We Do Things Different Here in Texas

The Winter Garden

2011-12-31T17:48:00.002-06:00

The winter garden is growning quite well. We spent the better part of October tearing up the old garden beds and putting in the six - new square foot garden 4 x 4 beds. The first bed on the left, I discovered does not get enough sun currently, so I've rolled some extra chicken wire over it to keep the cats and squirrels out and will plant in it when the curvature of the sun changes.

The bed in front on the right, is full of broccoli and brussel sprouts. The broccoli is just now forming tiny baby heads. It will be interesting to see how fast they form. I have three box covers made out of chicken wire and 2"x 2"x 4' squares. These are currently covering 2 boxes on the left and 1 box on the right as these do not have all of the squares in use and I wanted to keep 4 legged critters out.

The middle box on the right is boasting healthy squares of radishes, romaine lettuce, parsley, swiss chard and kale which I am harvesting regularly. Behind the kale and swiss chard is an ailing chive plant which I plan to move to some empty space between the kale and radishes. Everything has gotten too tall and the chive plant is not happy.

I can happily say that the garlic, kolirabi, and onion sets are all doing quite well. The kolirabi is beginning to form the bulb which gives the plant the nickname of cabbage turnip.

In a few weeks I will be sewing together some Tater Totes: Potato Grow Bags. Here in southeast Texas the chart I'm following says I can plant potatoes between the middle of January and the middle of February. I remember my great Uncle Arthur growing potatoes in straw and this seems to work on a similar principle. I got my idea for making grow bags from the following website: http://www.instructables.com/id/Tater-Totes-Potato-grow-bags/ This will be a grand experiement, as I have read that potatoes in the grocery store are coated in a lot of pesticide residue.

How to remove a stump in 2 - 3 days instead of 2 - 3 years

2011-11-21T15:57:00.005-06:00

Remember this? This stump was in the corner of my garden bed. The picture shows what I did to kill the stump by placing a pile of lighted charcoal briquets on top of it. It scorched it but it wasn't a big enough effort to actually make it disappear.

I have been waiting for my tree man to come and grind this stump out but business has been slow, so they haven't needed to rent a stump grinder and they were not sure how long it would be before they would be using one. I waited three weeks and then decided if I wanted to finish the garden beds, I would need to take matters into my own hands. What you see in the picture is only part of the stump. When we cleared the dirt away we discovered it had a broad base. A friend had come out to see if he could cut it closer to the ground but the wood proved harder than his chain saw could handle, So there was still more stump above ground then would be good for a garden bed.

Last Wednesday, I decided to really apply the charcoal burn out method. This time I piled charcoal all over the stump and kept adding more and more briquets as the old ones burned down. To prevent my yard from catching fire due to the breezes blowing around sparks, I covered it with a flipped over galvanized oil pan. By Thursday, about 1/2 the stump was gone. I poked the loose stuff, scooped off the excess charcoal dust so as not to get the growth inhibitor coating of the charcoal into my good growing soil; and began the process of adding more burning briquetts to what remained. By Friday, I had accomplished my goal;instead of a stump, a hole appeared in it's place. Now it looks like this:

Milk Jug Seed Starters

2011-11-16T09:36:00.009-06:00

I found an idea in the November 2011 issue of The Herb Companion. I'm not wild about the idea of setting up grow lights in the dining room, but starting seeds in a milk jug (which I have plenty of on a regular basis) and putting it outside in our mild climate is very appealing.

I'm going to start my Mortgage lifters (big, sweet, pink tomatoes) and the free (from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds) Riesentraube Tomatoes (German for "Giant Bunch of Grapes) in this method so that I can have them to go in the ground as early as January. I've put tomatoes in that early before with success.

To see the article Go To:
www.herbcompanion.com/gardening/cold-frame-for-herbs-make-milk-jug-seed-starters.aspx

22 November 2011 - I just learned that this technique is called "Winter Sowing". More information can be found at www.wintersown.org. It appears that it can be done anywhere, not just here in the deep south.

The Fall Garden 2011

2011-11-10T15:18:00.003-06:00

It's a little late to get started but the weather is so mild I thought I would just proceed. I've planted the following this week:

12 - Broccoli plants
4 - Brussel Sprout plants
3 - Kale plants
2 Kohlrabi plants - I'm waiting for the seeds to arrive
2 parsley plants
4 romain lettuce plants
1 - bunch chives
leeks, 18 white onions, 4 - garlic cloves
1 - winter squash (sugar bear) plant - it was something I found at the independent nursery a few weeks ago - It sounded like a bush variety of acorn squash - it may be WAYYY TOO LATE to put it in the ground but who knows. If I could grow any squash without the southern squash vine borer destroying it, it would be a good thing.There are male blossoms developing on it now.

The day after I brought the Kale home I discovered a whole lot of little holes in the leaves but I couldn't see anything to cause it. I bought some BT concentrate and sprayed the leaves top and bottom and as I did so I finally discovered who was making all the holes. My Kale was infested with cabbage worms. One of the beautys of Square Foot Gardening is that it is an easy thing (if you do it early enough) to find and destroy crop pests. I squashed a LOT of worms, yesterday.

I still have mixed lettuce, radishes, kolhrabi seeds and two different kinds of carrots to plant. I had never heard of Kohlrabi before this year but it is on a chart from the county extension service that recommends what can be planted and grown this time of year. I am told it is a mild tasting tuber, similar in taste to cabbage.

Out with the old, In with the new

2011-11-09T08:02:00.002-06:00

After reviewing the successes and failures of this past spring and summer and considering the over-all success of my whole growing system in Texas, I decided it was time for a change. For years I have used a modified version of the square foot gardening system, but I decided to go all the way and really do it the way Mel Bartholomew suggests. On several weekends this fall, my DH and I have worked to pull up and break down the old, pre-2003 pressure treated wood grow boxes and replace them with 4' x 4' grow boxes constructed of 2"x 8"boards. Where each 4' x 16' grow box used to set 3 - 4' x 4' boxes will go in its place. Currently, three of the 4 completed boxes are sporting chicken wire covers that will provide protection from birds, squirrels and cats. I'm excited.

The tree stump that sat for so long in the corner of one grow box is waiting for our tree man to come with a stump grinder to grind out the stump for us or the grow box will be too shallow for most vegetables. I hope he comes soon as this box and the one behind it(which is only a mound of dirt right now)get the most light through out the day. One box is so shaded by the trees on the other side of the fence that it will have to wait until spring before I can plant in it. I have rolled the chicken wire over that box to keep the cats out of it.

Since I don't have quite enough dirt/compost to fill the boxes, my DH purchased a load of super compost to mix into each box. It's a combination of mushroom compost, composed horse manure, and ground up trees. (I'm not sure why the soil places around here are so intent on adding ground up trees to every compost mix they make, but they are).

They say it's not a "SFG" unless it has square foot designations. I looked at numerous options and decided that the cheapest 48"wide window blind at Walmart was the best option. I carefully screwed each strip down to the wooden frame so it wouldn't blow away. Hopefully, I won't be leaching PBA into my soil.

Things are looking GOOD!

Beware "Matt or Mike's Wild Cherry" tomato and what I learned about leeks

2011-11-08T12:00:00.002-06:00

THE SPRING/SUMMER 2011 GARDEN REPORT

I grew 5 different types of heirloom tomatoes this year - Cherokee Purple - which I really loved - it was the largest type of tomato I have ever grown and was everything it was promised to be. Large, sweet and meaty. I wish it had produced more than I got.
Costoluto Gero - in terms of flavor this was my least favorite variety - it was acidic in flavor, prolific during the spring and always seemed to be the one I found when I was looking for tomatoes to pick. I've discovered I do not care for acidic tomatoes and I was glad when it stopped producing and didn't come back in the fall. It was a little larger than best pack size.
Eva Purple Ball - this was a nice tomato, I enjoyed it when I could find it but I think it was overwhelmed by its neighbors.
Black Plum - this was a prolific producer, with a smaller fruit that the standard Italian Plum tomato plant you buy in the Lowes or Home Depot garden centers. I don't know that I will get it again.
Mike's or Matt's Wild Cherry - the optimal word for this plant is "WILD". OMGosh! This plant was CRAZY!! It was a pretty tame looking 6" plant for a month and then all of a sudden, it took off! It became a monster in my garden bed, sending out branches in all directions. I found it growning everywhere. All of the other tomato plants had to compete with it for space. I was picking "Wild" Cherry tomatoes in and through every other plant in the garden. What was worse is that unlike, a plump, sweet, 1-inch "Sweet 100" the tomatoes on this plant were about the size of the end of your little pinky finger. When you popped it in your mouth you had the sensation of eating mostly tomato skin and little else. I will NEVER grow this one, again and I will warn everyone to do the same.

TRYING TO FOIL THE BIRDS

I decided if I were going to protect my tomatoes from the birds, I would need to build some protection. I took PVC pipe to create a frame work than I attach deer netting. Unlike bird netting which is 14' by 14', deer netting is 7' wide and 100' long. I was not content with just wrapping it around the sides of the frame work, I decided to run netting across the top as well. This worked well until the Mike's Wild Cherry grew through the roof. I couldn't reach most of those tomatoes so I let the birds have them. This picture doesn't show the tomatoes through the roof but try to imagine tomato vines growing 3 or so feet into the air above the roof line all the way across the top of the tomato house and every single vine came from Mike's Wild Cherry.

OTHER THINGS LEARNED SPRING AND SUMMER 2011

I learned that leeks are a cool season crop and when the tomatoes took over and the weather became unbearable the leeks simply disappeared. I had placed the cucumbers - a bush variety - about 3 feet in front of the tomatoes but found that this was not a wise decision. Although I was training them up, they were inside the tomato house and therefore often obscured by the netting and Mike's Wild Cherry. I can't begin to count the number of cucumbers I didn't find until they became large yellow balloons with large seeds and a bitter flavor.

I found that the tomato house was great for tomatoes but lousy for plants that needed pollenators in order to produce fruit. Next year, I will make the structure smaller so that it only encloses the tomatoes and not everything else. Eggplant and peppers did poorly. Basil got lost in the tomato vines but managed to reseed itself. I put in bush beans in another section of the middle garden but once again the squirrels and birds plucked out the seeds as they broke through the ground. Instead of 36 plants I got 5. I was able to pick a few summer squash before the southern squash vine borer found it and destroyed the plant.

We worked all summer long, watering the tomatoes during the long drought we are experiencing in this part of the country, in hopes of having a great fall crop. In September, I noticed the leaves on the tomato plants looked misshapened, which seemed odd. As I looked closer, I discovered that every tomato plant was infested with mealy bugs. The simple solution was to spray everything with Safer Insecticidal soap or make a homemade solution, except with the vines up through the roof it was inpossible to reach and clear the problem, so I decided to tear the whole thing down. Better luck next year.

This year's grand experiement was successful in some ways but not so much in others.

Preparing for Green Beans

2011-03-23T15:30:00.000-05:00

Well, the broccoli has now all gone to seed and the temperatures are moving upward. I pulled out all the broccoli plants, yesterday. I'll be putting bush green beans into their place. I'll need to get some chicken wire in order to create a protective barrier that will keep the squirrels out of the bean bed as the beans begin to break ground. The little critters find the freshly sprouted bean seeds quite tasty. I'm not interested in sharing.

Heirloom Tomatoes

2011-02-28T12:16:00.000-06:00

I'm excited about my tomatoes this year. Instead of buying the standard hybrids available at the local garden center attached to Lowes or Home Depot, I decided to go to my local neighborhood grower, Enchanted Forest. They debuted their heirlooms this past Saturday. Here is what I got

Cherokee Purple - medium large dusky rose fruits with full flavor
Black Plum - oval 2" fruits, from deep mahogany to black-brown, nice rich color makes great sauce
Eva Purple Ball - smooth round 4 - 5 oz fruit, blemish free, very good flavor, does well in humid areas

I like the names of these as much as the descriptions - I am especially interested in the Eva Purple ball because it does well in humid areas.

Several weeks earlier I found a second heirloom tomato, that I was told would do well in the heat and humidity of SE Texas. The farmer lives north of me by 2 hours and he grew the Costoluto Gero last year up until August, then he cut it back and it grew back when temperatures got cooler in the fall. I have no clue what it will taste like or what it will look like but I'm excited to try it and find out. I'll keep you posted as the season progresses.

Broccoli is AMAZING!!!

2011-02-28T11:32:00.004-06:00

Back in the fall of 2010 I planted broccoli for the first time. I was curious to see how it would grow. One of the first things I noticed was that because the weather was too cool for insects to thrive, I had no problem with cabbage moths or cabbage worms. That was a plus. We began harvesting 7 - 8 inch wide heads through the month of January. I didn't pull my plants up after this initial harvest, as I had read that if left alone broccoli would put out shoots which would grow into additional smaller heads.

Here is what my broccoli looks like now! I have lots of new heads forming. This picture was taken AFTER I picked quite a number heads for supper tonight.

My cabbage looks to be ready to pick. It too has been left alone by the cabbage moth and cabbage worm.

I must report that the broccoli and cabbage plants were placed in the garden bed that I experimented with last spring. Instead of trying to plant in the gumbo that was in this grow box I decided to follow the principles outlined in the book Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza. I placed a 3 - 5 sheet layer of newspapers down first (I didn't even bother weeding or double digging the bed), then a layer of cut grass, then a layer of peat moss, then a layer of leaves, layer of peat moss. I repeated the layering twice cause by then the squash vines from the other bed were spreading over this bed. The contents of this grow box is friable, loose, nutrient rich (as you can see by the color of the plants), crumbly and holds moisture well. I'm impressed. Lazy gardener that I am this method is quite successful.

More Things Discovered

2010-10-19T12:21:00.001-05:00

Who Knew Peppers Would Survive the Blazing Summer Sun?

I had a most pleasant surprise when I cleared the morning glory vines off the spring garden in September. There, still struggling to put out fruit, were the two green pepper plants I had put in April. I found three peppers that were beginning to turn red (and now you know why red peppers cost so much in the grocery stores - they are actually green peppers that have been left on the vine to ripen - it takes longer), which I picked. Now that they no longer have to compete for sun and water they are continuing to produce, there are at least 5 - 6 peppers at various stages of growth. Some look like they are even ready to pick.

Gifts from Hurricane Ike - The next two pictures were brought to me thanks to hurricane Ike.

These sunflowers now grow in profusion in the cracks in the concrete between the garage and the neighbors fence.

This WAS a Chinese Elm tree. They produce an inordinate amount of seeds every fall and can really be described as a weed tree. There are baby Chinese Elm trees in a great many places they do not need to be around our property.

I can still remember asking my DH to remove that little tree in the corner of the garden before it got too big. Well, it was about 10 - 12 inches across when Ike came blowing through and he broke off a number of branches, it being a soft wood. A friend offered to cut it down for us and we took him up on the offer. Since Ike, the stump has been busily trying to send out tiny, thin branches all around its edge, that is until I tried something. A friend of mine shared with me a technique she uses to remove old stumps from her property. She piles a mound of lit charcoal briquettes onto the offending stump and just keeps lit coals on the stump until eventually the stump is just burned away. I'm quite good at putting the lit charcoal on the stump but I am not so good at remembering to keep adding new charcoal. The first time I did this to the stump however, I did manage to kill it and now it has stopped sending out thin little branches. I've even noticed that the bark has fallen off. I think I'll try burning the stump one more time and then if I haven't cleared it completely, I'll let the termites finish the job.

The Fall Garden 2010

2010-10-19T11:14:00.004-05:00

The weather here in South East Texas is beautiful. My tomatoes have been planted for a few weeks now but is wasn't until last week that I started to grow them vertically. My vertical support system took a beating this summer with the weight of the morning glory vines so I had to do some hunting around to find fittings and poles that were still straight and undamaged to create somthing for this fall. I love the nylon netting they have a Home Depot, the squares a wide enough apart that I can weave the tomato vines in and out of them without difficulty and without using twisty ties. This is what is looks like.

In front of the tomatoes are 9 broccoli plants and 18 butter crunch lettuce plants. The white strips are old window blind strips. They say if you don't have a square foot garden marked in square foot blocks it's not a square foot garden. The fall garden is in my second grow box, behind it is the spring grow box.

Gardening - Spring 2010

2010-09-06T14:20:00.005-05:00

This year I tried something a little different.

I started "Lasagna" composting, i.e. linear composting is what it's been called for a long time. Every time I had plant matter that could be added to the garden, be it grass clippings, rabbit litter, or kitchen vegetable waste, I added it. Sometime in March I noticed some type of squash growing in a great clump a one end of the grown bed I was actively adding material to. In fact, I had two different types of vines pop up out of the grown box. I weeded most of the huge clump out and left probably 3 - 4 plants to continue growing. It was fascinating to watch and I was excited to know what I had tossed in that had volunteered.

Since one end of the bed was actively growing something vine-like I decided to plant the opposite end of the box with tomatoes, green pepper, Japanese eggplant and bush cucumbers. This was at the beginning of April. Note to self: If you want tomatoes before it gets too hot, they must be either short season varieties or they must go in no later than the beginning of March. I tried growing several 'heirloom' varieties but my most successful was one from Mexico called Tlacolula - It's shaped somewhat like a plum tomato but it had deep ridges all the way around it. It was a very mild tomato in flavor, it didn't have the sharp, acidic taste of so many tomatoes you get these days. I really enjoyed and have (I hope successfully)saved some seeds.

I wish now that I had taken a picture of my thriving garden. I haven't grown so successful a garden since I lived in New Jersey, more than 15 years ago. I think it had a lot to do with the composed organic material.

I discovered I had volunteer spaghetti squash and volunteer acorn squash coming up at one end of the garden bed. Every day when I came out to check the garden it seemed like the vines had grown another foot or more. I had 12 spaghetti squashes of various sizes hanging from the nylon netting I had stretched across my galvanized tubing frames and 1 acorn squash. I was excited. Then it happened...

The squash vine borer moth found my garden and my lovely vines. In two weeks my vines were history. I tried to cut the grubs out of the vines in an attempt to save the plants and for a short time that worked but quickly the moth laid more eggs, and as they say, the rest is history. The first to go was the acorn squash vines (I harvested 1 acorn squash), the next was zucchini (it was almost like it was here today - gone tomorrow) (I harvested just one zucchini squash), then the spaghetti squash vines were attacked(I had to pick my immature squash and hope that they'd ripen on the counter.) It was very sad. I'm still seeking an organic way to deal with them next year. The Master Gardeners at the AgriExtension office have all said "Good Luck with that, there isn't anything." The moth has a fat red body with black wings.

I fought the birds and won most of my Tlacolula tomatoes. Bird netting helped with that. Near the end of the tomatoes productive season the leaf footed stink bugs arrived with their nymphs. Now I know what the white dots on tomatoes and peppers are - they are the damaged done by the stink bugs. I discovered that a dust buster is an excellent way to deal with them, since they prefer to crawl rather than fly. I'll be using a dust buster more frequently in the garden next spring.

Currently, the only thing growing happily in the garden is morning glory. I pulled out everyone I saw before it got too hot to work in the garden. The minute I turned my back it spread like wild fire.

Summer Time and the Garden is changing

2009-06-20T06:54:00.000-05:00

It's been an interesting Spring. We harvested scores of tomatoes, at least all the ones we could nab before the birds punctured holes in them. I found that if I picked them just as they began to color- we got them, if I waited for them to turn a little more red - the birds got them.

We've probably picked 12 cucumbers off the bush cucumbers I started from seed. I've had to learn to wait until they plumped up a little before picking them, otherwise they tasted a little too green.

The swiss chard is doing well, as is the Malabar spinach - which is actually a vine with edible leaves. It's in it's second year, I bought it last year at the farmer's market and planted it in the half wine barrel with the ailing tomatoes. Just as promised, it reseeded itself and is going to town.

I planted string beans but for some reason only four out of the 9 plants came up. I don't know whether the birds got them or I planted them too deeply or what. It's been wild to watch them grow, they are in their second or third blossom cycle. 4 plants only produce enough green beans to snack on.

I've got a volunteer basil plant growing in the garden near the cucumbers. The birds must have planted it cause I certainly didn't. The parsley is struggling along, I really need to soak the soil, they aren't getting enough water. The stems are rather hard - it is definitely rabbit parsley.

I tried an experiment this year and made my own upside down tomato planter out of a plastic, 5 gallon bucket you can get for free at any bakery. There seems to be natural, circular indentations in the bottom and lid of these buckets - so I drilled those out, sat the bucket on two chairs, put my baby tomato plant upside down through the hole and filled the bucket with potting soil. I put a coffee filter over the hole in the lid, secured the lid and flipped the whole thing over. I left the tomato grow upright for a week or so, then I hung the whole contraption upside down on a securely mounted hook on my patio roof. The plant was determined not to grow upside-down and for awhile it looked like it was heading for the top of the roof. Eventually, as the fruit began to grow, it forced the stem to come down and now reluctantly it's growing down towards the ground. This one seems to be a little trickier for the birds to pick the fruit - I think they must have to dive bomb it, as there is no place to sit and peck daintily at the ripening fruit.

I made a second bucket and placed a basil plant in it. The basil has had not qualms at all about growing upside down. It immediately just turned it's leaves over and has had no quarrel with the pull of gravity. I discovered at the beginning of the project that it was definitely advantageous to use a potting soil mix and not a dirt type mix. Potting soil is lighter, a bag of garden dirt from the garden store is way too heavy. Also, when asking for the buckets be sure to say you want to keep the handles. I had to put rope handles on my buckets but would have much preferred the metal handles that came with the buckets originally. Also, I learned that when purchasing potting soil, smaller is better. It takes less then you think to fill a 5 gallon bucket.

This summer, I've covered the garden bed with several layers of newspapers in an effort to control the weeds. So far it's working. I've planted a few cantaloupes and hope that they trail all over the garden to fill in the empty space. I'm hopeful we can keep the tomatoes alive during the long summer months. I know some people pull them up and start fresh in the fall but if we can keep them going we'll have earlier fall tomatoes. We grow the best fall tomatoes here in South East Texas.

Linear Composting

Thirteen years ago, we constructed three 4 x 16 grow boxes. Two of those boxes are still unused, but this spring, just before the open house reception we pulled up the big weeds and covered them both in a thick layer of hay. Some very determined but easy to pull out grass has poked through and morning glory vines have grown up around the edges but the thick layer of hay compost has successfully stifled anything else from coming up.

I decided I wanted to add more organic matter to at least one of these beds; so I've been using my Vita-mix to chop up every bit of vegetable matter into a mash and pouring it under the hay to rot. Well I thought this seemed to be working quite well until one day, as I pulled up some hay near where only a few days before I'd added the last batch of mash - I discovered that I had created conditions perfect for the production of meal worms. You know the kind, the big fat meal worms they feed to lizards and birds at the pet store and that fishermen use as bait. There squirming in the mash was a large mound of meal worms. Uck!!! Now what!

It took several phone calls to the folks at the cooperative extension service before I was able to find someone who could give me some advice. The recommendation was open the bed up to the air so the birds can get fat and happy and probably don't make mash of the vegetable matter. The only problem was when I pulled the hay back I didn't know where my squirming mass of meal worms had moved on to. Oh well. Maybe the 7 toads I know are living in those garden beds will find them worms or the resulting beetles and have a fine meal and they can get fat and happy.

New Things to try

2009-04-26T15:03:00.000-05:00

Not long ago, a friend sent me a website that showed how to grow potatoes in a bag of dirt. I'm not much into growing potatoes. They are cheap enough in the store, but the beauty of this website is it had links to other cool planting ideas. As I checked through the other links I found one that showed how to make an upside-down tomato planter out of a white bucket you can get for free at any bakery. On the market these planters, called 'Topsy-turvey tomato planters' cost any where from $10 - $20. I was so excited about this idea I immediately rummaged through my garage to find a bucket and lid and set to work. I'll post the website next time I write.

I am waiting for the plants to get themselves established before I flipped them upside down. I can hardly wait.

Wow, It's working!!!

2009-03-06T08:02:00.000-06:00

I am pleased to say the experts are WRONG! We don't have to wait til March to plant our summer vegetables. I will be picking tomatoes off one of my plants by the end of March. Dad would be proud.

The plants I've put in the garden are doing well, the seeds I started are a little slow. It seems to have taken eons for the parsley to finally break through the ground but I have 4 little baby plants in the area I planted the seeds. Probably lack of water had a little bit to do with that. I really must do better in that department.

I have started hauling the hose out to the garden rather than use the watering can to soak the soil. I seem to have an easier time controlling the force of the water with the spray nozzle rather than the end of the watering can, PLUS I'm not hauling bucket after bucket of water around the house to the garden.

I was reading in the "Square Foot Gardening" book that it's easier to maintain the square foot effect if you actually make a 12" x 12" grid with strips of lathing and lay it over the garden bed. I've had the wood for a couple of weeks now but I haven't done anything with it. I can see the point, as I got really creative with the square foot concept when I put in the parsley. Since so much of it didn't come up I'm thinking of digging the baby plants up and moving them around inside the frame work of the 12"x 12" grid.

I'm going to soak 9 bush bean seeds today and begin planting them tomorrow. My dad always soaked his beans before planting. It ensured they came up faster. 9 bean plants will fit in a square foot. I don't want to can bush beans, I just want to eat them so I'll stagger the planting a week or so apart to I'll get a continual harvest over a longer period of time.

I saw bush cucumbers in the store last month and decided to try them instead of the standard vining type. 3 out of the 6 seeds I planted have sprouted in my little peat pot greenhouse and two of the plants I've put in the garden already. I wonder how much space they are going to take up? I'm assuming that the two plants (which are planted side by side) will probably take up the same amount of space as a zucchini plant which is a 3' x 3' space. I'll have to make a note of it.

It's time to begin tying my tomatoes up. The one with the ripening tomatoes is getting big and needs to be trained to grow upward and not spread out all over the garden. I've had galvanized 1" pipe stacked along the edge of the garage for years from the last time I tried gardening in Texas. I'm confident the pieces for the cross bars are still there.

When I get a decent looking garden in another month I'm going to take a picture of it and post it on this blog. God bless the man who invented digital cameras.

It's Rainig, finally!

2009-02-10T15:20:00.000-06:00

Well, it's sort of raining. What we really need is a good, old fashioned gentle shower that lasts all afternoon and soaks in really deep.

How does the garden grow

2009-02-09T17:14:00.001-06:00

It's beginning to look a lot like a real garden. The tomatoes are beginning to get taller, the Swiss chard is developing more leaves and the 18 lettuce plants (9 - buttercrunch and 9 - romaine) are standing a little straighter.

I'm a little frustrated by the fact that a local feline has decided my nice soft, newly turned garden soil is the perfect place to do his business. It so happened that I wanted to put the lettuce in the exact same place the latest deposit was made. I carefully dug up the donation and threw it into the bed behind me or at least I thought I'd thrown it into the bed behind me. For the rest of the time I worked in the garden the smell of cat poop followed me around. Every time I bent down to work in the soil the smell followed.

I took my shoes off on the mat inside the door of the kitchen and thought that finally the smell would be gone, but no - I was wrong. After returning to the kitchen the smell was still there. After carefully examining the bottom of my shoe I discovered a gift was wedged into the deep crevices of my gardening shoes, Yuck! Those were quickly thrown outside.

I am waiting, somewhat impatiently, for the seeds I planted last week to break through the soil. I planted parsley, nasturtium, and lemon basil. I'm so worried my seeds won't sprout as the packaging promises that I have invested in a 24 count little seed sprouting contraption. It came with 24 peat disks you soak in warm water that fit neatly in the tray with a clear plastic domed cover. I've planted parsley, nasturtium, two kinds of basil and chamomile in the little peat pots. What'd you want to bet every seed I planted in the garden will break through any day now and I'll be stuck with either giving the parsley and nasturtiums away or be reduced to committing herbicide (baby plant murder - i.e. pulling the plants up and throwing them away.)

The grand experiment begins

2009-01-31T16:12:00.001-06:00

Well, it has been a few weeks since the last post. Last week DH and I finished double digging the middle grow box. The roots from the chinese elms that had been in growing happily in the box were a lot of work to dig out but we were successful in pulling everything out that wasn't growing down into the gumbo at the bottom of the box.

I went to Lowe's on Monday, originally to look at kitchen faucets but I decided I could probably use some nylon fencing and a roll of weed blocker, so I detoured through the garden center. They had the stockiest tomato plants I had ever seen - so I bought 5 plants. 2 - Romas, 1 - cherry tomato, 1- Early Girl, and 1 - (?). I bought the weed block and the nylon fencing only to discover when I got home that I already had some in the garage.

Several weeks ago while at the organic gardening store I had picked up two Swiss Chard and a chocolate mint that DH had been keeping alive on the kitchen counter. After bringing the tomatoes home, I gathered everybody up and took them out to the garden. Mint is known for it's spreading habit, so he was put into a pot and joined the rest of the crowd in the container garden. 80% of each tomato plant was buried in the ground - supposedly to promote better growth.

I am a student of square foot or intensive gardening - so the plants are about 1 foot apart. This afternoon I put in 8 Nasturtium seed in two square foot blocks, a small bunch of Lemon Basil seed in 1 square foot block (I took from the lemon basil plant going to seed in the container garden) and about 12 - clumps of parsley in a 2 ft by 1 ft square.

I think I've missed the window of opportunity for planting peas this year. They were suppose to go in at the beginning of January and here it is the beginning of February.

This week's progress

2009-01-11T14:02:00.000-06:00

It has been at least 10 years since I last did any active gardening in my three 16' x 4' gardens. The landscape timbers on some of the boxes are disintegrating. One box has been the repository of soiled hay and rabbit droppings which have been left to decompose on top of the soil. All of the boxes have been infested with Chinese elm saplings which I had managed to kill off to some extent last summer. My husband cut down the trees during the winter and spread out the mounds of old rabbit litter.

In November 2008, while visiting the Farmers Market hosted by Urban Harvest I purchased their gardening book for gardening in the metro Houston area. It is really a gardening Bible for the Houston area and is a wealth of information. The chart of what to plant when indicated that the beginning of January was a great time to plant peas, especially snow peas. With that in mind I visited the Enchanted Forest and purchased some snow pea, lettuce and parsley seeds. That afternoon I began double digging the second bed, as it seemed to have the most potential, beings how this was the bed the rabbit droppings had been dumped in over the years.

Double digging is quite a job, especially when with very other shovelful you hit a root from a now cut down Chinese Elm sapling. I was pleased to discover that when I wasn't hitting roots the soil was still friable and I could see wild life - cutworms, red worms, black cockroaches, small garden snakes to name a few.

I'm about half way through double digging that first box and I hope to finish it up early this week so I can put the seeds in. I was concerned that the roots I wasn't able to get out of the garden might act like hydras and come back with a vengeance, sprouting 3 or more new plants each. I called the Co-operative extension to ask what they thought I should do but they only suggested using "Round-up" on them. When I went to the Farmers Market, yesterday, I asked one of the gardeners for Urban Harvest what they would suggest and they recommended commercial strength vinegar. It would kill the root but not harm the soil. I like these urban harvest people, they speak my language.

Of times past

2009-01-09T11:26:00.002-06:00

I grew up in southern New Hampshire watching my father put in 100 by 50 foot gardens. I would ride behind the tractor, adding my weight to whatever implement was attached which would tame the soil and prepare it for planting. Dad did things on a large scale; I remember one year when we maintained five 50 x 100 foot gardens. We canned much of what we grew and it was more common that we went down to the cellar or up to the attic for the vegetables we ate daily, then that we bought them at the store.

As my dad grew older, he still kept a garden but they were closer to the house and not spread all over the fields across the road. He used a rototiller to turn the soil each year instead of a farm tractor and still kept to the concept of long rows of a single vegetable. I remember there was always lots of weeding to be done. It was hot, labor intensive work and if not done consistently the weeds would take over and obscure the vegetable plants.

When I got married I wanted to keep the gardening tradition my father had begun but I didn't have the land or the equipment he used and I certainly didn't have the time to dedicated to weeding that he did. It was about this time, in the early 1980's that I discovered a book by Mel Bartholomew called Square Foot Gardening. It was a remarkable book which promised high yields in small spaces with easy to manage raised beds that practically made weeding a thing of the past.

While living in southern New Jersey, I became a very successful square foot gardener. My gardens were lush, with nary a weed or bug insight. The method was all that it promised to be.

In 1995 we moved to southeast Texas, 22 miles southwest of Houston, into zone 9 A/B. Because we were so far south I soon discovered the summers were brutal. Tomatoes just wilted in the blazing heat and no one really wanted to be outside anyway. I tried for several years to garden as I had always done in the northeast but to no avail everything burnt up and died except the weeds. It seemed like the only way to garden as I was used to was to start in January or even September, certainly not in the summer it was too hot; but who had time to with kids in school and volunteer work and all the other things one is involved with during the school year.

Well life has come full circle. The kids are all in college now, in fact one is getting married this spring. My own educational goals have been scaled back so that I will have time to prepare for the wedding and I am currently unemployed, even on a part-time basis. There is now time to really learn how to garden in southeast Texas. I invite you to join me in my journey of discovery.