Weekend Gardening: Successes and Challenges
June 20, 2009 by Andrea 
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In spite of all the rain this year that has drowned parts of our garden, the tomatoes and peppers have continued grow. The tomatoes and peppers do well in their location on the south side of the house, the same spot we had them in last summer, and we already have lots of blossoms on the plants. I found four more volunteer plants, some tomatoes and tomatillos, bringing the total number of volunteers to eleven. There’s no room for them here, so we’re going to move them to another part of the yard to see how they do.
Weekend Gardening: Not All Garden Pests Have Wings
May 17, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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We planted our garden. It began to grow and we were very happy. First we had this.
Weekend Gardening: Fruits of our Labors
May 2, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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We’ve had a very busy spring full of building raised beds, transplanting herbs to their new home, planting seeds, planting trees, planting new edibles, ripping out inedible ornamental bushes and replacing with edibles. It seems like we’ve hardly had time for a break on the weekends, and we still have more to do. It’s a lot of work but we’re already enjoying the fruits of our labors.
BUILDING THE RAISED BEDS
After two years of being in the house we finally decided on the location for our raised garden beds. The first year we had a container garden, then last year we ripped out a bunch of inedible bushes on the south side of the house and planted tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, and herbs in about 48 square feet of space. This year we added 132 square feet of raised bed space and about 50 more square feet where the apple and cherry trees and blueberry bushes are planted. Still had plenty of room for the rhubarb and horseradish that’s coming back from last year.
Before building we took some scrap boards and laid them out where the beds would go so we could get a visual idea of how it would look and test the width between them to make sure we would have plenty of room to walk, turn, and bend.
Weekend Gardening: Vegetable Gardening Tips from Southern Living
April 11, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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While visiting my parents in South Carolina for spring break, my mother gave me a wonderful present: a ticket to a presentation on kitchen gardens at the Riverbanks Zoo and Garden given by Rebecca Bull Reed, Associate Gardening Editor for Southern Living magazine (thanks Mom!). Reed, a South Carolina native, has been traveling around the southern states finding examples of great vegetable and herb gardens, and along with Steve Bender and Gene Bussell, the other gardening editors, has put together some great articles on these gardens. Check out the links below to see some of those gardens on the Southern Living website. (I forgot to take my camera, so no photos of her presentation. Sorry!)
The point of the presentation was to encourage people to start kitchen gardens and provide smart tips on how to do it successfully as well as demonstrate some easy dishes to make from homegrown herbs and vegetables (The Lemon Thyme Cookies were to die for.) My notes do not completely cover Reed’s two-hour presentation, but here’s a brief summary of her tips (notes from me in parentheses): Read more
Weekend Gardening: What Survived the Winter In Our Outdoor Garden
March 21, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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Herbs. That’s pretty much it. We cooked with our sage, parsley, and thyme throughout the winter. We didn’t get the cold frames finished in time to have a successful winter garden, but that didn’t stop me from trying. We got one little leek and one tatsoi plant, but the cold frames are ready for next winter and we hope to have much more. The arugula picked up some kind of pest late in the fall that sapped the life out of it before we could get a second harvest, but we’ll plant more this weekend. The saffron never bloomed but did stay green the whole winter, so it probably had too much water last summer. I’m moving all the corms to a new location away from the beds we water so hopefully they will flower in the fall.
We will also transplant all of the herbs to their new home in a raised bed and plant some more cool weather herbs (dill, cilantro) as well as spring vegetables and fruits (two kinds of peas, eight kinds of greens and lettuces, shallots, strawberries, blueberries, and hopefully some rhubarb) in the other new raised beds.
Weekend Gardening: Starting Seeds Indoors
March 15, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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Over the last few weeks we have started seeds for our summer garden. We’re right on the border for Hardiness Zones 6 and 7, so I follow the rules for Zone 6. Because we often still have very cold temperatures in early May, our safe outdoor planting date is around the third week in May, and depending on the type of plant we start seeds as early as the beginning of March. I separate our seeds into three groups: 1) start indoors (early March to early April), 2) plant direct in spring when the soil is workable (third week in March), and 3) plant direct after danger of frost has passed (third week in May).
In the last two weeks, we have started celery, leeks, sweet peppers, chile peppers (jalapeno, ancho, serrano, anaheim, poblano), tomatoes (San Marzano, roma, grape, Brandywine, Jubilee yellow), eggplant (Black Beauty and lavender), marjoram, cilantro, stevia, and lemongrass, and in a few weeks I’ll start the basils (Genovese, lemon dani). Several of these can also direct seed when the weather is warm enough, but I always start some early in the hope that we will have something to put in the ground and have an early harvest. It doesn’t always work and last year not a single bell pepper sprouted so we had to buy plants, but most years we have seedlings ready to plant in May. Read more
