Experiments in square foot gardening, and topsy turvy gardening showcasing the trials, tribulations and triumphs of the fruit and veg that live in a small garden in Cornwall, Ontario
Holy Hannah, two posts in and I'm already procrastinating. I've got some video that I shot yesterday along with some new pics. Every time I get the camera out, I say to myself that I'm going to get the blog post done while it's all fresh. The thing is, the darn videos take soooo long to upload to Youtube. It’s thinking about that that really puts me off working on the blog. But, I’ve come across a new software that supposedly cuts the time down to minutes what had previously taken a couple of hours or more; and I’m talking for a 4 minute video imagine the ones that are close to 10.
The weather was looking a little dicey and if I didn’t know better, I would think we were moving backward. We had quite a nice little snowfall in the morning which had faded to rain by the afternoon. Then, just about supper time, we had another snowfall. It was a lot heavier than it was earlier in the morning, but that didn’t last very long before turning to rain again. The yard is green again now, but I expect we’ll have at least another snowfall before March leaves us.
I have to say, the speed at which everything is growing caught me by surprise. I actually thought I was a little late starting them because the seed packets said to start them eight weeks before the last frost. I’ve since learned that for my area, the last frost should be around May 6, so I was actually a couple of days early. The only plants that are going the way I expected are the peppers. I’ve never seen a pepper plant grow fast. Last year my red peppers were only big enough to pick and still green at the end of the season. And they were flowering plants when I put them in.
So, to replant my broccoli I just spooned a little potting soil into a peat pot and then literally scooped out each plant, soil and all and put it into the pot. I only had five pots and plants in nine egg carton sections, so I had to make them share pot space. I actually have several plants in each egg section, so I should end up with quite a few plants at the end of it all. I Learned from the Square Foot Gardening Forum how to harden off my seedlings, so I guess I’ll be trying that in a few weeks.
Click to enlarge
1t potting soil
Lift seedling with
soil intact
Add to pot
Fill with potting soil
Add seedlings
from a 2nd section
Okay so it turns out I didn’t need the new video software after all. I just needed to learn how to use the media browser properly for my video camera to convert my videos to the right format for uploading. I uploaded my 6 minute videoto Youtubein 9 minutes; not too shabby, eh?
This article has a couple of interesting ideas I never heard of before. She talks about using a fan to simulate wind, using liquid fertilizer and self watering seed starting systems. I wonder if I should try liquid fertilizer; Do you think my seedlings could benefit from that?
Well, I'm getting ready for the new season. Today my Honey went out and got some fencing so that we can keep the mutt out this year, - I think she ate more from the garden than we did - and on the 9th I started some seeds in egg cartons and painstakingly charted out my garden plan.
What I've got going so far are 3 varieties of tomatoes, cantaloupe, green and red peppers and broccoli. If I can avoid having to buy too many plants this year, I'll be happy. They seem inexpensive enough on the surface, but by the time you get all the plants you need, you've shelled out a pretty penny.
I'm wondering though if I should've planted the broccoli. Last year it took so long to start, (and I ended up with no broccoli at all) I thought maybe it'd be best to start them inside, but as you'll see in the pictures, it's really going like gangbusters, and I'm a little nervous it'll get too big for the egg carton before I can plant them outside. When we came back from getting the fencing, we found that the ground is still pretty frozen about 10cm down; plus the yard is like a swamp, so it'll be a while before we can start setting anything up.
Now, I still have my reservations about the kind of earth I have in the garden. That may have been my broccoli's problem last year; it's so heavy and tightly packed that I think some things have a harder time than others growing in that type of soil. What I have in the egg cartons is potting soil which is so much lighter. I can't afford to swap it out, but I'm hoping to be able to get enough of the black earth to mix into it so that it changes the composition some. The carrots were packed in there so tightly that I pulled the tops right off trying to get them out. I ended up using my little weeding tool to dig them up. And then, I found they were a lot shorter than what they were supposed to be. Again I guess it was just too hard for them to go deep. The beans didn't do too badly, but still, I think they could do better with lighter soil.
I'm going to give the square foot thing another go this year. I have the squares marked off in the chart but I don't know that I'll actually string it off like I did last year. I also marked how many plants per square, but that may end up being less because of the density of the ground; we'll see.
I'm doing the hanging buckets again too, but what I'll do differently this time is put potting soil instead of garden soil in the buckets. Last year they were so heavy that a few of the handles actually broke under the weight, and you saw what it did to my hanger at the south end. I might or might not use my long planters. I'm going to make a hanging planter of herbs so that when the season is over, I'll be able to just hang it up inside and still be able to use the herbs over the winter.
I made a video last week - July 6 - but I’ve been running around too much to get any time to actually sit down and write, and there have been some interesting goings on, so I decided to just go ahead and make a new video. I had originally thought to just scrap the last video and replace it with the one I did this morning - July 13 - but I may just put both of them up anyway.
At the time of last week’s recording, I had one new cucumber flower in my hanging bucket but since then, a couple of flowers have come and gone. It looks like I’m on the road to seeing some fruit there. I had a half chewed strawberry which I guess was Kiti because I saw what looked like great big teeth marks in it, and the sight of that has led me to believe it was she who took the hanging pepper as well. I still have a couple of strawberries left; one of them red.
In the rest of the garden, my fennel, what’s left of that after Kiti’s last trot through the garden looks okay. I only have one full looking plant and one little sprout out there, but they look healthy enough. No real change in the green or yellow beans except the yellow beans are really climbing the poles, and I wonder if I’ll have to extend them. The cantaloupe seems to be coming along; especially the one plant closest to the east fence (my last hold out). I’ve seen 3 or 4 flowers come and go from it and I think I’m going to soon add a pole or two. I’m not really sure how a cantaloupe plant grows, but from the presentation I saw at Toastmasters, I’ll need to stake it and add a make shift hammock for the melon to sit in so that it doesn’t get ground rotten. The four cantaloupe plants close to the west side of the garden really keep me guessing; one minute they seem to be advancing in growth and then given up on life the next. The melon plant in the square foot garden looks healthy but I haven’t seen much change in it over the last few days. Oh, and the herb sections look like they’re really kicking in now too.
My in ground peppers are really performing well. I have two especially good looking plants with big, healthy looking peppers. Of the tomatoes I have a really good cluster of cherry tomatoes on the biggest plant with the others starting to catch up. I’m starting to get some hope for the beefsteak; even though there aren’t any flowers yet, I can see that it’s working hard to grow and the leaves all look healthy. I hate to give up hope on the hanging tomato plants, but they just don’t look all that good. I see minimal growth, and still no flowers. I know I just said there aren’t any flowers on the beefsteak, but the hanging plants don’t look that healthy. The one hanging by the shed looks a little better, but still . . . I don’t really know what to make of them.
The cucumbers in the garden are moving right along as is the one hanging against the wood fence. There’s a second hanging cucumber that died though because it was just too close to the fence. We didn’t really pay attention when we were making holes in the buckets and some of them turned out to be perpendicular to the handles. So when we hung them up, there’d be one plant touching the fence. I need to get longer hangers as well to keep the buckets farther out from the wall.
I’m pretty baffled with a couple of the plants in the square foot garden. The flower’s on the radish square have reverted to pure white from pink and white, and what looks a lot like bean pods are growing in their place. Also, the broccoli is getting something bean looking but with “thorns”, and the plant itself looks rather sparse. I don’t have any experience with either radishes or broccoli, so I have no idea what the natural progression is for these plants. I guess time will tell if I’m on the right track. The peas will soon be ready for picking I’m sure. I’ve tasted some and are they ever sweet. They’re still quite tiny though. I’ve also got some good sized green beans growing in the square foot garden, but still not ready to pick yet.
I still haven’t planted anything in my empty squares or the empty spaces in the rest of the garden; I don’t know now if I even have time to grow anything there. Then again, it might be beneficial to leave them empty this year and use it next year when I rotate everything. And that wraps up the garden report for now.
It’s now 6h42 and I’ve just been an hour in the garden fluffing and tying stuff up. We’re in for a wicked heat wave over the next few days. We have a humidex advisory out – supposedly in the 40’s - for today, so I thought I’d better get out there early if I wanted to get anything done. I guess that makes me officially a farmer now. I guess it’s just going to get hotter toward the middle of the week.
I’ve had a video on ice just waiting for me to post since Canada Day, but there’s been a lot going on, and I just couldn’t seem to find the time to write, and the couple of times I did get to sit down at the computer, I was just too tired from so many personal commitments on the go. Even now, I don’t know that I’ll be able to finish this today; what with the constant editing, rewriting and the inevitable Youtube and photo upload troubles that plague every post.
This morning I got everything fluffed up, and I actually considered planting in the empty spaces but then thought better of it. With the heat coming it’s bound to get pretty dry out there, and I just didn’t feel like dragging the hose out this morning. I added a few bean poles in the yellow beans to supplement the two little wire “trellises” I got from the dollar store. My tallest tomato plant has started to lean. The stake I tied it to is a little short and now the tomato plant is taller than the cage even, so the upper have has begun to tilt. All I did to compensate for that was to tie it to the upper rung of the cage. I noticed that I have even less fennel than I started out with; which wasn’t much. I may add more seeds to it down the road. And I’m considering ditching the tomato plants I have in the planter boxes along the east fence. Speaking of the east fence, some kind of weed is poking through from the neighbour’s yard that has a really pretty flower on it. I’ll get pics next time if it’s still alive.
So, what went on in the garden last week? Well, in the square foot garden I cleaned out the 4 “dead” squares, and I put a wire trellis in the green bean section. I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but this year the green bean blossoms are pink. The onion tops look like they’re dying though. I’m noticing that they’re getting brown and drooping over. I accidentally dug up an onion when I was fluffing the other day, and it didn’t look any bigger than the bulb I originally planted. The carrot tops are really getting quite full and healthy looking. It doesn’t look like I’ll have many carrots though, so maybe I’ll add some more seeds to the empty squares. Here’s a question: How do you tell when things that grow underground are ready to harvest? What’s supposed to be spinach doesn’t look like it’s going to be spinach to me. When you touch the blossom, if that’s what you can call it, there’s some kind of smoky or powdery substance that flies off of it. Also, I see three plants in that square and you’re only allowed one spinach in a square. I’m wondering if some of it is weeds, or did I just lose track of what the heck I was planting again? The blossoms on the radish and broccoli squares are getting quite tall, and I guess the broccoli will soon start to appear because I saw a few petals on the ground. The cantaloupe square that I replanted is probably about an inch out of the ground now, so I’m really hopeful that I’ll get something out of it. There aren’t any changes that I can see as far as the peas are concerned; they still look great. Oh except that they all seem to be clumped together as though they’re one plant. There’s no plant definition between the peas and they seem to be occupying one side of the squares they’re in. I’ll talk about that in the next video. That wraps up the square foot garden. One thing I have to say about the square foot garden though, is that even though I feel I had pretty good success with it in the ground, I think you really need to do it according to the book. Now that things are really starting to come in, it’s making it hard to get in there and weed even with my tiny hand tool, because everything is in such close quarters.
In the rest of the garden I think the cucumbers are soon going to come. The flowers are starting to die off and I think I see the start of teeny, tiny cucumbers. I took off some of the dead leaves, and I saw that one of the plants had decided it was going to reach for the wood trellis, but I showed it who’s boss and put it in it’s place by the north fence.
My tallest cherry tomato plant now boasts 9 little tomatoes on it! The smaller cherry tomato and the beefsteak plant are finally starting to pick up. While I was tying the middle plant (the one that got eaten in the beginning) I was reminded that there were actually two plants there. I wonder if I can let them grow like that, or would I do better to separate them?
On one of the three in a row pepper plants, I have one really big pepper. It was second in size to the one that was growing on the hanging pepper plant, but is now number one because the hanging pepper got plucked. I think it’s actually bigger now than the photos will show. Nothing really spectacular is happening with the peppers that are sharing a patch with the cantaloupes. And speaking of those, all of the seeds I planted are showing promise. The last hold out, as I call the last of three cantaloupe plants I bought, now looks like it’s going to flower anytime now; fingers crossed. I feel like an expectant mother. The yellow beans have a count of fifteen, and my green beans have gone from nine to seven.
I’ve looked over the garden a few times since I shot the video I’ll be attaching to this post, and a lot of flowers have started to come out on quite a few of the plants. The cucumbers, peas, radish, & broccoli all have flowers now, and I think the green beans in the square foot garden are starting to show signs of flower buds. I’m seeing the bell peppers are really starting to take shape, and I’ve counted five cherry tomatoes on the tallest of the 3 plants. I’m not sure about the other two tomato plants in the garden – The 2nd cherry and the beefsteak – they’re still so small. I still didn’t get any stakes for the peas, but we removed some of the wire scalloped fencing we were using to keep Kiti away from the new grass seed, so I used that in the pea squares.
I have to say that I’m really starting to get confused about what the heck I actually planted in some of the sections of the square foot garden. Initially, I thought I just messed up with the square to the south of the broccoli which should have had peppers in it but looks like it’s another broccoli plant. Well, now I’m starting to wonder about the radish and turnip squares which look suspiciously similar. I think I’m going to add more carrots to the mix. What’s coming up looks nice, but they’re appearing sporadically. The squares aren’t full. I’m not sure what’s going on with the spinach either. Again it’s a matter of confusion on my part. When I touch the centre though, it looks like it gives off some kind of smoke or powder or something. And the onions look like they’re disappearing. I have four squares that I believe need to be replanted, and I’m sure what’s in a couple of those are weeds, but I’m nervous to take them out just in case they actually turn out to be something I planted. Anyway, I read somewhere that a weed is only a weed if it’s growing somewhere you don’t want it to be. Well, for now I want them to be there.
There’s a total of 15 yellow bean plants and the green bean patch at the south end now has 9 good sized sprouts, and I think I saw another one starting to poke through. I’m really quite surprised by that one because I really thought I’d have to start that over again. Oh, and there’s 5 fennel sprouts too. The four cantaloupe seeds that had started out nicely looked like they were going to die there for a minute. I think something got at them, because I was seeing the roots exposed and they looked quite sickly. I decided to just poke them back down a little deeper, and it looks like they are starting to perk up. All of the cantaloupe I have going look really well; especially that one I thought wasn’t going anywhere. It’s quite tall now. Not anywhere near flowering or anything, but still, a lot better than I had even hoped for. The herb sections are starting to fill in nicely and I’m sure I’ll soon be able to fluff it out properly.
I think maybe the tomatoes I have in the buckets are diseased. They’ve got really purple looking leaves and some have yellow spots on them. As far as the bucket herbs go, The dill looks like it’s going to be good and so does the basil. I really want the basil to do well. My Mother says it’s working wonders at keeping the flies away from her house. We’ve got a trash can out back and so do our neighbours to the west and the flies are everywhere. Nothing spectacular is going on with the spearmint or the tarragon; I ‘m hoping it’s just because it’s their nature to be slow starters.
We had planned to have a barbecue and a fire on Saturday, so I thought I’d take some night video of the garden lights, but it rained all day, so we called it off. Still, like I’ve said before, I’m not gonna complain about the rain. The less I have to drag that hose out, the better. Well maybe next weekend. In the meantime, enjoy the new pics and video.
Well, it ended up coming down pretty good yesterday evening, so again, I didn’t have to water the garden. I really haven’t had to get the hose out too much since I started my garden. Watering isn’t my favourite part of the gardening process, so you won’t hear me complaining about the rain.
So far the only thing that’s starting to gain fruit are the peppers. ** It looks like I’ll have quite a few peppers this year, as each of the plants has multiple peppers and flowers on them. I’m really quite happy about the pepper progress. I was kinda getting worried about them a few days ago because of all the dead leaves around the bottom. I wonder if my picking them off helped them to start producing. The one showing the best though is the one that’s in the hanging bucket next to the strawberry plant. I was surprised by that, as it seemed it was the one that had the least activity as far as anything budding on it went. I’m not sure if the strawberry flowers are now becoming strawberries or if they’re just dying.
It looks like I’ll have to replant the green beans. Ever since planting, I’ve been finding them around the garden and sticking them back in the ground, but I suspect they’ve been stolen again. The same thing happened last year too, and I had to redo the whole green bean section a second time. Maybe I’m not planting them deep enough. Or maybe I should have stuck the wind chime right in the bean patch. I didn't find that hanging the pie plates was really all that helpful last year.
Except for one of the cherry varieties, the tomato plants are pretty unremarkable. I don’t expect much from the one that initially got torn up at planting, but I don’t know what’s wrong with the beefsteak. Last year too we only got a couple of the beef steaks while the cherry tomatoes, although slow to start, came in like gangbusters once they got going. And I noticed quite a bit of dead leaves and stems toward the bottom of all the tomato plants. I don’t know if maybe my soil isn’t really conducive to the beefsteaks. I had been complaining about how easily it packs up tight, and my Son seems to think it’s because I have too much of a sandy quality to my dirt. On closer inspection it does look rather sandy. It dries up in clumps too almost like rocks. And maybe that’s why everything in my garden seems to take so long to get going. I did mix in several bags of black earth and a couple of bags of sheep manure at the end of last season to sit over the winter, but maybe that wasn’t enough. It also occurs to me that the leaf colour on a couple of the plants is different than it was last year. I’m noticing that the two tomato plants in the buckets are quite dark and have an almost purplish look to them.
As I uploaded the video for this post to Youtube, I saw a fellow gardener's video talking about the top leaves of her cherry tomatoes curling, so I had to go have a closer look at mine too. I see that one of my cherry tomatoes also has a bit of leaf curl, though not to the extent of garden california’s. Of course while I was out there, I had to feed my need to “fluff”, and I found that I do indeed have a few more green bean plants coming up; looks like 6 altogether. I guess reburying the seeds that got scattered around didn’t do them any harm. I did some light fluffing in the herb sections too and I do believe they are starting to take off nicely. I had to be really careful though, as the herbs are still so tiny and delicate I didn’t want to disturb them too much. Oh, and I did notice there are a few sprouts in the fennel patch. Hopefully, it’s actually fennell.
I’m gonna have to get out there and make a night video. My Honey won a butterfly solar light at his golf tournament this past Saturday, and I’m telling you, it’s quite the light show out there at night. Maybe at our next fire I’ll do a quickie.
** The pics show I actually have a couple of cherry tomatoes coming.
There’s been quite a lot going on in the garden in a short time. Between my last video that I filmed on June 15 and this latest one I did on June 18, the yellow beans have taken off like crazy. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I had nine really good sized plants. Not too shabby considering only 3 days earlier I only had three or four that weren’t even totally up. And not only that, I’m beginning to have hope that I will get some cantaloupe this summer after all. I was going through my usual “fluffing” routine in the square foot garden and thinking about giving up on the cantaloupe when I nearly ripped a seedling out with my weeder. I have four really good looking cantaloupe seedlings in one of the mounds as well, and the one plant that I thought wasn’t going anywhere looks a bit taller too.
Only four squares out of sixteen in the square foot garden didn’t take. I’m going to dig the weeds out of those and replant. Still, twelve out of sixteen squares isn’t too bad at all in my book, and they all look really healthy. At the time I planted though, I didn’t know peas were something that needed to be trellised. I think next year I’ll plant the peas topsy turvy style. I’ve decided that the tomatoes and cucumbers will all be done that way so as to leave more room in the garden for other things. I’m wondering if the latest batch of green beans will go anywhere now. I’ve been seeing my seeds scattered around the garden, so I guess the birds are up to their shenanigans again.
I got the plants that I picked up from Canadian Tire a few days ago in. I just stuck the pineapple sage beside one of the tomato plants, and the chrysanthemum down by the fennel. I decided to dig up a couple of the cucumber plants and put them into a bucket, and I put my common sage plant on top of those. I’m hoping that by moving out two of the cucumbers, it’ll leave more space for the others to spread out. Oh and I noticed this afternoon that my strawberry flower looks like it’s turning into a little strawberry!
I got a tip that adding peat moss around my plants can be a “real life saver” for my plants, so I hope I can pick some up. I also found out why the ground packs in so tightly and clumps up so easily; apparently it’s too sandy and not truly soil. I don’t know what I can do about that. I added black earth at the end of last season, but maybe it wasn’t enough. I don’t know. Anyway, for now things look pretty good, and I’ll see what I can do to make it better next year.
I was out in the garden for several hours a couple of days ago (Tuesday June 15) I had only planned to go out and do a little weeding, but it turned into what seemed like an all day thing. Naturally, the weeding turned into a fluff fest, - Some of you will remember I’m obsessed with fluffing the dirt up even where I don’t even have plants yet - and that turned into, “Oh, I’ll just lay out a few of these bricks,” which of course led to planting. Before I knew it, I was totally engrossed. And even though by the time all was said and done I was feeling like I had been run over and then backed over by an 18 wheeler, I had the nerve to go and help my Daughter plant her garden! Am I a sucker for punishment or what? Oh and get this: I was mortified when I had seen the dirt in the tomato and pepper plants I had given her looked like they hadn’t seen water since the days of Methuselah, and yet, one of the pepper plants had a little pepper on it! If I had known that was going to happen, I would have kept that one for myself and given her another one. She decided to take out her Rhubarb plant completely, of which I took quite a few of the stalks. She has this plant that I’m sure is a potato plant, although I could be mistaken. But the purple and yellow flowers and the little berries look just like what grew on my blue potatoes last year. Anyway, I’ve got some updated pics of her garden too. And, I’ll be making a Rhubarb cake – have you ever heard the like? – and sharing the recipe later on. Also, it turns out I was right about birds being the garden thieves. I went out for a quick peek on Saturday, and I caught one red handed (or is taloned?) flying off with a leaf.
Last of the original cantaloupe plants
Most of what I’ve planted seems to look pretty good. I have seen some flowers and buds popping up on the peppers, tomatoes and strawberries, and I got some herb seeds into my topsy turvy plants. I did some pinching off on the tomatoes; not that there was much to pinch off given the size of the plants. I learned about pinching off from this guy right here. Not everything in the square foot garden turned out, but I think it’s not doing too shabby. I did notice though that the square that I marked as peppers on the chart has a plant in it that looks remarkably like the broccoli plant that’s sitting next to it. So, it looks like I screwed it up somehow. Maybe I should rename this blog "A Gardening Comedy”. I notice that the carrot squares seem to really be slow growing, but I’m happy that at least they are growing. I had tried carrots in my very first garden about a hundred years ago, and I was never able to have any success with them. I tried a few times with seed and seed tape, but . . . nothing. The cantaloupe is still “iffy” I planted new seeds in the square foot section and in two of the cantaloupe mounds. So far one mound is actually sprouting. The one plant I had left after the stealing episode still looks pretty much the same. I’m not going to touch it though.
I have finished with my layout, or so I tell myself, and I only have a few empty spots to fill. I think the south west corner will be beets. and maybe some more broccoli. And just to clear something up. When I said that I had planted a half a row of yellow beans, I realized that people might think I meant just that; a half a row of beans. Actually, I had created a section that ran from east to west which I referred to as a “row” and then I planted about 4 or 5 horizontal (north / south) rows of yellow beans which took up about half of that section. I’m updating the chart, so you’ll see what I mean.
I was back at Canadian Tire yesterday. I picked up a couple of chrysanthemums. I got this idea from a raid commercial. Apparently, chrysanthemums are good at killing bugs. I also got myself a couple of sage plants; one common sage and one pineapple sage. I had never heard of a pineapple sage before, but boy does it ever smell nice. They still want 3.99$ for a small strawberry plant though, and they’re really starting to look tatty now. Square Foot Garden Gal got a sweet deal at 1.49$ from her local Canadian Tire. I thought they were all supposed to do the same thing.
We had quite a bit of rain over the weekend. Most of the day Saturday and all day Sunday. I’m not complaining though; not in the least. The way I see it I don’t really care much for watering the garden, so I really appreciate God picking up the slack for me. We had a break Saturday starting in the afternoon. I decided to have an impromptu gardening session that evening, and I started a new row of planting. I put in about a half a row of yellow beans – yuck! Those are for my Honey not me - and when they start to sprout, I’ll plant the other half. I added a few new cantaloupe seeds in the cantaloupe mounds and in one of the cantaloupe squares. I also started a new row of bricks, but I ran out, so back to Mum’s to get more. That might not be for a few days though, because tonight I’ve got a Toastmasters meeting and tomorrow I’ve got an extraction.
I decided to empty the strawberry bag, as 2 of the plants died. I put the remaining plant into a bucket and hung it on a free standing plant hanger along with a pepper plant. So far, what I have in the buckets look like they’re doing alright. I haven’t seen any spectacular growth or anything, but they’re not dying either. I read on Square Foot Garden Gal’s blog that she was able to snag some strawberry plants at Canadian Tire for 1.49$ each! I paid nearly 4$ each for mine (At Canadian Tire) Anyway, I’m going back to see if maybe they’re trying to clear them out for less.
My new handy dandy weeder
I got myself a new weeder today. A lot of the maple seeds from the tree next door have taken root, and I didn’t have anything small enough to get into the square foot patch, so I got this neat little tool at Walmart for less than 3$. It works great, and it’s the cutest little thing; it reminds me of a fish fork or something. Even the little cultivator I bought last year was too big; everything in the square foot section is so close together that I couldn’t manoeuvre it around the plants. And for the first time since planting, I was able to fluff up the dirt in some of the squares. I don’t know what it is, but I have this obsession with keeping the dirt all light and fluffy. I couldn’t find exactly the same thing at the Walmart's online garden centre, but they have a pretty nice 3 tool setthat has something in it that’s very similar to the one I got, and I think they’ll ship it free to your local Walmart if they don’t already have it. If you need to get around really tight spots around your plants, it’s just the thing to have. Of course, if I had started with Mel’s mix, I wouldn’t have weeds in the first place. Oh well.
Oh and I got a nice wire basket that I’ll be keeping my herbs in. Walmart had it for 6.95$. That’s the best price I’ve seen so far. They’re 12.95 at Marlin’s Orchard and a whopping 17.95$ at Canadian Tire. It’ll be nice to be able to bring the herbs in at the end of the season this year. Last year I had them in the long planter boxes and since we don’t have much room in the house, I had to toss them. We actually burned them in the fire pit. It did make the air smell nice though.
I've added more bricks to the design and put a few more plants in. I don't know what's getting in there, but right from the off, something has been enjoying the fruits of my labour even before there’s any fruit! One tomato and one cucumber top were first to go. Now I’m noticing the cantaloupe leaves are quietly disappearing. I suspect it’s birds. Whatever it is seems to really go for the cantaloupe though. It seems I'm missing a new leaf every time I go out there. I have no problem with wildlife welfare, but for crying out lout, at least give me a chance to get something going here.
Over the last few days, I was out there a couple of times making changes, and I made a video each time. I was planning to post after each one, but I think I'll just do the one post and include both videos.
3 tomato plants
Now, I've realized something very important about myself through this whole gardening thing: I'm not a good planner. At the beginning of this project, I drew out a chart with every intention of planning the whole thing out before so much as even one seed or one plant got put in the ground. I just sat there stumped in front of the paper. Have you ever heard Fred Flintstone say, "Details, details. Don't bother me with details."? Well that's me. I'm more the, "let's put this here and see if I like it" kind of person; plan as I go. Then, whatever I decide I'm happy with at the site will go on the chart. I finally got some plants into my "topsy turvy" buckets. None of my seeds grew, so I put store bought tomato and pepper plants in them. It wasn't as easy as it looked, but I suppose for my first time, it's not too shabby.
The garden layout as it stands now. Bear in mind that this is only rough and in no way to scale.
P.S. As of 17h30 today, the last leaf was eaten off my stand alone cantaloupe plant. All that’s left is the stem. I’m not touching it though, just in case it still grows.
My first backyard recipe actually comes from my neighbours’ back yard. They’re not fans of rhubarb, so they just throw it away. I had offered to take it because my Mum makes strawberry, rhubarb pies (not my favourite). It turned out Mum didn’t have any strawberries, and not wanting to waste the rhubarb I had to figure out something to do with it. Considering I’m not a fan of rhubarb either, I found this to be absolutely delicious. If you like apple crumble or Dutch apple pie, you’ll probably go for this.
What you need:
Sauce
1l / 4 C. Rhubarb
250ml / 1 C. (heaping) Granulated Sugar
45ml / 3 T. Butter
60ml / 4 T. Flour
Crumb Topping
250ml / 1 C. Flour
250ml / 1 C. Oatmeal
250ml / 1 C. Brown Sugar
250ml / 1/2 C. butter
What you do:
Oven 190º C / 375º F
1.) Cut rhubarb into small pieces, and in a mixing bowl mix together with sugar, flour and butter using a spatula or wooden spoon the ingredients and set aside
.
2.) In a separate mixing bowl use a pastry blender to mix the flour, brown sugar and oatmeal. Cut the butter into small pieces, and again with the pastry blender, mix it into the oatmeal mix. Once you get it going you can continue to blend the butter into the mixture with your hands until you have a large crumbly mixture in the bowl. Don’t over blend, as you are not looking to create a dough.
3.) Put the sauce mixture into a greased (I used butter) rectangular baking dish, cover with the crumb topping and bake for 35 mins. Longer if you want to brown it more.
Tips:
Make sure you don't get a fine overly quick cooking oatmeal; you want a good sized flake for texture.
For gift giving, I used **pyrex dishes that come with their own lids. It makes a better presentation than just scooping out a serving into a container. This way I can bake and give in the same dish.
If you're like me and don't like to get muck under your nails, latex or vinyl examination gloves work a treat.
I got my pyrex dishes at my local Walmart, but you can get them online too. Note also that the rectangular dishes shown in my photos are the smaller 3 and 6 cup ones not the 9 x 12 oblong, however, pyrex does make the longer ones with lids too.
This is just like my set but I have red lids
**The two rectangular dishes in the set pictured above are exactly what I used to make the rhubarb recipe. They are labeled as storage and are not officially marked as bake ware, but according to pyrexware.com, they are "pre heated oven safe" , and on the dishes they are marked that they can't go under the broiler. Of course the plastic lids can't go in the oven. I personally don't put the lids in the microwave either because I have found from experience that they go all out of shape from doing that.
I have to admit I started baking with them before I even researched this info, because to me the name Pyrex means it can go in the oven. But I had heard of a few people saying that they had pyrex explode in the oven, so I thought I'd better get more information. I personally have never had an issue with pyrex exploding or anything like that, but I do remember when I was about 8 or 9 my grandmother had a pyrex measuring cup explode after she poured boiling water into it, I was always taught that mixing extreme temperatures can cause it to explode, and that you should always put your pyrex in a cold oven if you take it from the fridge or freezer.
Naturally, if you are uncomfortable with these, pyrex does have a line specifically marked as bake ware.
Pyrex also has more information about this and how to use pyrex safely on their website.
The next few days are supposed to be wicked hot, so I got out early this morning to get some planting done. Today the humidex is supposed to be 38º, and this is supposed to keep up until at least Thursday. As I write this, it's already 27º and it's not even noon yet. So I better do my gardening work in the mornings. Yesterday I waited 'til evening which was cool enough but man those mosquitoes; they just love me. Guess that's what I get for being too sweet for my own damned good. ;-)
We went to Marlin's Orchard on Sunday and picked up a few plants. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and cantaloupe. They were all out of strawberry plants though, so I had to get those at Canadian Tire. I've already planted cantaloupe and peppers in the square foot plan, and I've got tomato, pepper and cucumber seeds on the go for the topsy turvy planting; these are just backups in case all this experimenting doesn't work out though. (Yeah I know, not exactly law of attraction thinking)
So, with the help of my Grandson, ( who I call Ziggy - Zig for short) we laid out more bricks, planted a couple of the cucumber plants, and put the strawberry bag together. I only bought 3 strawberry plants because they were pretty pricey @ 3.99$ a pop, and most of them looked sick. And was it ever hard to get the plants into the holes; I honestly thought I was going to rip up all the roots! I had to move my planter boxes to the inside of the gardening area too. When I left them outside the fence, did I remember that I have a dog who loves to dig? OF COURSE NOT! After that I had to get inside before I turned into one giant mosquito bite.
This morning I got the rest of the cucumber plants in and the 2 tomato plants and 3 hills of cantaloupe. Honestly, I don't get the whole "hill" thing. What's that all about? And man - oh - man if you want to start a cantaloupe business, you'd need one heck of a farm for that because those suckers have to be spaced 48 - 72" apart! I wonder how that's gonna play out in the square foot plan. :-??
I still have a few seeds to plant in the rest of the open space: beets, fennel, green and yellow beans, and some potatoes. I'll plant the beans in succession so as not to have them all come in at once, and you'll be able to see in the video how it's all coming along. I apologize in advance for the crappy camera work - boy am I ever zoom happy; I'll have to learn to get that under control.
Well I've gotten a few more things done over the last couple of days. We went to Home Depot and got the fence. It seems to be sufficient to keep Kiti out, but I don't know yet how much of a deterrent it'll be for the neighbor's cat. He might just go ahead and jump it. If that's the case, then other measures will have to be taken.
Yesterday, I did most of the planting in the 4' x 4' section. The chart shows how I have it laid out so far. The key at the top clearly describes what I have planted, and the multiplier numbers represent how many plants will grow from each square foot. It seems pretty incredible to me that I can get 9 bean plants or 16 onion plants in one square foot, but that's what they say. I was supposed to put in some beets, but I couldn't get seeds anywhere. . .well, anywhere I had been anyway. I have one empty square left though in case I find some. I changed my mind about the lettuce though. I was going to start my strawberry planter, but my "kit" turned out to be just a bag. I knew I had to add my own dirt, but I thought there were seeds included; apparently not. So now I gotta find some strawberry plants.
So now I've got to figure out how I'm going to plant the rest of it. The next thing I'm going to do is lay out the bricks around what I've planted so far, and then I guess I'll pretty much do things in "patches" A potato patch, a green bean patch etc. My Honey wants me to put in some yellow beans - yuck! I was going to put the potatoes in the four - by - four, but then I remembered how hard it was to keep the plants contained last year. They'll need a trellis, so I'll keep them well separated. I'm still going to add a couple tomato and cucumber plants in case the topsy turvy experiment doesn't work.
Oh, and we got new solar lights. 3 of the 4 globes we had last year were broken, so we replaced them with get this: a butterfly, a dragonfly and a humming bird. They do change color, but now the globe looks a little out of place. Last year when I tried to get pictures of how the light color changes, I got some neat effects, but not what I wanted. This year, I'll try it on the tripod because apparently, I wasn't steady enough to capture the effect properly. I'll also try video; that might work out better.
My layout chart is kind of blurry, so here is the key:
B= Beans x 9 BR = Broccoli x 1 P = Peas x 9 C = Cantaloupe x 1 PE = Peppers x 1 S = Spinach x 1
R = Radishes x 16 PO = Potatoes x 4 L = Letuce x 4 O = Onions x 16 T = Turnips x 9 BE = Beets x 9
The melon plant in the square foot garden looks healthy but I haven’t seen much change in it over the last few days. Oh, and the herb sections look like they’re really kicking in now too.
I guess it’s just going to get hotter toward the middle of the week.
They’ve got really purple looking leaves and some have yellow spots on them. As far as the bucket herbs go, The dill looks like it’s going to be good and so does the basil. I really want the basil to do well. My Mother says it’s working wonders at keeping the flies away from her house. We’ve got a trash can out back and so do our neighbours to the west and the flies are everywhere. Nothing spectacular is going on with the spearmint or the tarragon; I ‘m hoping it’s just because it’s their nature to be slow starters. 
so again, I didn’t have to water the garden. I really haven’t had to get the hose out too much since I started my garden. Watering isn’t my favourite part of the gardening process, so you won’t hear me complaining about the rain. 
at his golf tournament this past Saturday, and I’m telling you, it’s quite the light show out there at night. Maybe at our next fire I’ll do a quickie.
Those are for my Honey not me - and when they start to sprout, I’ll plant the other half. I added a few new cantaloupe seeds in the cantaloupe mounds and in one of the cantaloupe squares. I also started a new row of bricks, but I ran out, so back to Mum’s to get more. That might not be for a few days though, because tonight I’ve got a Toastmasters meeting and tomorrow I’ve got an extraction. 
I paid nearly 4$ each for mine (At Canadian Tire) Anyway, I’m going back to see if maybe they’re trying to clear them out for less.
that has something in it that’s very similar to the one I got, and I think they’ll ship it free to your local Walmart if they don’t already have it. If you need to get around really tight spots around your plants, it’s just the thing to have. Of course, if I had started with Mel’s mix, I wouldn’t have weeds in the first place. Oh well. 
At the beginning of this project, I drew out a chart with every intention of planning the whole thing out before so much as even one seed or one plant got put in the ground. I just sat there stumped in front of the paper. Have you ever heard Fred Flintstone say, "Details, details. Don't bother me with details."? Well that's me. I'm more the, "let's put this here and see if I like it" kind of person; plan as I go. Then, whatever I decide I'm happy with at the site will go on the chart. I finally got some plants into my "topsy turvy" buckets. None of my seeds grew, so I put store bought tomato and pepper plants in them. It wasn't as easy as it looked, but I suppose for my first time, it's not too shabby. 
