Greetings all ye gardeners!
I knew I’d come to the right place here at SMGB when I saw the passion amongst you folks for growing things and for beauty. The weekly diaries display a wide array of plants and flowers and other inhabitants of people’s gardens, and it’s a delight to dive into each garden every Saturday. I’ve also found that the pictures and stories in the comments add more depth and detail and variation: like another row of petals to the flower. My garden is very small so I may not host another Saturday diary for a while, but gardens are intrinsically dynamic creations — who knows what I might find out in the yard at another time.
What I’m sharing today is moments in this year’s food garden. I’ve been gardening forever but I’m still a newbie with much to learn. I’m interested to hear any experiences or insights folks have. Since I live on the West Coast and am not an early riser, I’ll be joining you later than the scheduled publishing time of 6am PST, but I’ll be by!
When I bought my place up here in the northwest corner of Washington state in 1989 there was a house, a driveway, some brambly brush and a lawn on my half-acre. I left the shrubs and small trees to provide a visual shield along the road. That meant I had about 100’ x 50’ of lawn where I could create a garden. To start with I planted half a dozen fruit trees, and carved out curved beds where I planted herbs like lavender, rosemary, mint, sage, thyme and annuals, and some landscaping shrubbery. The north-eastern edge of my property has the longest light because of trees belonging to my neighbors, so that’s where I placed my vegetable garden.
Over the years, a degenerative spinal condition has limited me more and more from doing physical labor. It’s been frustrating, but facing the reality of it, I’ve gradually given up all the landscaping and let them go wild. Mr O mows the remaining sections of lawn and I trim once or twice a year. My gardening now is focused on food. I love to eat well, and it’s important to me to know where my food comes from. Plus, I LOVE to handle dirt and growing things, and to see how new things develop. The seed packet may say one thing but in my experience, plants have a mind of their own.
Let’s start in January….
I ordered tomato, cucumber and sweet pepper seeds from Johnny’s and started them in flats on seed warming mats. Once they were big enough I transplanted them into 4” pots and put them under lights on my living room counter. This is a February scene, with the first set of peppers (left), cukes (middle) and tomatoes (right). Not all seeds germinate or grow well, so I started some backups, under plastic wrap. When the starts were 6”-1 foot tall I transplanted them into 5-gallon pots using a rich container mix and bone meal. This is my unheated greenhouse, which Mr O built a few years ago, attached to the south side of the house. In February there isn’t enough solar gain so I kept an oil heater going in there for a month to keep them temperature above 45º. Warming mats are under the pots too. Luckily it was a warm winter and never got below freezing outside. Once spring arrives it heats up nicely in the greenhouse. By May I had lots of green tomatoes. The greenhouse has vents that open automatically when it gets too hot inside, so insects fly in and out. A Western Swallowtail rests on a tomato leaf in this picture. Tomatoes are heavy feeders and the nutrients in their 5 gallons of soil are exhausted soon. Monthly I dig in a cup of a mix containing bone meal, kelp, greensand, fish meal and some other additives. It keeps them going well through the growing season. Greenhouses attract critters of all sorts and it’s a battle all season to limi their depredations. Slugs hide under and inside the pots during the day, coming out at night to chew neat circular holes in fruit. I caught this one in the act one night. I use Sluggo and physical methods to deal with slugs, but nothing is foolproof. The yellow sticky card attracts and captures fruit flies. I use a lot of them.