Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Spring Has Sprung!

Slowly but surely, the weather is helping my little veggies along. Here's a quick tour around the garden-in-progress.

Romaine lettuce and spinach in containers. (That blue stuff is tulle, to keep the birds and the squirrels away.)


The lettuce seeds in the hugelkultur beds finally sprouted. Hugelkultur is a german gardening technique, where you build a raised bed on top of rotting wood. Supposedly, the wood provides lots of nutrients to the soil as it breaks down, and also helps to aerate things, since it's not compacted down. So, I took some of the tops of the Rubbermaid containers from making self-watering containers, and decided to make mini hugelkultur raised beds with them. The celery in the corner had been growing in a pot, so I moved the seedlings to the corners of the hugelkultur beds, and spread lettuce seeds in the middle. We'll see how well things grow.

Here's the swiss chard, getting bigger. It's in a prefab self-watering window box. And now that the weather is warming up, it seems to be much happier. I still haven't figured out where it's permanent home is going to be, since my front yard is a big mess of stuff right now, which is why it is halfway on the driveway, and halfway on the weeds that I call my lawn.

Blueberries are flowering! These are some of my food stamp blueberry bushes, that my four year old has decorated with one of her Easter necklaces.


And the strawberries are flowering more and more...


I know that the rule is to direct-seed cucumber, but I'm a big fan of starting seedlings in little pots before moving them to their permanent home. I don't know why, but that's just how I like to do things. And it's early enough on that if these die, I can always direct seed some new ones. In the pink container are Japanese Long Cucumbers, and in the containers next to that are luffa seeds that I pre-sprouted using the paper towel in a plastic bag method. You can barely see it, but there is a clear Sterlite container in the lower left hand corner, and that is propped over this little grouping to provide a greenhouse effect in our unpredictable spring weather.

Last but not least, the orange bell pepper, much happier now that he's settled into his new home. To the left, under that juice bottle "cloche" is a jalapeno.

Do you see all that mess in the background? That's mostly tomato plants that need to find permanent homes.
I had some issue in my worm bin, and couldn't figure out why I was having such a massive die off. I still don't know what the problem was. These guys seem happy with these apples that stayed in our house for a little bit too long.

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