Adventures in gardening: getting resourceful and powerful

Amazing to see how much its grown in a month!

     Just a quick note to start, no matter if you are doing a photography blog and using your garden as a subject or not, everyone should take pictures periodically throughout their gardening process because you don’t realize how much its’ grown over such a short time.

     For the most part, the drainage situation isn’t affecting the tall plants. Seeing as I have yet to pull up any of my onions or garlic, I cant speak for their progress but they look fine from the upper half.

The two celebrity tomatoes growing side-by-side.

We’ve run into a minor problem. My tomatoes are a bit too close together and I know for next year to plant them spaced apart some more but here’s some of the main issues with their current location.

     As stated before, we’ve had some serious weather these passed few weeks. About a week ago there was a huge storm cell, as in “World News Tonight” did a segment warning people of the danger and tornado risk, and all the plants on our property were at risk.

A blossom on my celebrity tomato plant.

     The winds were nothing short of incredible and damaging. Luckily most of our plants were fine. We had some stargazer lilies fall over in our flower garden and some of the tomato plants suffered. At this stage, only one of my four roma tomato plants were bent and I fixed it by taking a wooden kebab skewer and a twist tie to return it to it’s correct position. A few days later, we dealt with a day of steady rain and relatively intense wind, which resulted in me using kebab skewers on the remaining three roma tomato plants. My celebrity tomato plant has faced the weather like a true champ.

     Other than the issue of falling all over each other and getting their leaves and branches all tangled, my tomato plants are doing well. My roma plants have started blossoming and I have two tomatoes growing on the celebrity plant with blossoms opening all around.

     As for the rest of the plants, they are getting a bit out of hand. I have to search a bit for my sage plant because the basil and tomato plants are hogging the attention. Because of the high amount of basil, I finally cut some off and I’m planning to make some basil infused olive oil. It’s funny because I cut quite a bit off and it looks like I didn’t even dent the plants. Anybody want some basil?

     In other maintenance news, I’m happy to report on the weed situation. I came into this knowing one of the worst parts of gardening is weeding but it’s a necessary evil. I accepted my fate but did so begrudgingly. I don’t know why, though I have theories, I don’t seem to have many weeds. I’m betting it’s because this is a raised bed garden and not plopped on the ground waiting to be invaded. The few weeds I have pulled out have been very, very small and I’m thinking they came from the containers the plants came in. It’s definitely making it easier to like gardening. If you’ve been avoiding trying your hand at gardening because you don’t want to deal with the upkeep then a raised bed is the perfect thing for you because you don’t have to worry about weeds been the nutrient leeches they are.

     I’m hoping by the next blog post I’ll be able to report one of my tomatoes was ready to come off the vine but I feel like it may be the post after. Both are doing fine at the moment but seeing as they are celebrity tomatoes they have to get quite a bit bigger before they are ready to be picked.