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.

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.