In the Garden, Vol. 3

You might think that this is the time of year that the garden is napping. Not producing. That's sort of what I thought might happen. Not so, my friends. Things are really getting fun out in those garden beds! I spent some time winterizing my little patch of earth and I wanted to share the progress with you.

Since we had 70+ degree weather here this weekend (in December!!!), my plants have been getting a little confused. My strawberry plants started flowering, which means they are preparing to bear fruit, but I don't want that to happen yet! It's sure to freeze here before winter is said and done, and I don't want my poor little strawberries to give up all their energy into a lost cause. I called Pike's and they told me to prune back the delicate little ballet-pink flowers. But I thought I would snap a shot for you before I had to end things :)

Aww that strawberry flower is seriously the sweetest.

Unfortunately, both varieties of lettuce (Galactic - the purple above, and Romaine - the green above) bolted from all this hot-cold weather. What is bolting? Well, it's pretty obvious when you look at them. They shoot up tall reeeeeeally fast, and then the unfortunate flower comes up from the top. In most plants, you want to see the flower, but with lettuce, that means, as my master gardener friend Dana puts it, "It's time to throw a wake, because that plant's life is over." Basically, the lettuce turns bitter and stops producing new leaves. See this little flower?

It means it's OVER. Pull it up. Till the ground. Start fresh. Sad day.

But also happy! Because I planted some peas and beets and loooooooook!

Pea babies:

And beet babies:

Just some tender little chutes. So cute. I might have planted the peas a little too close together because they will eventually get vine-y, but see, I have this problem with spatial reasoning. I just want to maximize my earth as much as possible and smash all my plants together so they just hug and love each other. But. I don't think I'm supposed to. I'm hoping that the fact that both of these varieties are supposed to thrive through the winter will sort of cancel out the fact that everything is planted in pretty tight quarters. I'm smiling right about now. Because I just re-read that sentence.

Another thing that's supposed to rock in the winter is kale, and I am growing two types:

Red Russian Kale: (hahah it's mis-marked in my garden. I had to google it to figure out why my blue kale was coming up red - because it's not blue kale!!)

and my Blue Dwarf Kale:

I feel pretty proud of these plants, because I grew all of them from seeds. Some of the others in my garden I bought as little plants, but I grew the kale from scratch all by myself. Heart swell.

I tried to pull up my carrots for Thanksgiving, but they just aren't ready yet! Look at these cutie tops. I can just see Bugs Bunny snapping a long bite with his toothy chompers :)

The Most Improved Player award goes to the cauliflower. Yes, the cauliflower. Remember when the #*%$ caterpillars decimated my cauliflower plants and left nothing to salvage? Well, slowly but surely, ONE of those plants has been resurrected to life. It's trying so hard to live, you guys. This plant is a fighter. Check it out:
 

See that little white cauliflower head tucked inside? I'm super curious to see how this is going to go.

I might have made a rash mistake with my radishes. I'm growing two types. See, a while ago, when I planted the radish seeds, only a few actually grew. And out of those few seedlings nothing actually produced the vegetable. Such a disappointment. So I threw a TON more seed out and tried again. This time, a flabbergasting amount of seedlings emerged, and instead of thinning them out (which is what you're supposed to do), I just wanted to see all of them grow. To make up for the ones that never grew. Welllllll. Now there is an enormous mess of radish tops and I have no idea how to distinguish one radish from the next. Oops. Overcompensation problems over here. Rookie mistake.

It's also very possible that no vegetable will be produced out of this either, because the probably don't have enough room under the earth to grow. I feel like I am learning so much about life from this little garden experiment of mine. Plants need room to grow! People need room to grow! And time! And love and care and nurturing! See. I bet you're pretty dumbfounded by those insights right about now.

Okay, it's fine if you're not. I'm alone in my dumbfoundedness. Typical.

Let's ooh and ahh.

Oh, my Japanese Maple. This shot was taken before Thanksgiving and it has since forfeited all it's lovely leaves. I love you, Maple. I luh you.

I'll leave you with one last plant that was a total surprise. A camellia! These bushes are awesome because they are evergreen throughout the entire year, and they actually produce gorgeous lush flowers in the winter. We all need some flowers in the winter, right?? This bush was a head scratcher for me, because since we moved in I wasn't sure what it actually was. I'm sure glad I didn't rip is up with some of the others! I definitely had some boughts of crazy where I went outside and tore up a ton of bushes to make way for this little garden of mine. Stevie was NOT happy. But this one, this escaped my manic episode.

Camellia!

To winterize the entire garden, I trimmed some unruly weeds, plucked out all the ragged leaves that had fallen into the beds and laid down some fresh black mulch. Mmm I love some black mulch. It's so striking. When it gets to be later in the winter season, it will be time to seriously prune a lot of the plants and bushes for the spring. And probably feed them something organic. I don't really know. My google searches are so dorky, "How to make hydrangeas pretty" and "I didn't thin my radishes and now they are crazy??" It's just one big experiment, friends.

If you have garden advice, can you tell that I need some? Talk to me!

Garden Update Vol.2

Oh, the garden. My, I have learned a lot since I started gardening. I had my first harvest this past week - my radish seeds reached their days of maturity and some lettuce was ready to be plucked. Exciting times in the garden world. So I scampered out in the hazy drizzle and fetched my fair food. And the things I found!

Out of all my radishes, this is the only one that came to maturity. This particular variety is supposed to be long and thin, but this clearly didn't grow to it's full potential. I looked up the variety and tried to figure out why mine didn't grow big enough, and apparently, you have to wait a lot longer for the fall harvest than in the spring. Oops. I was probably premature in picking this one, even though I followed the instructions. So, no radishes for now. But you can see below that I planted a whole slew of more of em, so hopefully I will enjoy a radish salad before winter's end.

While I was harvesting, my gorgeous husband dug up bushes and moved them around the yard for me. When we moved into the house, our box garden was full of bushes and thick hedges. Little by little, we are moving them so that I have more room to grow vegetable plants. He doesn't love that I'm doing this, because he thinks the bushes are pretty, but he is kind to me. (Seriously though, look at that plant in his hand - it's not that pretty.) So he's been moving them for me. I really had to make some room this time, too, because I had a ton of kale that I've been growing from seeds that had to be transplanted into the ground. So another hedge bit the dust. Or you know, got moved to the side of the house. EXCITING STUFF YOU GUYS. I know you are riveted.

My new radish sprouts! This variety will look like the traditional radishes you buy in the grocery store. I mean, hopefully they will look like that. In like 6-8 weeks.

Carrot tops! Cute, right??!

My lettuce is seriously lush. Leafy. And yummy :)

Radish top.

Oh, my heart breaks. This is my sad, sad cauliflower. I hate the demon caterpillars and the havoc they wreaked in my garden. I've plucked off over 60 caterpillars from these leaves, clinging to the underbelly of the leaves and creeping deep inside the plants - it's truly alarming how much damage those little guys can do. I concocted an organic garden spray to ward them off, but I ended up bleaching out the leaves and now the plants look worse than ever. Diseased. They're not diseased, they're just bleached. And eaten through. What's a girl to do??

SAD CAULIFLOWER.

I'm not going to lie. I've been praying for them.

But oh! A bowl full of lettuce! I actually learned a lesson after harvesting this time around. I picked too much! I only need to pick what we will actually eat on any given day, because otherwise the left overs wilt. Like I said, I'm learning! Only pick your salad for the evening.

My lettuce babies. Such good babies.

Is that creepy sounding? Stevie says it is.

But.

They are my babies. I grew them. I tended to them. I watered them when it was annoying to do so and fed them fancy organic plant food and, you know. That's it. That's pretty much all I did.

You're about to see it. That move I've always wanted to do.

LETTUCE BABIES!!!

And that's the update! Things are growing over here! I'm excited to see how everything does as we really transition into fall. Apparently, the cooler temperatures are supposed to help the lettuce and kale taste sweeter. So we will see how that goes. Thanks for coming to my garden, friends!

Garden Update.

It's been about 3 weeks since I planted my first garden. When I say that I didn't and don't know what I am doing, that's not an understatement. I'm not being self-deprecating. I literally have no clue what I'm doing. But you know who does? Pinterest. Google. Those fine master gardeners out there in the world, who are kind enough to share pictures of what spinach seedlings should look like after 10 days. I would be clueless without the Internet. Well, and my friend Dana. She's a master gardener. I've been mad texting her all like, "Is this a good soil brand?" and "What do I do about caterpillars?!"

And now we've come to it. The caterpillars.

Skeezy, selfish, slimy gluttons. They've been decimating my cauliflower leaves. Boring holes into my baby plants.

They are no longer cute. They are more like machete-mouthed thieves of doom. I won't read Everett that book any longer. Caterpillars are the flipping worst. They found my cauliflower and they have almost decimated the leaves - eaten holes through them and now I'm praying my plants will still photosynthesize. I mean, look at these gaping holes. JUST LOOK.

It's like they've eaten holes right through my heart.

Oh, also, apparently I'm also growing what looks like cabbage. I didn't realize I bought cabbage. Didn't realize I planted it. Thought the whole lot was cauliflower. And I thought there was something wrong with a few of the plants because they were so short and growing weirdly. But I remember now that when I was planting, I found a label that said "cabbage" and I thought it was mislabeled, because all the cauliflower plants looked exactly the same.

I am a terrific airhead. It's cabbage. I'm growing cabbage.

I guess that's great! I enjoy coleslaw. Put it on this yummy pulled pork a few weeks ago. So yeah, let's grow cabbage!

The other plants seem to be growing beautifully. The galactic lettuce and romaine lettuce are growing like weeds, which is fun and colorful.

My little baby kale plants, which I've been growing inside the house, are almost ready to be transferred into the ground.

The radishes are a bit of a head scratcher. Only 4 seedlings came up. I planted a zillion seeds, but only 4 actually did their thing. So... I'm going to plant some more radishes. I've still got time, since they germinate and mature the most quickly - like 24 days from planting to eating! Whaaat? I love that efficiency, Mr. Radish. I won't hold your lack of mass germination against you.

And the carrots! These seedlings are so adorable. They have actually gotten fancier looking even since I took this photo, so I will have to do another update next week. The carrots are rad little plants!

A few more photos that aren't food related, but are keeping my garden looking really good.

There you have it! The garden update! Who wants to come over and harvest with me? :)

Planting My First Vegetable Garden.

I have always wanted to grow a salad.

I used to dream of it. I wanted to live on a pasture in an old white farm house and walk outside, past my chickens and horses and pick the vegetables that I grew from seeds in my own little patch of Earth. Of course, in my dream life I also simultaneously lived in New York City and was a famous actress and wore red ball gowns everywhere. It doesn't have to be either/or in the dream world, right?

Well, I've done the New York City thing, and even though fame was never whispered about my stint as an actress, I had the opportunity to give it my best shot. And now, well, it's no white farm house, but it's my house. My green house, actually. And in the back, there are a few rows of above-ground garden beds that are so perfect for vegetables it's not even funny. It's real. My real, rustic, perfect little patch of Earth for my own little produce community.

I spent a lot of time browsing Pinterest for tutorials, talking to friends who are master gardeners and eavesdropping on conversations between the Pike's Nursery employees and customers like myself. I have found myself consumed with questions about which varieties are best for my climate/zone/neighborhood/backyard, where to plant which items, how much to water or how little to fertilize, how to deter deer from my yield, what kind of soil is best, how long until plant maturity, how to prune, etc. The questions go on and on! My Google searches over the past month have become ridiculously suburban. But finally! The planting has begun! And I must say, I'm pretty proud.

Here's what the garden beds looked like before:

I was ready to rip out all those bushes. Clearly, this bed was made for gardening! But it would be a serious investment to replace all of them at once, so Stevie and I decided to focus on the area where catnip was planted and replace that with my first round of Autumn vegetables. In case you're wondering, the catnip is the crazy green wispy plant that looks like a weed. Actually, it was getting choked by a lot of weeds. I believe the previous owners planted the catnip because it's supposed to be a mosquito deterrent? Whatever. It had to go.

I bought so many seeds. Too many, actually, when I realized how much space they would take up. I also bought some plants that had already been growing in their containers. I transplanted them, along with planting some seeds, all which should produce a fall harvest! THIS FALL.

Stevie's a good gardening teacher. He warned me that the most time consuming and laborious part of this endeavor would be pulling up all that catnip and PREPARING THE SOIL. I sort of laughed at him, like, "Yeah, but I'm AMPED. This is going to be so fun!!!"

I mean.

It quickly became time consuming and, yeah, laborious.

Thank goodness my trusty sister came along for the entire planting excursion and kept me laughing. She had me in stitches while we attempted to wheel the tons of muddy soil and weed-eaten catnip up the hill and dump it in the back corner of our property. And she laughed with me when every single neighbor in our hood came by to say hello while we were working in the front yard. There was a solid hour and a half that we just stood in the sun, shielding our faces, making small talk with my new community. What a trooper, my dear sister. That gal is not only a true friend, but a seriously hard worker.

Oh yeah. And we did crap like this.

Early in the day shenanigans.

All in all, it took two days to get the garden planted. Once the catnip was fully removed and the soil was tilled and added and given some magical growing elixir, we got our plant on. We planted cauliflower, carrots, romaine lettuce, galactic lettuce, radishes, strawberries and two types of kale. I am so excited to watch my baby plants grow! I will keep you updated on how things begin to progress. I have no idea what I'm doing, so if you're an idiotic gardener, then we can be friends. If you're a master gardener, wanna come over and tell me what I did wrong?

Have any of you ever planted a garden? What do you wish you had known going into it? Any how-to's or tips that you wouldn't mind sharing with the class?

Have the happiest of weekend to you, friends!