Veggie Garden - Year 3

In our three years in our townhouse, we've realized some things....

1. Our backyard is really shady
2. No matter how hard we try to trim the giant trees, the leave still block most of the sun
3. Tomato plants don't like shade

You probably sense a common theme, our attempt at gardening in the backyard has yielded sub-par results. This year, we almost didn't plant a vegetable garden since we can get organic veggies at the DeKalb Farmer's Market right down the road and since we've had sub-par results from our own attempts in the backyard. But last minute, we decided to try a few things in the front of our house in pots.

Our first large {ish} harvest from the garden:

Cubanelle peppers, Sun gold cherry tomatoes, Regular cherry tomato, and a Green Zebra tomato

We put together some yummy appetizers when my friend {and MOH} Ana Maria visited a few weeks ago.
That's two different types of crostini: Roasted heirloom tomatoes on goat cheese with a drizzle of honey, and pan fried cubanelle peppers on goat cheese. Both were delicious! When we made the cubannellle toasts again, we drizzled some honey on them too.

Our second harvest of tomatoes:

Green Zebra, Sun Golds, Cherry Tomatoes, and our first Black Cherry Tomato and Pink Thai tomato!

We made yummy flat breads for two nights out of those. Soooo delicious!

Tasty flatbread with our heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzerella and
homemade french bread with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar

Soon we'll be harvesting our pimento pepper and trying to make pimento cheese for the first time! We've got a bunch of Cubanelles ready to harvest too, so we'll have to decide what to do with them this time. 

Garden Tomatoes!

I was able to pick our first harvest of tomatoes from the garden last night- 2 better boys, and 4 romas. Aren't they pretty? One of the roma variety was close to normal size, but the others were all smaller than expected. So hopefully as the season goes on, they'll get larger in size. I got to cut open the 2 better boys this morning to go in a pasta salad we'll be having for lunch today. So excited to eat them!

Backyard Upgrade: Part 3- The GRASS!!!

You got to see our plan, the prepping steps, and now, finally, you can see the grass! Or the beginnings of it anyway. It's been pretty rainy/cloudy here for several days, so hopefully it will clear up so the grass (and the garden) will shoot up!

It's starting to fill in, but there's still a lot that hasn't sprouted yet. We'll probably give it another week and then maybe reseed the empty areas. Since it has been kind of rainy, some of the seed probably got washed away. It's a pretty dramatic change from how it looked back in December when we moved in, and we are super happy with it! Now we'll just have to add some garden art in here and there to make it more 'us'.

You can see where I already got a solar powered kitty to watch over the garden. It was a yard sale find a few weeks ago, I'd seen the same one at Big Lots, but just wouldn't pay $12 for it, but for $2, it was perfect!

Here's what the backyard used to look like, in various stages of progression. Unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures of the backyard when we moved in, but just image 2-3 feet of decaying pine straw and leaves, that's basically what it looked like.

And after adding the tiles and watching the grass grow in!

It's still got some more growing to do. And probably another round or two of reseeding. But we're excited! You can't see it quite as well in the aerial view as you can when you look at it. That's probably due to my 5 year old camera....Oh and just to throw a note in about our rain barrel- it's awesome, since building it like a month ago, we haven't had to use anything else to water the garden or the grass!

Veggie Garden- 1 Month Update

It's been {exactly} one month since we planted our vegetable garden, and as much as I'd like to say that I planned that, I didn't. It's just a happy mistake. The garden overall seems to be doing really well.

And no, you aren't imagining that wooden fence back there, it wasn't there before. A house is just about complete back behind our road, but fortunately, the house is farther down, so we just see the fence and woods.

The store bought better-boy tomato plant is in the back and has grown pretty large, it has lots of flowers and even one mini tomato growing. There's a few smaller tomatoes in this picture too.

This Cherokee Tomato plant is the lone Cherokee seedling survivor, those torrential downpours killed the weakest, and I'm not really sure what happened to the other seedling. But this one has done really well and is almost as big as the store bought Cherokee!

The cucumbers are massive! I have no idea what we're going to do with all of them. Guess we'll be making lots of pickles. Fun process, gross smell! We started with 4 store bought plants, one died, but the other 3 are looking good!

All 3 of the pepper seedlings we planted have survived! We know there is one Bell Pepper and one Poblano Pepper, but we aren't quite sure what the middle one is. The seedlings got mixed up when we were planting, so that one will be a surprise!

We planted 4 zucchini seeds since none our of seedlings made it to transplant time (thanks Nutmeg). All 4 sprouted, but 2 of them didn't last long. These two are getting big and seem to be performing well!

I don't know anything about onions, so I have no idea if these are doing well or dying. At least 1 has died, but a few others seem to have grown another 'leaf', I really have no idea what it's called on an onion.

Like the zucchini, we planted Cherry Tomato seedlings, which are still pretty small. But about 3-4 look like they're doing well.

Broccoli seedlings, planted straight into the ground. Some of the seeds got washed out of the row, so they are somewhat random throughout that side for now. We'll see what makes it, they are still pretty tiny.

The Kale, Butter Lettuce, and Arugula are doing really well! These are the ones we got from Oakhurst Community Garden. They are huge! So are the other lettuce varieties we planted in containers on the deck. They have their big plant sale this weekend, so I'm excited to go check that out and see what they have now!

Melon seedlings (Cantaloupe, Crimson Watermelon, and Orange Watermelon) are still small. They took a lot longer to sprout than the zucchini and broccoli seedlings. Only time will tell.
Not too much is going on with the blackberry plants, they are supposed to be fall bloomers, so we'll have to wait a while to see action there. Something weird is going on with the blueberry plants though, they all bloomed and didn't produce any fruit, so we'll have to research what's going on there.

Stay tuned for another update soon!

Vegetable Garden Planning

So we have about a 20'x 3.5' raised bed that we are going to plant a vegetable garden in. After taking away about 6' in paths, we're going to plant two 7' x 3.5' beds. Here's my preliminary plan-

Our Vegetable Garden!

So far we've started everything except the watermelon and honeydew melons by seed. We started the seeds a few weeks ago and set up some plant lights above them once most of them had germinated. Everything is sprouting really well, except for the butter lettuce, poblano and bell pepper. Only one poblano and two bell peppers have come up in the last week or so, so maybe they are just late bloomers. I'm not sure what's going on with the butter lettuce, there are like 2 pathetic looking sprouts, so hopefully some more will pop up soon!

From left to right: Broccoli, Spinach, Catnip, Poblano, Roma Tomato (2 rows), Zucchini (2 rows), Bell Pepper (2 rows), and Onion (2 rows)

From left to right: Cherokee Tomatoes (4 containers), Butter Lettuce (white container), Zucchini (2 containers), and some Rosemary in the back

I am by no means an expert gardener, I usually kill everything I plant, but now that I'm planting in real soil and not on an apartment balcony, hopefully things will turn around. The only exception to that rule has been my little clementine tree that I started from seeds from a clementine I ate just for fun, and surprising it sprouted and grew! Who knows, it may never produce any fruit, but for now it's my pride and joy!



On a completely separate note, check out this video of my goofy kitten. You'd think I never feed him, right? He's actually succeeded in getting this kind of can open and eating the whole thing, so these are kept out of his reach now!