The forecast is for thunderstorms EVERY DAY between the 17th and the 27th. I’m going to try to get a nice harvest in, either today or tomorrow, before all the rain starts.
Tag Archives: raised bed gardening
Garden Progress
Smiling Veggies
My plants are truly loving this cool, wet weather!
Spinach
“It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth, to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season.” ~ Kate Morton
“I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.” ~ Ruth Stout
Head Lettuce
“My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant’s point of view.” ~H. Fred Dale
Lettuce and Red Onions
“In every gardener there is a child who believes in The Seed Fairy.” ~Robert Brault
Filed under Gardening, Square Foot Gardening - Raised Beds
Cleaning Up
Our raised bed square foot garden is now completely cleaned out. I was hoping the lettuces would survive, but the recent week of hard freezes did them in. All is now ready for more Mel’s Mix in the spring.
I’m reading the new book I got about using my greenhouse most effectively. Since it’s WAAAAAY too expensive to provide heat or cooling to the greenhouse, I’m concentrating on extending my spring planting season, figuring out when the best time is to start seeds so that I’ll have good plants to put out in the garden when danger of frost is past. Since I’m new at this, I’m making lots of notes, trying to get my act together.
In the meantime, I’ll start getting my greenhouse better organized. Right now I just have things ‘in’ the greenhouse with no particular thought to where and how I’ll start seeds later. I’m going to see if I can find some information on the net and will start moving things around.
The only plants I have in the greenhouse right now are the elephant ear plant and the purple passion plant I dug up before all the hard freezes started. Of course, NOW it’s getting up into the 50s in the afternoon, so with my luck, they’ll probably die in there from getting too hot! :0(
I found some old pictures of the greenhouse as we built it –
The dimensions are about 10 x 14. It has a dirt floor covered with two layers of weed barrier. The corners have steel rod welded to plates that we drilled holes and pounded into the ground with a sledge hammer. The plates were screwed into the wood. The ribs are pvc pipe. At first we held them to the wood with plastic pieces, but we’ve replaced several that couldn’t handle the strain with metal ones.
You’re looking at the north end of the greenhouse from the inside. We made tables from plywood and they go around both sides and across the north end. We left a spot in the northwest corner to hold a trash can filled with Mel’s Mix, plus brooms, and other tall stuff.
This is still the north end of the greenhouse, with the addition of an exhaust fan. When it’s hooked up to electricity, it opens when the temperature reaches a preset mark to draw air through the greenhouse for cooling.
This is the inside of the east side of the greenhouse. It will hold lots of supplies, though I’ll store as much of this as possible off the tables to give myself as much room to spread out planting trays and pots as possible.
Outside of the north end of the greenhouse. If you’ve been following the blog, you know that we had a break in the pvc pipe right at the top where it was attached to the wood. We ended up screwing large screws with rings onto the upright pieces of wood and arranging for guy wires to pull the end out, attached to a stake in the ground.
This seems like a really old picture, since there is now a 45 foot ham radio tower very close to the door on the south end of the greenhouse. You can see pieces of it in the left front of the picture.
This is the inside west side of the greenhouse. I’ll show you more pics as I get the greenhouse in some kind of order (I hope). I’m hoping I can find good ideas for how to arrange things. Wish me luck?
Filed under Gardening, greenhouse, Square Foot Gardening - Raised Beds
My Plants are Insulted
No Time for Flash Cards
My poor garden veggies have been/are under triple assault: hail, bugs, and weeds. I just came in from a session of weeding, cutting off broken limbs, harvesting some of the broken/hole-y stuff, pitching the rest. It looks like it will take several sessions to get my plants happy again.
We’ve had a lot of rain (with hail and other severe stuff), then good sun, resulting in all of the problems. I do pretty well for an hour out there, particularly with our new raised beds, but I think it will take three or four more sessions to catch up. And THEN, guess what! We have more rain forecast for four days next week…
When you first glance at things, it doesn’t look very bad.
The closer you get, though, the more you see.
Here you see a BUNCH of broken tops on the onions. This doesn’t matter as much on onions as it does on other plants.
The spinach has broken leaves, and someone is trying to eat the spinach before we do. I harvested a BUNCH of broken leaves that will still make good eating, but not ‘pretty.’
This is one of the spaghetti squash plants. You can see the holes in the leaves. I don’t know if that will kill the actual squash trying to grow or not.
The romaine lettuce is basically really healthy, but you can see broken and/or eaten leaves, plus little bitty weeds that have sprung up in the last couple of days.
Red lettuce leaf isn’t really a ‘pretty’ plant to my eye, but it tastes good IF it doesn’t get beaten down by hail and eaten by bugs…
The celery plants are still alive and kicking! You can again see the teeny tiny weeds, though.
I’ll try to get back out several times today and again tomorrow. The rains aren’t supposed to start until late tomorrow night – and hopefully, we won’t have hail this time…
Last Tiny Cauliflower
It’s 48 degrees here and gray. That’s not cold, except when you’re out in the garden pulling up the residue of wet plants. Then it’s REALLY cold! I’ve been warming my hands for several minutes with my coffee cup. :0)
I got all the plants out of the garden, so we’re ready for winter now.
A nice surprise – one tiny head of cauliflower I missed when I harvested yesterday. It’s about 3 inches across!
Filed under Arkansas, Gardening, Square Foot Gardening - Raised Beds
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