Photolog: 3/24/2009

Think of this post as a "Photolog" of sorts...

Tomatoes are in the side garden this time, and are already off to a great start. I planted 2 heat-tolerant varieties - Valley Girl and Surefire. I wonder which will set fruit the longest? There are also 2 cherry tomatoes (Abbey's favorite!)

Here we have onions and carrots... I put them in this garden because they are both root veggies and this plot has the softest soil.

And, the big guys - Corn. I will plant beans all over this plot as soon as the corn is 6 or 7 inches tall.

Getting Ready for Spring

Well, I had Monday off and figured I should take advantage of the cool weather and get the garden ready for the spring. Bailey was at the vet getting a dip treatment, so I knew I could actually get some work done without a little shadow following me around the whole backyard. I pulled up everything except the garlic and added the compost I had been cooking since the summer. 

Here's a pic of Shady hiding in the broccoli before I pulled them up. Technically they were still making heads, but I have plans for this space in the next few weeks. Into the compost bin they go!

Here is my harvest of mesclun lettuce. De-lish!

Nearly-done compost makes a great topping for the garden. The big stuff stays on top as an organic mulch and the little stuff gets washed down into the soil, adding nutrients and organic material, the plants will love it!.

What could not be eaten from the pulled up garden was the first thing to go in the compost bin. The end is only the beginning. Next spring this will be part of the compost that is spread. The chemicals and molecules that are created by the bacteria will help build the new plants, so nothing is wasted! Did you know that in San Francisco they have green garbage cans where you can put compost-able items? This stuff does not need to go in a bag and put in the land-fill! Monday night Abbey and I drove around the neighborhood picking up bags of raked leaves people had set on the sidewalk. My compost bin is now bulging at the seams!

Here are the freshly composted gardens, fertilized and ready for planting. All I need to do is figure out what to grow and where to grow it! 

Winter, and All We Need

Here's a little mid-winter update on what has (mostly hasn't) been happening in the garden, what I want to plant for the Spring, and a simple fact of life itself...

I pulled up the cauliflower not because I harvested and ate it all, but because it began to flower and stank my fridge up. A couple of pounds of cauliflower in a big gallon Ziploc went pretty much entirely to waste, and the rest never even made it out of the garden. I will have to remember to grow desirable vegetables from now on. Not all was completely wasted as the plants and un-eaten heads found their way to the bottom of the leaf bin - which brings me to the next topic.

The compost I have been preparing since July is looking really nice, and I stopped adding new things to it (diverting new compost into the leaf bin) on the 1st of the year to allow it to be more thoroughly composted for this spring's garden. I look forward to adding the compost to my gardens here in a few weeks before I plant. I will be sure to post some pictures of that.

As far as what I will be growing... I know I want to grow a lot of corn, squash, peas, and cucumbers this spring, and I think I might plant a few tomatoes, but not as much as I did this past fall. I also want to plant okra because it's easy and it's the only thing that will keep growing after the summer heat sets. I am going to try something called "Three Sisters" which is a method of companion-planting successfully used by the Native Americans. I will post a detailed narrative of the experiment.

Abbey and I went to Ganado to visit her grandparents during the holidays and I saw how her Pa Pa was growing an entire patch of garlic (I planted mine mid-September and nothing had sprouted at that point). He said that every single clove sprouted as I looked down the rows and rows of it. Apparently all I needed to do was water it really good once a week - plants like water - go figure. The cloves I planted in September finally came up around Christmas after laying dormant for three months in the dirt! After all the fertilizer and mulch and waiting, all it wanted was some water. Good thing garlic likes the cool weather, as mine is having quite a delayed growing season. All it needed was water to sprout...

The chemical reactions and miracle for life lay waiting, only needing some H2O.

I guess all we need sometimes is all we need. truly truly...