the vegetable garden
I finally planted the seedlings, with great excitement followed by four days of frost advisory. This night is supposed to be the last one and the plants seem to have made it, wrapped in plastic bags and covered with pots.
Last year I learned a couple of lessons: cucumbers and squashes hate being planted in containers and eggplant will grow strong and mighty in a tub, but will not yield. With this freshly acquired wisdom in mind, I planted all of the above directly in the garden, because it appears that even hard shallow clay is the better option.
Same thing goes for the herbs. In fact, except for the peppers, no edible plant seems to be happy when potted.
Here is this year’s vegetable garden:
– 4 tomato towers, one of which holds my favorites – the SuperSweet 100
– 7 cucumber nests
– 2 containers of bell peppers and a few more plants that I sprinkled around the vegetable bed
– 4 hot pepper plants, in a pot
– one bean tower (good grief! I still have green beans in the freezer from last summer, I think one tower is more than enough!)
– 13 eggplants
– 7 zucchini nests, fingers crossed. I planted them in a location that gets a lot of sunlight, but not too much rain, because it is covered. I hope they’ll be ok with just my watering. The good news is they have plenty of room to spread out and they’re not going to overflow and block the walkway like the year before last.
– kitchen herbs – lemon basil, opal basil and dill. Parsley volunteered from the previous summer, so I didn’t plant anymore. The kitchen herbs really liked their location last year, so I didn’t change it.
For those who visit for the first time, this is the micro-farming project, an experiment I started in order to figure out how much yield I can get from approximately 20 square feet of soil and 3 pots in full sun exposure. The project relies heavily on vertical and succession planting, to maximize the use of space.
I tried using only compost, but nature can only do so much on twenty square feet! Also, given the limited amount of space in my back yard, a beautiful shade garden took precedence over the compost pile. I will use an organic fertilizer this year, but I’ll still supplement it with coffee grounds, mostly because it gives me a reason to sneak out to the back yard every morning 🙂
The carrots are still in the packet, I haven’t prepared the medium for them yet, and yes, I know it’s late.
Once the plants start producing, I will weigh and record the quantities in a produce yield table and place a link to it in the visit, download… section.
On a completely unrelated note, can someone please, please, please make the cold go away? It’s almost May for crying out loud!
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