Adventures in gardening: draining, composting and nurturing

My tomato next to some open blossoms.

    Two weeks after the plants have found their new home in my raised bed, Mother Nature has found a way to partially ruin my fun.

     Nearly every day of the first week-and-a-half has featured rain either in the morning or a mass thunderstorm at night. Normally, I wouldn’t be so bothered about the amount of rain. Come to think of it, I would be jumping for joy knowing I didn’t have to venture into the sun in order to water the garden.

The buds on the top of the basil plant. Some of the flowers
along the bottom had already opened when I pinched them off.

     The reason I’m not exactly what you would call happy about the amount of precipitation we’ve received is my raised bed may or may not have a serious flaw. The instructions for the bed tell you to place the boards equally spaced apart and cut a few holes in the plastic lining in order to allow drainage. I noticed the second day that the water wasn’t draining. To solve the problem, I used a utility knife and slid it from one end to the other to open the plastic lining more to see if that would help.

     It hasn’t, or at least I don’t think it has.

The basil buds can be anywhere from a half inch
to two inches when you pinch them off the plant.

     Because of the rain, I haven’t been able to tell if the side-to-side slit in the lining has worked seeing as rain not only makes everything wet but also it has been too steady to make it clear whether or not the garden is draining. I’ve taken matters into my own hands or at least my dad’s. Instead of waiting around to see if the slit worked my dad grabbed a drill and put holes into each board (to be clear I didn’t ask him to do it, he just did it). It’s doing better but still not draining very well.

     Basic conclusion? Next year I won’t be putting a plastic lining down.
     Other than the mishap with the draining situation, the plants are growing better than I thought they would at two weeks. I’ve cut some chives on two separate occasions and I have a tomato the size of a large grape. I’m basically a proud mother of vegetables and herbs.
     I’ve also run into some of my first maintenance duties. Basil plants are great if you know the, as I call it, quirk about them. The tops of the plants will get buds that you must cut or pinch off before they bloom. Why? After they blossom they make the basil leaves turn bitter. On both of my basil plants this passed week I’ve had to remove the ends on nearly every stalk.

     As a final note, I’ve begun composting. Nothing too complicated seeing as I am nurturing a small garden and don’t want to overwhelm the plants. After I use eggs I wash the shells and keep them in a small round cake pan that I have lined with aluminum foil. Once I have enough I bake them at 250 degrees for about 15 minutes. The timing and temperature is nothing scientific and I’m sure anyone can do it differently because the whole purpose is to kill off any harmful bacteria. I crush them up as finely as possible and avoid stabbing myself with the sharp shells (warning: this will happen and this will hurt like a paper cut) then I sprinkle them into the garden.

     The other composting component is coffee grounds. This process would have been so much easier if we were trying this a few years ago seeing as we now only use a Keurig single cup brewer but the good news is there is a surprising amount of grounds in each little cup. Seriously, open one because I know you’re curious now.

     I use the same process with the grounds as I do the eggshells except the reason for baking them is to dry them out. I sprinkled the dried grounds into the garden with the help of my nephew and used the opportunity to teach him about healthy soil.

     Hopefully next week I will have pictures of multiple tomatoes to share.