City Organic Gardener

I'm finally getting around to planting some seeds in the bare areas. In this little section I put down some radish and green onion seeds.
In this case each piece of toilet paper has five seeds glued to it.
The top two are Cherry Belle radishes, so ten there. The middle row is Parade green onions, 15 there. The last row has eight Cherry Belle, 40 in that row.
My sucess with seeds in the ground is not very good, even with some thing as easy as radishes. In my defence the radish seed is old and I am not very good at keeping my collection of seed packets well care for while they are hanging out around the house and yard.
My biggest problem has been trying to find a nice seed cover to work with. I have tried many combinations and screened compost and even when I do have some success it just keeps adding up to extra time to get it done.
I finally bought a bag of a seed cover which is really made for lawn seed. It doesn't appear to be more than screened compost, but it seems to be a bit courser than what I was coming up with. I think mine was a little too finely screened.
I hope this works, because if it does it will make things much easier.
I do eat all of the radishes and green onions that I can grow and it kills me to have to buy them when I should have them in the yard. If I can get better success with the seeds I would like to be able to start seeds of both every two weeks for a continuous crop.

Labels: Cherry Belle, Parade, Topper, Valencia Garden

This year all of the transplants that I have put in the garden I have had to buy. I would much rather start my own plants from seed, but that never happened this year.
The problem with buying from garden centers is that they just don't have the selection and many times the plants just don't look good.
I also hate the fact that the growers jam a bunch of seeds into one pot or cell in the hopes that at least one will come up. If there are two or even three transplants in a cell I will pull them apart and plant them individually.
Having said that I went looking for some eggplant. One six pack would have been too many, so I was really looking for a couple of 4" size pots. I wanted the Japanese style eggplant rather than the large egg shaped type. All I could find was this one pot of Japanese Millionaire. Not that it looks great here but it looked worse at the store. After taking a rock to hold it down and letting it soak in a five gallon bucket of water for a couple of hours it looked better the next day.
There were six plants in here and I have two in the ground so far. Hope to get the rest planted this week.

Labels: Japanese Millionaire

These snow peas never really did any good. I had planted four seeds around a 24" tomato cage just to try that out. Three of the seeds did come up so that was no problem. Later one of the plants started dying out so I cut that one out.
All in all these two plants have so far only produced enough for three dinners for two.
It has started turning all yellow now so no reason to keep it any longer. I can always use the tomato cage anyway.






The blue circle in the above pic shows a yellow bell pepper plant that you can hardly see. The yellow pear tomato is spreading out too much for it.
Granted that tomato plant and the other one on the right side need to be tied up to the cages. Maybe tomorrow.
For right now I moved the pepper to where the snow peas were and it should do better there. Of course I'm sure it's not happy to be dug up .

This is the fist of the raised beds that I put together.
You can bearly see the peach tree in the middle. The two tomatoes on each side of it and the snow peas in back are really crowding it in.
The peach tree is leafing out nicely and will be fine for a while. When I replant this garden I won't be able to plant high growing plants again, but there are plenty of other things I can grow in here along with the peach tree.
The radishes that were in here are done and there is one more spinach plant left. There are two more bok choy left that I let flower to attract the bees.







This garden gets a lot of afternoon sun right now but won't be long before it gets sun pretty much all day.
It will be a long time before I get the bricks to finish this off, much less the soil to fill it in.
Right now there are two tomatoes and four peppers in here.



















This garden is only half as long as the one next to it.
Right now there is only one basil plant in here.
Got to get this filled up.



















This again is a very narrow garden.
There are two trellis here.
On the white one I planted three cucumbers. Only one has survived. They were from transplants. I have plenty of cucumber seeds, so I'll put some in.
Down from the trellis is a tomato plant that someone has been munching on. I'll have to replace it.
I've really had some good success with this garden in the past. The problem with it is that I tend to neglect it because I hate dragging the hose over here. Add to that the reflection off of the wall really makes it hot so things fry without water.














This is a pretty small garden.
One Pepper and one tomato so far.
Slow going garden because at this time of year it only gets sun after 2pm.









There's one tomato in the front and two spaghetti squash plants in the back by the wire. It will be a lot of work trying to have the spaghetti squash growing up instead of on the ground, but I just didn't have enough space to give up for that.
Maybe a few peppers for the middle.
I put some steer manure in the very back and that has taken care of the weeds back there. I'll re weed and put some down in the middle.




This sad looking garden has a long ways to go.
After I get it weeded I need to remove more of the soil to get it screened and mixed with compost and manure.
It's going to be a raised bed so I still need to get the bricks for that.
It will be a pretty good sized garden and I should be able to grow quite a bit of vegetables in there before the avocado tree starts getting too big.
I've got to get this garden done because that tree needs to get into the ground.








Not done planting this garden yet.
Just two tomatoes so far.
I'm thinking maybe some turnips and something else to fill things out.
The grape vines are trying to take over.











This is the third of the new raised bed gardens.
It's almost done, but it still needs to have some more soil added to it so I'll screen some soil and mix it with compost and manure and bring the level a little bit higher.
I'm going to use the trellis for cucumbers and not sure yet what I will plant to the right of the trellis.








This garden obviously need some help.
The dog was scratching around in here too much so I put down some old tomato cages to keep him out. He tore out most of the oregano that was there.
The dog doesn't go in there anymore and the fig tree is doing fine.
I just have to clean up this mess.









This is the second of the raised bed gardens that I put together.
There is an Oro Blanco grapefruit tree in the center. It will be a long time before that starts to produce.
It also has an Early Girl tomato, Poblano pepper, 4 Correnta spinach, 10 Bloomsdale spinach, 2 Curled parsley, and 1 basil.
There were radishes in here also, but they are done now.





I've planted this garden as much as I'm going to for right now.
There is plenty of room here to put a bunch of seed down, but I had weeded this garden once and millions more weeds came right back up. So after I but some transplants in I took the bare areas and mulched them heavily with steer manure. When steer manure is used by itself as a mulch the top tends to form a crust. I'm hoping that the crust will stop the weeds from coming up again. I did this about two weeks ago and no weeds have popped up yet.
The transplants are doing fine in here. Around those plants there is a mixture of compost, steer manure and chicken manure.
The transplants are parsley, basil, one bell pepper and three tomatoes.





This garden is all cleaned out, I just need to plant it.
I can squeeze quite a few things in this small space although they need to be low growing.
I'll probable put down seed for radish, green onion, spinach and bok choy. I may try some carrots but I have never had any luck with them.







This garden is not completely planted, so it only has a few things in it right now.
There are 2 Basil and 1 Tomato. The tomato was a volunteer that I moved from another garden, so I don't know what the variety is.