Update on the plants



I know it has been a little while since I've posted so I thought I would show you how the plants are doing.  This has definitely been a learning experience.  I've learned that some of the seeds needed to be started much earlier.

The zucchini are growing like crazy:

Everything else is growing pretty well:

















The giant bell pepper seeds are taking a while to grow.  They just sprouted about a week ago.

These are a few sprouts of Oleander that I cut off my mother's plant.  I put them in a glass of water and left them there for about a month.  They started putting on roots about a week ago so I went ahead and put them in some soil.

This originally was an onion we bought and forgot about it in our pantry.  We found it one day and it had sprouted.  I planted it and it produced two stalks which are going to produce a flower.  Once the flower blooms and dies it will leave behind seeds that can be planted to grow more onions!












Hopefully next weekend I will plant all the vegitables I have plus a few more I will have to purchase since I didn't get those seeds.  So far I have spent about $10 on all the plants I have growing.  That is over 40 plants for $10 but I've only used about half of the seeds and half of the potting soil.  Next week I will have pictures of my planted garden hopefully!!!  See you then.

Getting the garden ready!

The weather was finally good enough to get the garden ready! 

 

 

Below is what my garden looks like. It is an 8' x 24' raised bed.  Last year I didn't put anything besides top soil in my garden.  This year I'm adding other things to it like organic compost and manuer compost as well as blood meal and organic fertilizer designed for vegitable gardens.

The tall wooden boards have heavy duty fishing line strung between them.  Once my plants start producing veggies I hang aluminum foil pie plates to keep the birds and squires out.  I have something for my cucumbers to climb on as well as a sprinkler system. The sprinklers are the black poles sticking up in the garden.

The first thing I did was tilled the dirt because the top few inches have hardened making it very tough to mix the new material in.

After I tilled the dirt I used a shovel and scoped the dirt away from the edge of the bed.  This makes it easier to mix in the material without throwing it out of the bed.

 

 

Once the dirt was tilled I spread organic compost and Black Cow composted manuer.

 

I dumped 6 bags of organic compost and 4 bags of composted manuer on the garden and spread it evenly.  The comost will add nutrients to the soil as well as loosen the dirt.  You don't need to add this much every year.  I just added this much because I haven't added anything before.  Just remember the softer the dirt the better the roots can grow which means a better crop!

 

Next I added the two bags of fertilizer.  These were also spread evenly over the entire bed.

 

 

After I spread everything out I tilled the top 6-8 inches of dirt, compost, and fertilizer.  The last thing to do was to spread the dirt back out to the edges. 





 

Unfortunately it takes work to produce a great garden but you will find that it is a labor of love.  Hopefully I will plant the garden in about 2 weeks.  The seeds are outside today and are loving it.  The zucchini are about 4 inches tall already.  I'll post more pictures of the plants growing next week.  See you then!

Potting the seeds

Today I checked the remaining seeds to see if they were ready to be planted and they were!!!  I also checked on my zucchini and some of them are already 2 inches tall.

 

 

 

I now have 4 pots with 4 zucchini seeds in each, 10 pots with 3 squash seeds, 8 pots with a Big Red Heirloom tomato seed, 5 pots with an Abe Lincoln Heirloom tomato seed, 8 pots with a cherry tomato seed, and 8 pots with a jumbo bell pepper seed.  I had 8 Abe Lincoln seeds but one seed never sprouted and I broke three roots when trying to get them off of the paper towel.  That is one thing you need to be careful with.  If the root is growing through the paper towel you can pull of most of the paper towel and plant a little bit of the paper towel that is still attached.  It will break down and now damage the root. 

 

Now if you were counting Abe Lincoln seeds you would have noticed that I started with 8 and had 4 that didn't make it to planting but I still ended up with 5 Abe Lincoln pots.  No I am not a magician.  One of the seeds actually sprouted two plants with two separate root systems.  So even though I only had 4 good seeds I still was able to have 5 sprouts.

 

On a final note I have to thank my lovely, wonderful, amazing wife for allowing me to put all these pots in the laundry room.  This is one problem with not having a shop or greenhouse to do my preparation.  Since we don't have a spare room and it is getting down in the 30s at night the seeds need to stay inside at night.  Once they all have sprouts they can probably survive being outside.  So until then I will be watering them inside and trying not to make too much of a mess. 

 

This weekend if the weather is good I will get my garden ready to be planted and show you how I do it!  See you then!

Sprouting Seeds

I took these zucchini seeds out of the package on February 25th.  Today (8 days later) some of those seeds have already sprouted!  Hopefully tomorrow I will check the seeds that are still in the zip-loc bags and see what else needs to be planted.

Checking on the seeds. Day 6.

Well I checked my seeds today.  Most of them are slow except for my zucchini seeds.  Here is a picture of what I found when I uncovered the zucchini seeds:

Since some of the roots are almost 2 inches long I decided to go ahead and plant them in containers so the roots can grow.  I poked 4 holes in the potting soil and put a seed in each.  You can do 3 or 4 seeds to make a more full looking plant.  You can purchase seed starter soil but at this point just a good potting mix that can support vegetables is fine.  Thanks to this cold weather the seeds need to stay inside.  I've put down plastic in my laundry room and this is where these plants will start their life.  These plants won't make it to the garden until probably the first week of April.

 



The other seeds either haven't started growing or are just barely sprouting roots so they will stay in their "incubator" until they are ready for transplant.