Inhabitat
Here you can see four of the six planting boxes we built. The wooden ‘boxes’ are supported on metal table-like structures that allow me to do most everything chest-height, without having to bend over or get down on my hands and knees. I really love it.
Other than the lettuce and red onions you can see here, I have broccoli plants, plus radish seeds and spinach seeds. (The spinach seeds in the greenhouse aren’t doing anything and I can’t get any spinach plants locally this year, so I just planted some seeds directly in the garden and will let you know if anything actually comes up.)
Here are the broccoli plants. I have things really spread out. He suggests one plant per square, but not next to each other, to discourage pest problems and disease.
I do follow his suggestions that you keep track of where you plant things each year, and the next year plant them in different squares, a crop rotation thing.
Here’s a close up of one of the broccoli plants. See the baby broccoli head?
Here’s a close up of the lettuce. This says, “Head Lettuce”, but I harvest leaves for salad as it grows and either produces a small head, or doesn’t. My love is the fresh lettuce leaves each night!
Although Mel suggests planting 4 lettuce plants in the same square, my results are better when I spread things out.
This is an 8-foot brick planter on the opposite side of the house from the garden. We converted it to a square foot planter, emptying out all the top soil and filling it with Mel’s Mix (mixture of peat moss, Vermiculite, and as many different types of compost as you can find.) I’m using barnyard, mushroom, and cotton burr, plus any compost I can make from our scraps.
This is a second brick planter that is about 4 feet wide that sits in a nook created by the back of our house and the screened back porch. The tomatoes are more protected here, and usually survive better than the ones that are more susceptible to the wind.
I read a good article on growing tomatoes lately. It suggests planting them deeper than I have been, and then pinching off some of the ‘arms’ that sprout, as well as pinching off top leaves to keep the plants more compact, rather than allowing them to grow as tall as they like. The article says this encourages more fruit rather than so much greenery. Since fresh sliced tomatoes is one of our very favorite things, I’m going to try this, hoping for a great harvest.
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