Signs of life

 May and June are definitely the fun part of having a vegetable garden for me. The weather isn’t too hot yet, and every day I see new growth. In a few weeks I’ll start harvesting. At the moment I’m just enjoying how lovely my garden looks and getting excited about baby veggies. In addition to being tasty, the pea vines in particular have such pretty flowers.

'Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea Pod' bloom

Baby 'Burpless' cucumber with flower

Chives have such pretty flowers, too.

I’m pretty much done planting, but it’s not so hot yet that I can’t plant more if I want to. Once a week or so I’ll find an empty pot or some room in the dirt and plant something. I used to map out my garden plan and planting schedule ahead of time, but in the last few years I've found joy in letting my vegetable garden develop more "organically," so to speak. There are always leftover seeds around my house, or plants calling my name at my favorite local garden centers. I don't know whether I'll end up being busy one weekend, so I plant whatever I think will grow in the time I have.

Left to right: Peas, carrots, strawberries, and cucumbers (plus a mystery plant, probably pumpkin, that volunteered itself in the middle of the cucumbers)

Left to right: tomatoes (which you can barely see under the potatoes), potatoes, asparagus

This past week I planted some old zinnia seeds between the cucumbers and the strawberries. The week before I planted more scarlet runner bean seeds to accompany the one that survived from last year. The beans are loving this heat, and the last one emerged yesterday. The jalapeño likes the heat as well—I planted seeds a month ago, and the one that germinated finally has true leaves. I should plant more in another pot.

'NuMex Lemon Spice' jalapeno seedling

Scarlet runner bean seedling

It's planting time!

 The warm weather is finally here! It took right up until April 20 for temperatures to stay consistently over 55 (which many warm-season veggies prefer), but it happened. Highs are in the mid 80s now, and things are starting to grow like crazy! The irises and roses started blooming this week, the potatoes have grown a foot, the strawberries are covered in fruit, and even the carrots are starting to show signs of life.

Iris on Easter

All the potatoes had emerged by last weekend, and they have at least doubled in size since then. I'm experimenting with a slightly new growing technique this year. Potatoes prefer to be covered up with soil, a couple inches at a time, as they grow. You start when they're 6 inches tall, give or take, so you never cover more than half the stem at a time. With the potatoes in my grow bag, it's easy--I just add a little potting soil every week. With potatoes in the ground, it can be a little more complicated. The last couple of years I dug a trench and then just slowly filled the trench back in as the potatoes grew. The problem is all of that dirt has to go somewhere for a month (or more), so before I left it just beside the potatoes. It ends up taking a row all by itself, so then I couldn't plant anything there until I was done moving the dirt. It seemed like an inefficient use of space in my little 4' x 4' raised beds. This year I made a very shallow trench, so the leftover dirt got pushed into the trench last week after they all sprouted. From here on out, I plan on just mounding up compost from my compost bin. It has some nutrients, but it's not super high in nitrogen, and it drains well. It sounds like a good idea in theory!

I took this last weekend. The potatoes are at least twice as large now. Tomatoes on the left.

Last weekend I planted two tomato plants: a 'Celebrity' and a 'Husky Cherry.' The guy at the local hardware store recommended them. I have another two tomato plants a friend gave me, but they looked a little too small to stick in the ground just yet. This weekend I planted four 'Burpless' cucumber plants that I found at my favorite garden center. I had so much luck with cucumbers last year, I can't wait to grow them again. This is a slightly different variety, but I have high hopes.

Left to right: peas, teeny tiny carrot seedlings, strawberries, cucumbers.

The carrots are struggling, but the peas are thriving in spite of the four-legged invaders. You'll notice all my beds have short fencing around them this year. That's to keep my dog out. Last weekend one side had string trellis netting tied to a frame instead of fencing. Well, a cat decided to relieve himself in the row I planted my carrots, so he dug up at least 1 or 2 seedlings. THEN my dog decided he just HAD to go in there, too. He barged right through my trellis netting, walked all over my peas and carrots, and walked out completely tangled up in my netting. Pretty sure he ate my almost-perfect strawberry while he was in there, too. Now there is fencing on all four sides. It doesn't keep the cat out, but it discourages the dog. I think I have 4 carrot seedlings now.

"Who me?"

The strawberries look happy this year.

One of last year's experiments has turned out better than I hoped. I planted scarlet runner bean seeds. Scarlet runner beans are actually a perennial, but they don't like the frost. One of the 5 I planted survived the neglect of late summer and fall, died back in the winter, but re-emerged this spring looking better than ever!

Speaking of tropical plants, one of last year's planters got a little makeover. The pineapple sage from last year survived, so I bought a new COLD HARDY banana plant to go with it ('Busjoo')! I added a lime balm plant that's been living in a tiny pot since a friend gave it to me a couple of years ago, and a new spearmint plant. I feel like it's a whole tropical island or fruit salad in a pot.

Also, because I've gotten really into impulse purchases for my vegetable garden the past couple of years, I bought some new experimental jalapeno seeds called 'NuMex Lemon Spice.' They look cheerful, and I love anything citrus. I think they would be really good pickled. Since I didn't get any peppers started early this year, I just planted them in a pot outside. *Fingers crossed*

Thanks for reading along this far! I'll have more pretty photos for you next time.

Waiting for growth

 Some years we’re planting tomatoes right now, but we got a cool snap this weekend with lows in the 30s and 40s. It didn’t get much above 60 yesterday! I don’t mind it, since my late-planted cool-season veggies need it to get established.

Peas two weeks after planting

I planted everything about 2 weeks ago. The peas are off to a quick start and look quite happy. The carrots look like maybe 3 have germinated, but the seedlings are so tiny, it’s hard to tell if they’re carrots or just weeds. There are a could of odd impressions in the soil, perhaps the shape of a cat butt, right in my carrot row. I hope they don’t ruin the seeds I planted there. Carrots take forever to germinate (the seed packet says up to 25 days), so I’ll find out in another week or so whether my seeds are going to make it.

Out of the 21 chunks of potato I planted, 6 have sprouted so far. I hope to see the rest emerge this week. Before I plant my potatoes I always cut the chunks up and leave them sitting out a day or so. It’s supposed to reduce rotting by letting the cut sides form a callous before planting. Well, this time I didn’t get around to planting them right away, and they were sitting out around a week waiting to be planted. It's not ideal, but I think most of them should still make it.

Potato sprout

My asparagus started coming up a week ago! I cut enough for maybe one serving and gave it to my mother for her enjoyment while I was visiting. It's so cute when it starts emerging, I always aspire to take beautiful pictures of asparagus coming out of the dirt, but I can't ever seem to get a picture of it in focus. That's a photography skill I can work on. Last year it seemed like the asparagus only came up one or two two stalks at a time, never enough to eat. Hopefully I'll get plenty of asparagus this year--and plenty of practice photographing it. 

Some books say you should actually wait until April 20 to plant heat-loving veggies like tomatoes and peppers in our area. The forecast right now shows another cool snap possibly coming through April 17, so I'll probably follow that advice this year. Besides, I'm happy to have a little extra spring to enjoy my garden before we jump into summer.

Better late then never

 After two stellar years of vegetable gardening, I’ve gotten off to a late start this year. Between work and family I barely thought about planting anything until last week. I got my husband to pick up seed potatoes while he was at the hardware store a couple of weeks ago, so at least they would be here if I found time. It’s a couple weeks later than I normally plant (and a few weeks later than I always mean to plant), but they should do okay. I cut up the potatoes around a week ago and planted some in the grow bag a few days ago. The rest went in the ground today with a little compost from my compost bin and some fertilizer.

I also planted some ‘Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea Pod’ peas and a row of 'Carnival Blend' carrots. It’s waay later than when I planted peas last year (mid-February), but they were one of my favorite things in my garden last year. I decided it was worth the risk. I think we’re at the tail end of when they can be planted here in Middle Georgia. The carrots, too, are pretty much at the end of when they can be planted in spring. I didn't have much luck with carrots when I tried growing them in the fall years ago, but my mother-in-law had some success last year, which gives me confidence to try again. The 'Carnival Blend' seeds were actually a serendipitous birthday gift from my godmother last summer, so I was eager to plant them. I was so afraid the tiny seeds would wash away, I watered them carefully with a tiny spray bottle instead of drowning them with the hose. According to my blog, my mistake last time was not watering them one week, so I think I'll work on hooking them up with some drip irrigation in a couple of weeks.

I have a new garden companion this year! His name is Buddy. We adopted him in August, so this is our first spring together. He’s still learning how to be a garden dog. I’m hoping he’ll make our yard less inviting to voles. He loves to “hunt,” but he’s not very good at it.

Goodbye frost, hello veggies!

If you look up when to when plant summer vegetables like beans, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers, it will usually say something like "after all danger of frost has passed" or "2 weeks past your last frost date." Many gardeners eagerly start planting as soon as the plants start showing up at their local garden center, and are simply willing to cover them if temperatures dip below 40 again. Others point out that heat-loving plants like peppers and cucumbers do best when nighttime temperatures are consistently above 50 degrees, so it would be best to plant 2 weeks after your average last frost date. as a rule of thumb.

I fall somewhere between those two camps.

Here in Middle Georgia, heat can be as much of an enemy of plants as cold, even for tomatoes. Last weekend was our first weekend after our "last frost date," and the forecast said we would have a couple of mild rainy days before temperatures jumped into the 80s. (Also, I sort of had the itch to plant things.) So I went ahead and planted transplanted a few of my healthiest-looking seedlings.

It turned out to be a mix. Some of the seedlings I pulled had enough roots for transplanting, but some didn't. I already pulled them out of the soil, though, so into the ground they went. At least I planted extras of everything, so if one dies, I'll just replace it. Ideally, though, you want your seedlings to have lots of roots, which usually comes after it's gotten a few leaves.

I planted tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. The tomatoes and peppers went into the brick bed I built last month. I had built it nice and tall, so I filled it in with a mixture of peat moss, vermiculite, and compost before planting the tomatoes and peppers. The compost will provide nutrients for my new plants for now. The cucumbers went into an older bed, so I mixed in some organic fertilizer before planting and mulched with a little Black Kow composted manure for good measure.

Potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, and my one 5-year-old strawberry plant

Tomato seedling

Cucumbers and fertilizer

This is my first time trying to grow cucumbers, but from everything I read, it seemed like they're easiest to grow vertically. I spaced them a foot apart, and then tried to figure out what to use for a trellis. I looked at several different things online before I decided I would just use some extra trellises I had at home. I don't know if they're tall enough, but at least they're free. As an added bonus, my trellis would also help me contain my asparagus shoots that were flopping everywhere. Now I feel fancy!

Peas, cucumbers, and asparagus

In the excitement of trying to figure out what to use for a trellis, I think I forgot to water in my cucumber seedlings after planting. Even though the soil was damp from recent rain, and scattered showers were forecasted that day, it wasn't enough. By the next day, my cucumbers looked just about dead.

I gave them a good soaking, and then babied them with water twice a day when temperatures jumped into the high 80s a couple of days later. They don't look like the healthiest specimens, but they're still alive at least. I'm thinking once they get established they'll grow new leaves and look just fine.

I also planted zinnia seeds this past week! Last year I planted some zinnia seedlings a friend gave me outside my window, and I was pleasantly surprised to see hummingbirds feeding on them. I'm planting even more this year just for the hummingbirds.

Of course, the only thing you can count on in Middle Georgia is that the weather will change... After a couple of hot days, the weather turned a little cooler again. The lows even threaten to jump down to 39 this week! At least my peas and potatoes are happy. I'll just bring my seedlings back inside for a couple of days if it turns out to get that cold.

Enjoy this weather while you can!

My roses certainly like this weather.

Building a New Raised Bed

 As I mentioned in my last post, a little over a month ago I came home from the hardware store with 112 bricks and good intentions. My original wood beds have long since decayed into a poor semblance of a border, and my husband really wanted to replace them with long-lasting brick beds instead of wood that rots in a few years.

My husband and I are not huge DIYers. After a little research on Pinterest, I decided a loose brick bed was a good compromise. Even if my husband wanted to learn how to lay mortar, loose brick was less permanent and easier to throw together without any experience. If I didn't love how it came out, we could always take it apart.

Also, what I got from Home Depot wasn't actually brick. Technically it's just cement blocks dyed a reddish color. It's what was easily available to experiment. If I decide we have a future as bricklayers, I can always hunt down real brick later and redo the beds.

As if building with brick for the first time wasn't hard enough, I decided to make it more complicated by trying to line my new brick bed with an underground fence to keep voles out. I really didn't want voles killing most of the plants in my new raised bed like they did last year. The internet says voles won't dig deeper than a foot, so I got hardware cloth and cut it to the appropriate width.

If you want to build a loose brick raised bed, there are definitely easier ways to do it than how I did it! Needless to say, even with consistently nice weather, it took a few weekends to complete. First we had to build a trench at least a foot deep around the existing bed. Since I had gone through the trouble of filling my bed with the perfect mix of sand, compost and top soil originally, I wanted to keep that intact as much as possible.

Then, I had to try to snip pieces of hardware cloth with wire cutters into sides for my "fence," and attempt to flatten out wire that had lived its life rolled up in a circle. After flattening it more or less, I used the wire that wrapped up the roll originally, cut it into small pieces, and used the pieces to attach the sides securely together. That also took a while...

I tried to make calculations and take measurements and dig in the right spots, but let's just say that in the end I did not get a perfect square fence to go inside my brick walls. We made it fit, though.

I actually made my hardware cloth 15" in height, tried to get it evenly 12" deep all around, and then left a few inches above the trench that would go inside the brick walls of my new raised bed. I wanted to leave a little overlap so little voles couldn't, say, burrow between the hardware cloth and the brick. I didn't want it so high, though, that the hardware cloth would stick up and scratch me every time I pulled weeds.

After it was satisfactorily in place, we filled the trench in most of the way, while still leaving a trench 3" deep all around. Now it was time to actually start on creating a brick raised bed. We filled the shallow trench with builder's sand (it took about 3 50 lb bags). Then, I put the leftover rotted boards of the old border to use. I laid one down on top of the sand. I laid a level on the board to make sure my sand was more or less level (especially since we're building on a slight hill) and adjusted by hand as needed. Then, I used a small mallet to compact it down. I don't know if my system was perfect, but it was cheap.

Finally, we started laying the bricks out on the sand. This is where we learned our square wasn't perfect. On two sides the bricks had to be placed tightly against each other, and on the other two the bricks had to be spaced slightly, one more than the other. That was the only way the bricks would fit around the hardware cloth. This annoyed me at first, but in the end I decided it was probably close enough. At least we're not building a house here.

After putting down the first layer, I went around again with the board and the mallet, tamping the bricks into the sand. Finally, I stacked the rest of the bricks, staggering them as I went. This was the easiest part of the whole thing. 

I did not pull the level back out after that, it would just make me crazy. I actually sat on my little brick wall to finish pulling the rest of the weeds out of my bed. The bricks shift a little, but it holds, which isn't bad for a cheap, easy project. I just have to fix the bricks periodically. If I had young children, I wouldn't want to leave the bricks loose, they would just get knocked around all the time. If I still like it next year, I might try taking it apart and putting it back together with construction adhesive like my friend suggested.

I also planted potatoes this weekend! They were such a success last year, I couldn't wait to plant them again this year. I cut up some pieces last weekend with the intent to plant them in the grow bag and ran out of time. I hope they're not too worse off by sitting out for a week. Half of them went in the grow bag. The other half I ended up planting in my newly vole-proofed raised bed. I added a bag of composted manure to my bed after I finished the wall and mixed it in. It was just the right depth to start the potatoes. As the potatoes sprout and grow, I'll finish filling the bed with more compost and soil mix. 

It definitely looks like spring these days. (Yesterday was the first official day of spring, after all!) The seeds I planted indoors last month are looking really good. Well, except for the basil--I need to try again now that it's warmer. The spring flowers are emerging in my garden, too.

I planted this phlox several years ago so it would bloom pink during cherry blossom season.

My blueberries are getting pollinated!

Our cherry blossom tree bloomed right on time this year.

Getting Ready for Spring

It's been a particularly cold winter, with very few of those pleasant warm days that are usually sprinkled throughout the season here in Middle Georgia. The last few days, in particular, have seen rain seemingly nonstop. Today the temperature won't even get above 45. For someone who grew up in South Florida, that's unbelievably cold!

In the years I've lived here in Georgia, I've learned that as much as I dislike the cold, it's the grey skies that are the worst. Just give me one sunny day in February, and I'll start acting like it's a perfect spring day in April, no matter how cold it is. That was the case last Sunday.

My husband laid down for his usual Sunday afternoon nap, and I started getting the itch to plant things. It was the perfect time of year to plant spinach and peas from seed, after all. Of course then I remembered that the wood around my raised bed was in need of repairs, so off I went to the hardware store for supplies. To make a long story short, I ended up coming home with 112 bricks, all because the sun came out.

By the time I finished loading and unloading all those bricks, it was too late in the day to work on anything else, so they're still sitting there waiting for another nice day. I've never tried building a raised bed out of bricks, but it doesn't sound like a quick project from the research I've done. I decided not to let a cold, wet weekend stop me from working on other garden projects today, though. I got most of my vegetable and basil seeds started for transplanting outside in April.

This year I'm growing 'Muncher' cucumber plants, 'Bonny Best' tomatoes, 'Burrell's Special' tomatoes, 'Granadero' tomatoes, 'Jedi' jalapenos, 'Mellow Star' Shishito peppers, Sweet Chocolate peppers, 'Nufar' Italian basil, and 'Red Rubin' purple basil. Plus, for a friend I'm starting Lime Basil and 'Orange Hat' tomatoes.

Last year I felt like my seedlings took forever to get big enough to transplant--way past when I normally get my summer vegetables in the ground. But I'm planting seeds a couple of weeks earlier this year. I think last year I was unplugging my heat mat at night, which probably wasn't a good idea. I'll leave the heat mat plugged in 24 hours a day until they germinate at least, and hopefully that will speed things up. I actually bought a little indoor thermometer before I started my seeds to satisfy my curiosity. Even though our house is 68 degrees during the day, that spot by the window where I start my seeds doesn't get above 64 degrees when it's this cold out. I commandeered a spare meat thermometer, which confirmed that the soil for my seeds is a nice 74 degrees with the heat mat on. Since the heat mats say they will raise the soil temperature 10 degrees, that's right where it should be.

I decided to grow some extra plants this year with plans to give them away later. I don't necessarily have anyone in particular in mind for most of them (which is unusual for me, since I usually have a plan). But the popularity of sharing seedlings last year inspired me for this year. This way at least I'll be prepared if an opportunity presents itself.

I took advantage of a break in the rain today to plant some spinach seeds. I'm not sure how long it's going to be until my raised bed is ready for planting at this rate, but I imagine spinach will do pretty well in a container since the plants don't get huge. The seeds were just leftover from years ago, so even if they don't thrive, it's fine.

I ended up having to make another hardware store run this weekend when I ran out of plant labels for my seedlings. Apparently even on a cloudy day that's dangerous for me this time of year. I couldn't say "no" this adorable little houseplant sized banana plant. Even if I'm not in the Sunshine State, at least I can enjoy a little bit of the subtropics indoors until the weather warms up.

At least the camellias are blooming right now, even if everything else is waiting for warmer temperatures.