Why the amount of sunlight is important

One of the most common tips for planning a garden (and being successful) is determining how much sunlight your garden space will get. If you’re like us, you have a limited amount of good sunny spots for growing plants like tomatoes and peppers that need lots and lots of sun to thrive.

Our house faces north, and our gardens are around the detached garage — some on the east side and some on the south side. It’s not perfectly aligned to the compass but pretty much accurate. We also have lots of trees in our yard and in surrounding yards, which make a difference in how much sunlight each spot will get during the day.

The gallery below shows how much of a difference sunlight makes to how big plants get. It’s of the hostas we have planted in almost all of our regular garden beds. Time of day and which type of sun (morning, afternoon, etc), as well as where they are planted are noted in the captions.

 

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Trying our hand at square foot gardening

In the past couple years, I’ve heard a lot about square foot gardening. It keeps coming up in Google searches and the 500 Gardens program we’re part of recommends it to all of the new gardeners in Madisonville.

Our garden grid made out of old blinds.

So what is square foot gardening? It’s a method that lets you grow more in a smaller space and is great for small gardens. We’ve half-tried this in the past and decided this year to go for it (almost) all the way.

The essence is breaking your garden bed into grids — one square foot at a time — and planting one to 16 plants per square foot. How do you decide? It’s all based on the plant spacing recommended on the seed packet or transplant tag: 3 inch spacing is 16 per square; 4 inch spacing is 9 per square, and so on. This has a good explanation of spacing as well as which plants typically work in which spacing plan.

This is what happened to our grid after a storm. It was easy to fix.

It also helps to have a grid to better visualize where you’re planting everything and the Mel Bartholomew book says you need a grid to be “a true square foot garden.” Even though I think a grid drawn in the dirt would suffice, we decided to make a real grid this year.

Our gridlines are actually slats from old blinds that the cats have previously destroyed and they worked out really well. They are “secured” with a nail through the holes already in the slats.

An errant onion in a  different bed. Squirrels probably dug it up

I will say the grids helped already.

When I was checking on our plants, I noticed a couple of onions weren’t poking through (we had nine per square). I was able to find a few where they were supposed to be but a couple of bulbs were missing. One I found in the next bed over, lying by the garlic. I suspect squirrels are responsible.

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Our spring crops: Some tried and true, some new

We’re now in mid-April and all our early spring crops are looking good! I’m kind of amazed at how much we have planted so far.

There are peas (sugar snap and snow), spinach, radishes, carrots, lettuce, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and onions all doing really well, along with the garlic planted in the fall and chives that come back every year. Most of those are repeats from previous years, except the onions.

We decided to grow onions on a whim this year, even though they’re cheap to buy at the grocery store. After successfully growing garlic last season and learning how much better the homegrown variety was, we suspect onions will be the same. I found a bag of onion sets (they look like tiny, slender onions) that had red, yellow and white onions so we’re trying each variety. There are also a few squares we’ll use for onion seeds to have another later harvest (and for green onions).

We have tons of broccoli this year because the cell packs I bought had nine plants each instead of six, and I decided to try two different varieties. Some are planted in the garden beds and others in containers; same idea with the Brussels sprouts, which we can move around to find the ideal conditions/area for them to grow.

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Building better garden beds and soil

Our brand new raised beds filled with soil

Compost (left) and vermiculite/peat moss (right) are what we used for our new soil mix.

It’s hard to believe we have been in our house for more than five years. We started our garden the spring after we moved in and our raised bed frames have become a little worse for wear. The wood was splitting and cracking, and they generally looked dilapidated.

Our plan this year was to make the beds themselves a little taller, adding another layer on top. Matt suggested replacing the entire frame with new wood, and I’m glad we did. The wood we bought was 6 inches tall and then 4 feet long, and we overlapped each end to make an even square. Just the wood makes our garden beds look so much better!

Because these were so much taller than our other beds, we needed to fill them with soil. This year we decided to follow Mel’s Mix from the square foot gardening method. It was fairly expensive to get all the ingredients, but they say the mix will last for years, with a little top off of compost each year. Also, our garden is pretty big if we consider it all together — 112 square feet — and you’re supposed to fill the beds 6 inches deep. It’d probably be less expensive if the garden is smaller.

Mel’s Mix is one-third each of compost, peat moss and vermiculite. The compost (you’re supposed to have at least five different kinds to not overload on one nutrient) provides the plant nutrition and the vermiculite and peat moss help keep the soil workable and hold water.

It was quite a task to make this mix by myself — Matt was on a work trip and I needed to get plants in the ground — but I made it work!

We did end up saving the old garden boxes and are planning to use them as mini greenhouses to start the seeds I saved from last year’s plants.

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Springing into action on our garden

We’re back! I know it’s been months since the last post — 2014 was a big year. I got married and got a new job! Both really exciting things but with all the ensuing happy craziness, it left little to no time for blog posts (or much gardening, to be honest).

Last year our garden did OK — not great, but not too terrible. Part of it is because of the aforementioned life events, part of it because of the cooler summer weather, part of it because of the constant plague of garden pests and creatures we have, but it’s mostly because we weren’t keeping up with it. It also probably didn’t help when the garden was more or less ignored for more than a week while we were on our honeymoon.

This season we’re practically starting over — new raised bed boxes, new soil and new method. We’re trying more of the square foot gardening method to get as much out of our efforts as possible. We’ve also built new boxes and filled most of them with Mel’s Mix, the “perfect garden soil” formula from the books.

We know not everything is going to be perfect. For starters, we added Mel’s Mix on top of the soil and whatever else is there: leaves left over from the fall, a bunch of plants I forgot to pull out (do carrots overwinter?), and likely a handful of those little veggie and herb tags that have been unwittingly mixed in over the years.

Snow in early March delayed our garden plans.

Second, we’re getting a later start on spring planting. Again. This is out of our control — it doesn’t help (or motivate you) when in early March everything is still covered in snow and is then followed by days upon days of rain. This past weekend was our first nice one (sunshine! warmer temperatures!) in a long time.

Finally, we know our garden won’t be perfect because, let’s face it, life has an odd sense of humor. This weekend is a perfect example. After spending a few hours at several different stores gathering wood for the new beds and the ingredients for our soil mixture, we grabbed the wheelbarrow so we didn’t have to lug 40-pound bags of compost to the back yard.

And guess what? Our wheelbarrow, which we rarely use, had a flat tire. Luckily our neighbor, who is an avid and awesome gardener herself, let us borrow hers. Oh, and to top it off, the drill ran out of batteries when we had our last three screws to put in the last of four raised bed boxes.

This year we’ll post more (I promise!) as we go through our gardening adventure, sharing ideas and experiments from last season, as well as all the successes and failures we have (hoping it’s more of the former this time).

In the meantime, here’s our rough planting plan for this year. I’m sure we’ll move things around when they actually get planted. The garlic is in a different place in both beds because, as usual, I forget where I planted them until the shoots start poking through the ground. And also, I got a little overzealous when buying our broccoli — we have 18 plants now, and I’ll probably experiment some more with container growing.

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Getting ready to plant

Last weekend we did some basic garden clean up — removing the leftover leaves, turning the soil and moving some of the perennial herbs like chives, oregano and thyme.

The herbs are in temporary pots until I decide where to put them, either back in the beds or in other containers. Also, the garlic is doing very well! I can’t wait to harvest our own, and our limited success so far this year means we’ll definitely be trying it again next year.

Also, I’m happy to report the in-bed composting worked fantastically! We weren’t sure if it would, but except for a stray peanut shell or flower stem, everything broke down during winter. This is also something we’ll continue each year. It’s a great way to add more nutrients directly to the soil.

Finally, our planting schedule is getting thrown off a bit again because of the weather. We’re officially in spring, but there is supposed to be another round of snow this week with lows below freezing for most days.

To me, it’s not worth it to buy the broccoli transplants or seed lettuce/spinach/peas when they could just die in the cold.

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It’s Hard to Plant Those TINY Seeds – How to Make Your Own Seed Tape

This is a great idea. I might try this when we plant some of our smaller seeds. Thanks to the Looking Out From My Backyard blog for the tip!

lookingoutfrommybackyard

We recently returned from a nice getaway to sunny Arizona. Not that our Colorado winter had been too bad this year, but there is something about walking through the department store in February in Arizona and seeing beautiful petunias and marigolds on the shelves. Got my spring fever in high gear! I spent a good portion of the 14 hour drive with my nose shoved firmly into a stack of seed catalogs.

Anyone who has ever planted a carrot seed or a petunia seed, for example, will testify that these seeds are TINY! More than once, I have taken a tweezer and carefully picked up the seed to place into a waiting peat pot. At my age, you need bright light for that!

Since I use block planting in my raised beds, I saw a post that should just make my “tiny seed planting” a bit easier! It is a…

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Our planting plan for this year

Here it is, our grand garden plan. It’s ambitious, but I’m optimistic about it.

We’re trying something new this year, both with vegetables and planning. Last year everything worked fairly well, and we stuck to the plan — for the most part. This year, we’re adding carrots, which is something we’ve never tried before. And we’re going to try again with Brussels sprouts, broccoli and kale because none worked particularly well.

The broccoli bolted pretty early, the Brussels sprouts never really grew and the kale was knocked over and destroyed by squirrels. We’re also going to try to follow the square-foot gardening method a little more closely. We sort of tried it last year, but not exactly.

Our garden plan for this year. It’s a mix of square-foot gardening and succession planting, plus some container plants.

I’ve also splurged ($25 for a year) on the garden planner tool from Mother Earth News. In the little bit I’ve played around with it, the tools are really great, and it’s what I used to create the picture above. Some are harder to see, so I’ll explain what’s in each bed.

It looks very crowded because I have “all months” showing, but there is some succession planting going on here — the peas will be gone before the tomatoes need the room; the garlic will be pulled before the zucchini needs room to spread, etc.

We’re also going to use our “alternative pots,” which are basically old coffee containers and big buckets that used to contain cat litter. Everything will be washed and have holes drilled in the bottom for drainage.

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Community gardening initiative

I just learned about a brand new initiative in our neighborhood, and I had to share. It’s called 500 Gardens. Here’s a little more about it from their website:

Madisonville is a neighborhood of Cincinnati that has a lot going for it, especially for a gardening project.  There are large lots, generations of garden tradition, active community partners in the Madisonville Community Council, the Madisonville Community Urban Redevelopment Council, and local churches, and we have two years of partnership with Lighthouse Community School and success in building gardens on the school parking lot and nearby vacant lot with the students.  The neighborhood has a vibrant mixture of ages, ethnicities, incomes, and family origins, and carries a USDA Food Desert designation.

In this project we plan to:

• Recruit, organize, and teach volunteers.

• Recruit, teach, and coach mentors.

• Organize, promote, and teach on- going classes and workshops.

• Develop and disseminate educational materials.

• Acquire and organize lumber and soil.  Manage use and distribution.

• Schedule garden building, coordinate volunteers and homeowners.

• Host monthly Gardener Gatherings during the growing season.

I’m really excited about this and hope it is tremendously successful!

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Lesson learned: Green beans

We actually had a really good, big harvest from our green bean plants. The problem, however, is we only had one. And it came at the end of August.

Most of this is our fault. First, because we planted them too late — in June after the peas were done. Second, because we forgot to check them after the first bowl.

We also attribute some of this to the weird weather this summer. It was cooler than most summers and we had a lot of rain in July.

The Kentucky Wonder pole beans grew very well — some tendrils and leaves reached more than six feet tall and wrapped around our garage toward the tomatoes. But once they started to actually mature into beans, quite a few were bulging, which means they’re overly mature and could be tough (not good).

The good and the bad of our green bean harvest.

 

We made a delicious garlicky green bean sauté (recipe below) but wished we had more throughout the summer. On a positive note, the deer didn’t eat them like they have the past couple years.

So, what can be done better next year? We need to plant early! And check on them more often. I’d love to have a steady supply throughout the season.

Garlicky green beans

We had about a pound or so of the green beans, and this is an adaptation of a recipe I found. First, snap off the ends and de-string the beans. Then cut/trim to desired size.

Toss into a pot of boiling, salted water and cook for about three or four minutes. While those are cooking, add garlic to hot pan with oil. We used about four or five cloves of garlic.

Once the green beans are done, transfer from the boiling water to the pan with garlic and continue to sauté for another four or five minutes, stirring, until the green beans are crisp tender.

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