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.
