Pickle city

This summer I put in three types of cucumbers, a straight 8, and two types of pickling cucumbers.  We love pickles in our house, and we love making them ourselves so we can flavor them and choose the amount of pickling we give them. I am here to say new pickles, just about a week after they are canned, are incredible.  Here's  is what the different types of cucumbers look:

This is the gherkin varietal. It's a French gherkin, they are covered in spines, curly, and look just like the tiny gherkins you see pickled whole.  The spines honestly make these not my favorite, and the cucumbers themselves are kind of soft, so I don't know that I'll put this variety in again. 

This is the other pickling variety. I can tell you from experience that even if you leave them be, they will only grow about 4 inches long, then they just get fatter and fatter. These cucumbers have very firm flesh, very little seeds, and I think they will make excellent dill pickles. This week we will be making our first round of pickles from the garden, I'm very excited.  

In other news, monarch butterfly caterpillars are all over everything in my garden right now.  They are especially big fans of the dill and fennel.  I know my plants would prefer me to remove these pesky herbivores, but I love monarch butterfly's, so I'm letting it go...

In the picture above, there's lettuce in the foreground, then fennel with caterpillars, and then on the other side of the fennel there's carrots (on the right), beets (on the left), and artichokes behind them. I'm concerned my artichokes are still too small to put out buds this year, so I'll keep them covered and hopefully alive this winter and see what happens next year. 

Happy gardening. : )

Summertime, and the living is easy

Now that its full summer, the garden is going crazy. My tomato jungle is out of control. 

That space on the right? That used to be a walkway. That space on the left? Used to be a walk way. 

I'm getting lots of cherry tomatoes right now, and finally after literally months of chasing mice out of my tomatoes, I have Roma tomatoes starting to ripen.  I can't wait until they are ready.  

In contrast to my tomato jungle, these are the tomatoes in my topsy turvey planters. 

I got these planters this year because I had way too many tomato plants that survived seed starting, and I couldn't throw the baby plants away.  Unfortunately,I am not great about watering them every day, which in the texas heat is probably why they have failed to thrive. At least now I know that these are not going to be worth the effort next year. And I can console myself by literally getting up to my ears in happy tomato plants. 

Raised Beds

So the land my house happens to sit on is mostly clay. Clay, like thick, non-draining, even hard to dig with a shovel clay. And the clay starts approximately one inch under the grass. So the answer is raised beds. I did some research on the type of dirt to put int the beds, since I have the chance to put in exactly what I want. I went with the city of Plano's "bulk soil blend", which is a 50/50 blend of compost and topsoil. It has a very nice dark color, with plenty of good sized decomposed mulch that should make it drain ok. I was also careful to add only a few inches of dirt and then till it in with the clay before I added the rest of the dirt on top. This will hopefully stop the good soil from draining all the water 8 inches down and then creating a wet basin to rot my roots. And the baby plants seem to be liking it!

So this is what the whole set up looks like.  It can get windy around here, and it mostly blows from the north, so the teepee trellises have grapes planted under them to hopefully grow an edible wind break. 

I have a patch of onions, and I also planted them all around the edges of the bed, just to use up the space. 

To go with the onions, I have spinach that has sprouted: 

 And the radishes are coming up great. I started thinning them, and my husband asked me to try transplanting them instead. So we'll see if the transplants survive. I love their heart shaped leaves.

I planted a mixed bed of mesclun mix and Braveheart ( a roman variety) together here. They are coming up well. All their little leaves are so different. 

 I planted carrots at the same time as everything else, but they took almost a week longer to come up. They look very tiny and fragile. I've tried to grow carrots before, but I've never had success. Hopefully they like the dirt I got them. These carrots are a kaleidoscope blend, so they should come up in all kinds of cool colors.

In one bed I also planted some herbs that I bought as plants. My helpful local rabbits ate my cilantro and the parsley down to the ground before I got the floating row covers over them. They are coming back now, and they don't seem to mind the row covers, so I see that as something that I'll keep doing. 

Next time, I'll show you my new Brown Turkey Fig! 

Baby plant chronicles

It's been about a month since my seedling sprouted, and they have definitely started taking on the character of their varieties. Check out the tiny spines starting to grow on my artichokes. You can tell they were born to be thistles. 

Here is my forest of tomato plants. I had unbelievable success in the sprouting rates, every single pot I started still has a happy 3-6 inch tomato plant growing in it. The salsa varietal was the last to sprout, and they are still the smallest, but they are growing strong. 

I did however learn an important lesson for next year - all the plants in one flat should be the same type. Here you see I've had to raise the light because the tomatoes had grown up into it and then were being bent over by it, but the peppers in the same flat are now much too far from the light. Yes, there's a baby artichoke back there in the corner, I had one pot that had two great looking plants so I transplanted this one. 

The other plants I started didn't all sprout like the tomatoes. Here are the eggplants with their first true leaves. Most of the peppers did ok, but they had closer to a 70% success rate so far. They are also still very small, I'm concerned that they will be the right size in a month when transplanting time comes around. I started adding a 1/4 strength fertilizer to their water last weekend, once everyone had true leaves. I'm going to be watering them with that every Sunday as a special please grow up and make me vegetables treat. 

Outside everything is growing gangbusters as well. I put in two hanging pots of strawberries. I've never grown strawberries because I've always heard they were more trouble than they were worth, but my local nursery had them on sale so I made an impulse purchase. We'll see if these little guys can change my mind. 

Also, like I said last post I did get all my raised beds up. It took all weekend and seriously strained my whole body, but they are up and starting to grow baby plants. I had intended to take pictures and show the whole process, but then I got outside, got dirty, got tired, got thirsty, started whining, and then I couldn't talk my husband into going into the house and getting the camera. I'll post just about them tomorrow, but here's a preview. 

Baby tiny sprouting plants

My seeds have sprouted! Two weeks ago I started four types of tomatoes, six types of peppers, artichoke, and eggplant seeds on a three tier shelving system that I stole from the garage. This is what the seed flats looked like two weeks ago.

After a solid seven days that felt like forever the tomatoes started sprouting! This is what they looked like after about two days:

                                        

This is what they look like now, about 5 days after sprouting :

Several of the tomatoes have started first set of true leaves. The artichokes started coming up about two days ago as well, or about ten days after they were planted, which was a few days earlier than the package said to expect them. They seem to have hard seed shells, none of the plants have managed to break out of them, and they are growing much slower than the tomatoes. We'll see how they progress.

And tonight it looks like the pepper plants have just started to sprout, fourteen days after they were planted. I'm just starting to see the seeds start to push above the dirt, so I'm cautiously optimistic. You can kind of see the seed in the middle of the pot. 

I'm not expecting the eggplant to start sprouting for another week, so I'm not too concerned that it hasn't come up yet. I'll just keep it moist and see what happens. As I've never started my plants from seeds before I'm not sure what to expect for the success rate. I started three times as many pots as I want mature plants, and in most cases I started three seeds per pot, just to be sure. Now that the tomatoes are up, it seems I might have gotten a little carried away on some pots. . . 

I'll use scissors to selectively reduce the plants to just two or three sometime this weekend. Also this weekend, we are going to build garden boxes! I had four cubic yards of dirt that is half compost half topsoil delivered today, so tomorrow we are going to get garden boxes built and filled for planting. With as warm as the weather has been, I'm hoping to get some early spring plants in the garden next weekend. 

Getting started

Now that I own my first home, I'm starting my first garden in my own backyard. I've never gardened in the DFW area, so I expect this is going to be a learning experience. This coming weekend I'll be starting to lay out my garden boxes so I can begin preparing soil for my spring garden. I've already bought my seeds from Burpee, I'll talk about them a bit later. I'm hoping for a bumper crop of everything to validate all the coming work . .