Garden Update

My garden is growing, hooray!  I'm so excited! I know this is perfectly normal to most people, but since this is my first experience with gardening, I'm so thrilled to see the plants get bigger each week. Here's a little report on everything:

Box 1

Box 1, Front row--Strawberries and Petunias:
The strawberries aren't looking good. I have some kind of ugly brown beetle eating the leaves. After reading about all the problems I could have with strawberries, I'm thinking about pulling them out and doing something different. I've tasted a couple of them and they don't taste as good as the ones at the store. I like the petunias, even if I can't eat them. :)

Box 1, Back Row--Cantaloupe:
The Square Foot Garden book told me to plant one cantaloupe seed in each square and then take out the less dominant plant later so I would only have one plant every 2 squares. I'm not sure when that "later" was supposed to take place, but I finally took out 2 of the plants. It was very painful for me to pluck out anything that had grown, especially since they looked beautiful, but I decided I had better follow instructions. I had to take a picture before saying goodbye.

 Goodbye Cantaloupe plants

We built our trellis the way it said to do it in SFG book. (Liza, I would still like to hear how you do it). I was probably supposed to build the trellis sooner and train the cantaloupe up the vine before now but I didn't. I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to training this stuff. I'm just weaving it through the spaces and hoping it works!

Box 2

Box 2, Back row--Summer Squash and Cucumbers:
These plants are growing like crazy and taking over the garden a bit. I knew so little about gardening that I had no idea the leaves would be so huge!  SFG book said to plant a summer squash in two square feet if it was the vine kind. My seed packet didn't specify so I just hoped it was the vine kind. It doesn't look like it was. Now I'm trying to force it to stay within it's space with a tomato cage but it's probably supposed to spread out. We'll see what happens. My cucumber plant is growing nicely. I'm trying to train it up this tomato cage, I think I'll do a trellis for cucumbers next year instead of a cage.

Box 2, Front row--Onions, Pepper, Beets, and Tomato:
I think they're okay although the plants in back may be dwarfing them a bit. The leaves on the green pepper plant and beets aren't looking as good as they once did. I don't know how to tell when it's time to harvest the beets or onions but I suppose I'll figure it out. I need to go look at those seed packets again.

 My other tomato plant:

This thing looked almost completely dead a few weeks ago. We bought it in a container with a cage on top and thought we were supposed to leave it in there. However, it dried out and wouldn't absorb water no matter how much we tried. I wanted to chuck it but Jason thought it might come back to life if we moved it into a better pot with better dirt.   This is a quasi "before picture" but it actually looked worse than this:

 I guess Jason was right.  It is looking much better than this.

Herb Garden

Herb Garden--I've always wanted one of these and now I finally have one. I love fresh cilantro!  I also have basil, parsley and chives. I don't use the basil enough so if you need any, please come get some!  By the way, I'm glad I took a picture of this because Tanner accidentally knocked it off the next day. We tried to put Humpty together again and I think it's going to make it, but the plants don't look quite as strong as they did before the fall.

The backyard garden is the good news. My efforts in the front yard are not going so well. Did I mention that I don't like gardening in the actual ground?  Take a look at this:

Not what I was hoping for...

My poor hostas are burning up. I do water them daily but it turns out they are shade plants and I have them in full sun. They also like soil that drains well and my ground is full of clay. I think they may be gonners but I'm going to keep watering them. My roses are also suffering. They were blooming nicely for a bit, but now the leaves are turning red (what does that mean?) and the little brown beetle from the strawberry plant has moved to the rose plant.

Anyone know what this beetle is or how I get rid of it?

I still haven't removed the rocks or added mulch to this area and the weeds are taking over. This little plot of ground makes me sad. I'm tired of working on it and I will probably just live with it until I get ambitious next spring.

Final thoughts--My gardening attempts in the front yard have been very discouraging.  Thankfully, the attempts in the backyard with the square foot gardening method have been encouraging.  I think the square foot garden method rocks!  We haven't had any weeds in our boxes yet. If you try it, buy the Miracle-Gro garden soil from Wal-mart instead of making Mel's mix. It works great. Don't forget to put the weed-barrier down when you set up your boxes. Here is a week by week picture of the garden growing.   I'll add updated photos each week to this post.

GARDEN week by week

2 weeks after planting:

Box 1

Box 2

3 weeks after planting:

Box 1

Box 2

4 weeks after planting:

Box 1

Box 2

5 weeks after planting:

Box 1

Box 2

Cucumbers starting to appear

Yellow squash

My first garden

I have somehow managed to NOT plant a garden in the almost 12 years I've been married.  I've thought about it many times but it always sounded like too much work.  Jason has wanted to do it and attempted to do it but he really needed me on board to make it work! :)  He finally got me on board this year and we planted our first garden.  (So, I guess I've accomplished something since the new baby after all!).  We read the Square Foot Gardening book and tried to follow that method for the most part.  We kept it small with two 4x2 boxes.  I didn't want to burn out by over-doing it my first year.  Jason is in the process of building one more deeper box for carrots and potatoes (the only vegetables my kids will actually eat!).  So far, it has been exciting to watch the plants grow.  After reading all of the things that can go wrong (bugs, birds, disease, etc.), I thought I should take a few pictures now in case things don't work out later!

Squash, Cucumbers, Onions, Peppers, Beets, and Tomatoes

Cantaloupe, Strawberries, and Petunias (just for fun)

I got so excited about gardening that I decided to re-haul one of the beds in the front yard.  Some of my bushes had already died and I didn't like the plants that were left so I decided to do it over.  How hard could it be to dig up a few old plants and put in a few new ones?  Well...it is VERY hard when you have about a million rocks per square foot!!!  Thankfully, Jason did most of the digging.  He and a neighbor worked for a really long time to get this beastly rock out:

Tanner is just in the picture to show the size of the rock.

We planted rose bushes and hostas and now I'm just hoping they don't die in the rocky soil that is more clay than soil.  Look at all the rocks that are left around the plants:

Rocks, Rocks, and more rocks

Will it grow?

I need to haul those rocks away and add mulch but I'm not feeling nearly as excited about it all as I was in the beginning.  In retrospect, I should have just brought in massive loads of soil so I didn't have to dig at all, but I didn't think of that until we were done.  I guess I will do that next year if these plants die.

I've learned from this that I like growing things in pots and boxes but when it comes to gardening in the actual ground--count me out!