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The next veggies to appear are Ping Tung Eggplant (Japanese) and Red Rocket Peppers. One pot's worth of eggplant appeared last night, and some time this afternoon seedlings from the other Ping Tung pot poked through.
While I was taking pictures of the eggplant, I noticed the little Red Rocket shoot curling up out of the soil.
It's pouring rain outside, and it's blizzarding elsewhere...but it's spring in our basement.
The tomatoes and basil are all up, so late yesterday Bill moved them to their next area of residence: the living room. More importantly, they are living next to the big living room window, where they'll enjoy lots and lots of sunshine (once it stops raining here) until it's time for them to move into the garden. We'll probably thin them and move them to bigger pots at some point between now and the great outdoors, but not just yet.
The above contraption is mostly enclosed in some sort of chicken wire-like stuff, only with smaller holes. Bill left the edges rough, as a deterrent to our cats, who like to nibble on baby vegetables. He's got a light clamped to the top of the frame, to supplement the (eventual) daylight. The whole thing sits on top of a small cooler, which sits on top of an end table. I don't think we'll be featured in any home decor magazines any time soon, heh heh.
And so are the Brandywines, San Marzanos, White Tomesols...ALL of the tomatoes are up! Bill discovered this last night, and this morning I took a few pictures.
Bill discovered these last night. Let's see...we planted them last Friday, the 19th. Go, Basil!
There are 3 little square peat pots of basil, and all of them have little tiny seedlings pushing up.
While I was taking these pictures a few minutes ago, I looked very closely to see if anything else was starting to push through, but nothing yet. It's still early for everything else. But just this little glimpse of green will tide me over for a while.
And it begins!
Yesterday Bill started the first round of seeds. At this point we're starting tomatoes, chili peppers, eggplant, artichokes, and some basil.
First, Bill got out the gardening ringbinder that he has been using for the past umpteen years now. He has diagrams of the different gardens, and lists of all the vegetables we're growing, sorted by when and where the seeds need to be started. He keeps his charts from every year, so we have a loose history of what we've grown and where.
He filled one flat's worth of little peat pots with potting soil mixed with this organic seed starter.
Then he got the seeds out of their temporary storage container in the bar fridge.
Next, he poked little holes in the soil in each post...
Scratchy kept walking around the work area (we were in the bar area of the basement, which doubles as the seed-starting area this time of year) meowing at us. Eventually he got bored with that and found something else to do.
We started with the tomatoes. 6 squares of Valley Girl, 2 of Brandywine, 2 of White Tomesol, 2 of Pink Ponderosa, 2 of San Marzano, and 2 Redorta. I think that's about right. We will also be adding yellow pears and some kind of cherry, but we'll probably buy them as seedlings once the weather is warmer. We'll probably also have some coming up in random spots in the gardens. That's some of the fun.
We marked off each seed variety with little plant markers that we cut in half. You get more of them that way, and we mainly need them for when we're starting the seeds. Once they're planted outside, we'll know who's who. This cutting up and writing on the markers was my job. That and the taking of the pictures.
By the way, we also have a little coding system for the markers. This one below, for example, is for the Valley Girl tomatoes. They're from Johnny's seeds, so I put a "J" on the back of the marker. And the little dots? Braille? No. That tells us how many little squares of seeds we've planted. In this case, it's six.
Bill sprinkles a few seeds in each indentation in the soil.
Then he covers the seeds over, sprays a bit of water on them, and moves on to the next variety. Those in the package below look like the Redortas - our favorite plum variety.
And in the view below, you can see the fronts of the markers, with their little plant names and little dots.
We had everything planted except the artichokes, because we ordered those later than everything else, so we left two squares empty for them. With perfect timing, the last packets of seeds arrived with the mail that same afternoon, and, YAY, we got to plant the artichokes as well.
In the past, we've had a table over in the bar area to set up all the seeds and lights, but over the summer we got rid of the table and moved the foozball table into that spot, and I guess we could set up the seeds on a piece of plywood on top of that, but instead, I shoved all my fabric out of the way and we set our tiny greenhouse in my work area.
So far the cats don't seem interested. That will change once the leaves appear. But we'll deal with that when the time comes. We'll also eventually be moving our seedlings up into the living room. The big window there faces south and gets a tremendous amount of light all day. We had a couple of trays in that window last year and the plants loved it. So we'll be doing more of that this year.
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So many plans!!
We've got a little cold frame protecting our rosemary plant outside in the raised bed. I think this is the first time we've kept a rosemary plant alive through the winter, either inside or out. Yay!
Bill's got the buckets covered with thick plastic to get the soil warmed up. Our peas will go there.
We're (have I said this before? I don't remember) planning to have a winter garden next winter, too. One of the new 4' x 4' gardens will become a mini greenhouse so we can grow salad stuff and herbs during the colder months. No more paying grocery store prices for salad. It's just nuts.
Of all the things we've been growing through the years, probably the biggest payoff comes from growing our own herbs. If you're buying them at the grocery store, you know that a little bouquet of whatever costs several dollars, and unless you're going to use it all in a few days, you could end up with wilting, rotting expensive compost material. I think the only herb we've bought in the winter time has been cilantro, for Thai or Mexican cooking. But we'll try growing that in our little greenhouse (or greenhut, maybe) and if that works, we'll be DONE buying that sort of thing from the grocery stores, period. Yay.
Speaking of herbs, our late order of seeds also included, besides the artichokes, some cumin and fenugreek. We use cumin a lot, so we figured we'd let some plants just go to seed and save those, but you can also use the leaves and, if I remember right, the stems, in cooking. Fenugreek is used in a lot of Indian dishes, including curries, and we figured we'd try growing our own, just for fun.
And, because the lovely folks at Baker Creek apparently send a package of free seeds with every order, we also received some cilantro seeds this time around - and that's just fine with us!
So, have you got any seeds started yet? What are your gardening plans this year?
After my last post, when I was discussing all the seeds we'd ordered this year, someone said that we must have a huge garden.
Actually, we don't. We have a lot of little or oddly shaped gardens all over the place, and in the back yard we also have retained a chunk of space for the kids' pool in the summer, and for a whiffle ball area. Not a big area - mainly just a home plate and a pitcher's...lawn. But still, we have to have that. My husband requires it.
So, our gardens are everywhere else. And, just so you can all wrap your heads around them when I go on to discuss what will be planted where (in a future post or two), I've drawn a couple of little pictures that you can refer to in the future, if you like. I've also named each bed, so that when I talk about them, we're on the same page.
Ready?
Okay, I'll start with the front yard. We mainly have lots of flowers in these gardens, and some herbs, but we've also been putting the occasional tomato or pepper plant in as well, because of the great sun the front of our house gets in the summer.
So here's what it looks like, sort of.
Please excuse the lack of straight horizontal lines. I couldn't make the mouse move smoothly when I was drawing them. The front side of our house really isn't that wavy.
Anyway, as you can see, we've got some window boxes, which will be filled with pansies and petunias and whatever other flowering plants appeal to us in the spring.
Then, there are the two gardens that are right up against the house, on either side of the steps. They were there when we bought the place, and we ended up either killing off (unintentionally) or yanking out (very intentionally) some of the stuff the sellers had planted there.
So now the garden on your left, i.e. "The Smaller Front Garden," has several rose bushes, a Korean dwarf lilac bush, a forsythia, a big day lily, and assorted bulbs and rhizomes - tulips, irises, and the like. We've also placed pepper plants in there in the past, and I think we'll be doing that again this year.
Moving on, to "The Garden in Front of the Big Window" - this one also has a forsythia, day lilies, tulips and daffodils and irises, as well as black-eyed susans, columbine (oh, yeah, there's one in the other garden, too.), poppies, and...um...those big tall spikey things...whatever they're called. And we had a couple of tomato plants there as well, and will likely do that again this year.
The Boat Garden was a project I started years ago. It involves a little boat that had belonged to Bill's older brothers an eternity ago, and at one point one summer we filled it with ice and used it to keep beverages cold at a cookout at our house. Alex fell in. It was really too big, anyway. So I thought it would be cool half-sunk in the ground as part of a garden. Bill thought differently, and so eventually I did the digging myself and put the boat in the ground (he helped with that part - it's heavy) and dug up the area for the garden and did the initial plantings. Over the years, he's added to it as well, and last year he put pieces of slate down as stepping stones, and it looks pretty good. We have a ton of stuff in there, including several herbs - lavender, lemon thyme, sage...rosemary (if it survives the winter) and I forget what else. No room for vegetables, though. It's pretty full.
Now, all along the walkways, we've got irises and hostas and some other stuff - those gardens are pretty low-maintenance, apart from the weeding. The little rounded section where the two walkways connect also has a rose or two and peonies that were from Bill's mother's garden.
So that's the front. Not a lot of vegetables will go in, but that could change as the years go by, just because the sun is so much better in front.
Oh, and along the side of the house - the driveway side - we have windowboxes as well. That side of the house faces west. The box near the front of the house has more of the same flowers that the other windowboxes have (whatever they are - it changes a bit every year) and the other window box, which is near the kitchen, has thyme and sage.
Okay, now the main vegetable gardens. Let's take a look at the back yard:
Proportions are way off, probably, but at least this will give you an idea of what we're working with.
Let's start with the Hops buckets, over on the left. They're whiskey barrels, cut in half, and they stand just to either side of the garage doors. Bill has grown hops in them for the past two years now. Hops are the bittering agent used in beer, by the way. They are the little flowers that grown along the vines, and when they're ready to harvest, they feel very dry to the touch. They look kind of like pinecones:
Bill trains the vines to grow up twine, up along the front of the garage, way up to this piece of wood he set up above the backboard to our basketball hoop. I think the top of the wooden thing is about 20' from the ground.
In the picture below, Bill is picking the hops flowers and taking down the vines for the year. You cut them back to a few inches above the soil, and that allows them to store nutrients and send out more roots and then more new vines in the spring. Julia helped gather the flowers. After they're all picked, they get dried out and then frozen to preserve the fresh taste. Hops that are fresh have a bitter, floral, sometimes citrusy aroma. If they're old, they smell like milk gone bad. Trust me, you don't ever want to use old hops when you brew.
If I remember correctly, the Bill grew Willamette and Cascade hops. I could be wrong on the Cascade. But I don't think so.
Okay, enough with the beer lessons.
Okay, we've got a fence that runs from the corner of the garage to the deck at the back of our house. I didn't draw the deck, and the fence isn't really that clear in the picture once it's between the two gardens that run along it. (Oh, forgive me the horrible sentence structure. Thanks.) The two gardens along the fence stop at the gate that goes into the back yard. Just so you know. So that open area right below those 2 gardens? Walkway.
Okay, the garden on the driveway side has one rose at the wide, bottom part. The rose is one that came from Bill's mom's house after she passed away, and that's where it's staying. The rest of the space, however, has been home to all sorts of green edibles, including tomatoes, assorted eggplant, pak choi, dill, cilantro, carrots, garlic, annnnnnnnnnnd...probably something else but I can't think of it. Oh, yes, squash.
On the other side of the fence, we grow more tomatoes, more squash, and whatever else we can cram in there.
These two gardens currently get the best (i.e. most) sunlight during the growing season, and so this year Bill decided to capitalize on that area of the yard by planning two more small gardens nearby. Each will be roughly 4' x 4' and will be home to a wide variety of vegetables.
OH - almost forgot, we also grow tomatoes in 5 gallon buckets right near the upper part of the driveway-side garden, just below the hops bucket on that side. Some tomatoes do well in the buckets and others don't, so each year it's a bit of an experiment.
Okay. Toward the top of the picture you'll see the original raised bed that Bill put in the first year we were in this house. It's 15' x 3' and surrounded by bricks that Bill put down himself. It was a lot of work, and it's very pretty. The thing is, that garden doesn't get as much light as it used to, so some things, like our beloved tomatoes, don't do so well back there any more. This year we're using it for a lot of greens, salad stuff, and, dead center along the back, some of the cucumbers. Also, the root vegetables, like beets and carrots, as well as some shallots and spring onions. Behind that garden lies out garlic bed, which we put in last fall. Four long rows of garlic, which will grow, undisturbed, until late June/early July.
The asparagus bed is where it's been since we planted it, with asparagus that had been at Bill's mom's house. It's still doing okay; it doesn't seem to mind the lessening sunlight.
Over to the left, near the garage, is The Tiny Garden in the Corner. It's not much use for anything, really, other than the thyme that has stayed there over the years, and the self-seeded cilantro and pear tomatoes that will probably show up again this year. Again, it's a light issue.
And those are our vegetable gardens. OH - and I forgot! This should really be in the front garden picture - we moved the blueberry bushes - which used to be where the garlic is now - to the front of the house, in the garden where the big window is. Much more sun, so hopefully our yield will be better this year.
Okay, now I'm really done. I think. For now.
Oh, and we also have various herbs, in pots, that will stand along the front side of the raised bed. Currently the pots are sunk into the dirt in that raised bed, staying protected and warm while it's cold.
And by the way, most of the seeds we've ordered have come in. Yay! Oh, and the folks at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds very kindly put in a little free packet of extra tomato seeds - a nice little surprise for us. And, funnily enough, they were seeds for a tomato that Bill had thought about ordering, but didn't. So now we have them anyway! They're for a variety called Henderson's "Pink Ponderosa" and they can grow fruit up to 2 lbs. That's bigger than our biggest Brandywines have been in past years. So we'll see how they do.
Okay, I'm done. For now!
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