Thursday, June 9, 2011
My Pathetic First Tomato Harvest
It's always exciting waiting to pick your first tomatoes of the season and get them in a salad and say those are from the garden.
It is however disappointing when what you pick is next to nothing. I knew the first tomatoes would be the cherry tomatoes and actually these are really not the first. Over the past month there were three that were ripe, but I just picked and ate those.
This big tomato harvest came in at a whopping 4.7 oz. What a score.
Anyway I picked some Correnta Spinach and with a few other things from the fridge made a salad to have with dinner.
By the way these cherry tomatoes tasted great, but anything does after eating store bought.
Labels: Correnta, Harvest, Husky Cherry Red
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Lawn Repair
The lawn in this yard really went to trash at the end of last year because of the two dogs that were here. The result was that there were more weeds than Bermuda grass.
I have been pulling out the weeds in small sections at a time and with water the grass is coming back.
In some of the areas after I pulled out the weeds I covered it with steer manure. Those areas of course responded much better.
The bare areas in the first photo are where I had already pulled out the major weeds before. I still had to go through and get the smaller ones.
My problem is that I can't just take and put the manure from the bag and spread it on the lawn. I need to put on my rubber gloves and break up all of the clumps in there and as I'm rubbing though that I pull out the small rocks that are in there. They have no place in the lawn. To fill a five gallon bucket takes about an hour. After that I take that manure and screen it. The end result is a very lite and fine manure. Really nice if you can say that about manure. The screening takes a long time to fill a five gallon bucket.
That whole process was taking way too much time, so even though it's killing me I decided to at least skip the screening process other wise it would take me about five years to do the back lawn.
Labels: Bermuda
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Cleaning Things Up
This area around the fig tree has needed some cleaning up for a long time. It never gets fertilized on a regular basis and for most of the year there is too much shade here to grow vegetables.The Oregano I had in front of the fig tree was nice to have but I don't like things that spread on the ground because they just seem to create a home for bugs and snails that I don't need. On top of that when the new dog arrived he decided that that area
was a great place to piss and then scratch out the ground after that. So lets just say that maybe that Oregano is not something I really want to cook with. A while back I did cut some with the roots attached and potted that up and I think that I will like the Oregano in a pot better. On the left side is what I consider part of the Patio Garden and there was a small grass strip between that and the Fig. I removed the grass to kind of make it one garden. Where the Oregano was I put in three green bean transplants. On the patio side past where the tomato is I cleaned that up and planted an eggplant and another green bean and some Celantro where the grass was. To finish it off I think I can put down some Bok Choy seed behind the green beans and maybe a few more to the right of the Celantro.Labels: Bok Choy, Celantro, Oregano
Saturday, June 4, 2011
A Little More Corn
I wasn't planning on planting any corn this year but I was given 5 transplants and so I put them in. I didn't think it would be enough to eat or even pollinate right so I was going to go get another six pack in a week or two. And then even though those plants would be younger maybe they could all still pollinate and for me all of the corn would not be ready at one time.There are three tomato plants behind the first row of corn and they were intruding on the corn and there were about 10 volunteer tomato plants that had to be pulled out of there. Those volunteer tomatoes were
cherry tomatoes and I all ready have too many of those.I went all over the place and nobody had corn transplants. I finally found them, but that has now been about a month later, so the pollination idea I don't think will work but hopefully I'll still get some corn.
I should have gotten more corn to fill in the extra room but didn't so I put down some turnip seeds to fill that space.
Labels: Back Circle #1
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Radishes And Green Onions
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
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Too Many Plants In One Pot
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
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Done With This Snow Pea
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 .
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