July 20 A Pictorial. Part Deux.

So.. I usually love all things google, but this google blogger software is not my favorite. The new post window is tiny, pictures never go where I intend them and do any interesting wrapping of text is near impossible. Any way part 1 of the pictures was getting a little unwieldy to work with so I broke it into 2 parts. Here is the tomatoes and the basil.


Tomato patch overview.


Basil.. two of the 6 plants we have scattered through the yard.

Cherry tomatoes.. I love how they form a whole stem of tomatoes like that, just looks cool.

Fourth of July tomatoes.. Denver is about 3 weeks behind an average growing season, so they are maturing right on time.

July 20 A Pictorial.

Alright.. been slacking off with updating here. Just when the garden is getting interesting too. So i went and shot a bunch of pictures this morning. Here we go.

Overview


Pole Beans.. climbing nicely starting to get blossoms.. carrots in foreground.

Second planting of lettuce, romaine in the back black seeded simpson in the front.
Green and sweet onions.
Massive chard plants.. need to eat more of this soon.


little tiny cucumbers.

Not so little tiny zucchini


I planted Burpees 'Carnival Mix' of peppers. So even as the peppers form I'm not sure what all I'll be getting. I have 5 bell plants and one jalapeno, but the bells can be of a number of varieties. Should be fun to see what color they turn.

The Raspberries

This is a less than impressive post, but I'm hoping it will serve as a reminder next summer to how far certain areas of the garden have come.

We hope(d) to grow red raspberries and found a guy selling some on craigslist. He had a gorgeous raspberry patch and seemed to know what he was doing so I bought some. He dug me 5 massive rootballs with little spring shoots for $20. So it was a low risk deal. He said to plant them and trim off all above ground growth. Which I did. Sadly they have not done much at all. Now to be fair it is possible that I didn't water them nearly enough when they were first in. They got planted in what at the time was a non irrigated section of our yard. So maybe I got bad plants, maybe bad advice, maybe just didn't water enough. But our envisioned raspberry patch looks like this.



Not so good really. The one glimmer of hope is one plant did take. It is growing slowly but clearly still alive.




I've been told these things spread like crazy so maybe we can make a patch out of this one yet, but we think a supplemental fall planting may be in order.

Some harvest pics from the last few weeks

First two heads of broccoli. Forgetting how big a head is I failed to stagger our plantings and we ended up with 4 head of broccoli all at once... live and learn.



Our first head of romaine. We have been picking leaf lettuce for salads for quite a while, but fun to get a whole head.

Cherry bomb radishes. These babies are super tasty and FAST. Roughly 30 days from seed to harvest, we have done 2 full crops already with a third about to go in the ground.

Just got back from vacation yesterday. Given my OCD personality I usually walk around the garden about twice a day so sometimes growth isn't so apparent. Coming back from 5 days gone is always a pleasant shock to the system seeing how far the garden has come. I'll let the pictures do it justice.

The greens.. part 1, lettuce and arugala. You can see the arugala has gone to seed, time to do another planting.


Greens Part 2.. Spinach and Chard


Onions


Bean Seedlings



Peppers


First Head of Broccoli forming



Peas(couple cukes in the foreground)


And finally tomatoes and some basil

Mmmmm... Irrigation

Ok.. we are back up and running with the purchase of a new camera last week. Little Panasonic point and shoot, love it so far. Apparently having a 9 year old digital camera was quite rare, the salesmen were all shocked. Needless to say I'm impressed with how far cameras have come.

I'll summarize the last month into 2 posts that will cover most of the changes. I learned a valuable lesson about seedlings being ready when THEY are ready. In the last post I mentioned that the tomato seedlings were one of the few nursery quality plants I had produced. Sadly, trying to time the seedlings being ready to transplant with my schedule and Denver's crazy weather schedule I waited to transplant about 10 days too long. Sounds linnocent enough, but I went from 14 strong seedlings, to having 7 keel over in their pots and 7 make it to the garden on the last legs.. of those it looks like 4 will supply. Live and learn.

The exciting first project was installing a drip irrigation system. I discovered via pure dumb luck that I didn't actually need all the sprinklers in my backyard, I could cover the whole yard with only one of the two installed zones. I happened across a few articles about converting a sprinkler zone to a drip irrigation system and was intrigued. Several hours of reading and bumming around in Home Depot and I thought I had it figured out. Sure enough for less than fifty bucks I converted a zone to a drip system and ran drip lines through all the garden beds. It is now all automated off of our sprinkler timer so watering will happen on vacation or if Sara and I are out of town at the same time. I'm thrilled about this. Oh and I buried all the distribution lines, so no more running the hose all over the yard. See the pictures of the sprinkler installation below.


Running the Line

Buried Distribution Lines(need to learn how to take a picture without my own shadow)


Doing It's Thing

Why Not Flowers?

So as we cruised the garden center the other day marveling at how expensive annuals are when they only last one year, but still wanting to buy some we thought why not try annuals from seed. Since we already have the whole seed starting set up in place it was just a couple bucks for seed packets. So far the germination rate has been astounding.. we'll see how they do long term.

The Nightshades.. an update.

I'm happy to say that of all the plants we've started so far the tomatoes and peppers seem to be doing the best.. with the basil not far behind. We've produced nursery size tomato plants, which I'm quite excited about. Obviously it's all for show until we see if they bear fruit, but it's a promising start.

Crazy CO weather

So I'm finally back up to date on my blog here and this really did happen last night(May 11). They said it would snow here.. and sure enough, it did. Couple quick pics of our snow covered garden. The good news is that under all those row covers the direct sown seeds were really starting to pop. Lots of onion and lettuce seedlings coming up. The bad news is I just had the thin row covers, not the thermal blanket ones so I'm really hoping everything underneath them survived.

Compost Bin

The first compost bin is finally done. This has been on my to do list for about 6 months. I hemmed and hawed repeatedly on how to build it. How big did I want it, did I want it made of wood or metal, how fancy or not. I finally settled on a fairly classic design, wooden sides to help trap in moisture in the dry air out here in Colorado. I wanted to do wider slats but 1x4 is really the widest cut of rough cut lumber you can find, and I felt finished pine was a bit of an excess for a compost bin.

Another bin will be forthcoming.. we don't have space to do a side by side and still have room to turn it over. So there will be a second bin about 5 feet away, facing this one with room too work between them.

Stupid Seeds

So it's now the last week of April and of all my direct sown seeds pretty much nothing has come up. I have two tiny plants that may or may not be pea seedlings but I'm not entirely sure. It has been a cool April and I'm not sure I have the moisture levels quite right so I'm hoping this is a fixable situation.

No pictures, because they would just be of empty garden beds which I find a little depressing. Plan will be to transplant cold hardy veggies outdoors(onions, green onions, lettuce, chard, and broccoli) the last weekend of April and then replant the seeds as well.

We Go Outdoors

So based on a number of seed timing charts I read I determined(I'm not sure correctly) that the optimum date for planting certain seeds outside was 4-6 weeks before the average last frost. Here in Denver that average last frost date is May 5th, but to play it safe I used an average last date of May 15th or so. So this meant putting out seeds the first week of April

First step is to have a plan. I'm not sure if you can quite see it in the picture, but that piece of paper there lays out everything that is going in the garden and what it's spacing should be. We are planting our garden in the "block" style and the recommendations for spacing came from the CSU Extension.

http://www.ext.colostate.edu/mg/gardennotes/713-Block.html



Next of course we needed seeds. The candidates for early spring seeding were radish, arugula, romaine lettuce, leaf lettuce, spinach, onions, green onions and peas.


Finally with everything laid out it was a simple matter of making some furrows, dropping the seed in, covering them up, and watering them in.

The not so deadly nightshades

Alright the last of the indoor seeds have been started.. peppers, tomatoes, and basil.

Sadly our 9 year old camera had issues the day I tried to document this so of all the seedlings, which are doing well, I only got pictures of the peppers.

The First tranplants

So.. a few weeks in all is well. Seeds are germinating, plants seem to be growing. Seedlings have been thinned and thrived afterward. The next challenge lies in the first transplant. Splitting out seedlings, putting them in bigger pots and hoping they keep growing. Well the first challenge was that we quickly realized we were lacking enough light space. So back to Home Depot for an additional light. We decided not to skimp this time and went with a double tube 48" T5 fixture, effectively quadrupling our light space.

So here are the new transplants looking pathetic in their now bigger containers..




But looking much better after a few days under their new lights.

The first plantings

We didn't want to just trust our seeds to leftover yogurt cups and the windowsill. However we didn't want to go overly high tech either or high expense. So after lots of research and indecision we decided on starting with basic six pack cells in a seed tray and a cover. Grand total for that was around 5 bucks. We did however buy a soilless seed starting mix which so far I have no regrets about. So the germination setup was quite simple.



That's pretty much it. The planting is nice and simple. Wet the starting mix, sprinkle or tweezer a few seeds in, sprinkle just a touch of starting mix on top of it, spray it with a fine mist and stick the lid over it.

Once they germinate you pull the cover off and put them in the light. So along with not entrusting the light from window sills we didn't want plants scattered all over the place so we built a grow light setup.




I was able to build this using scrap lumber. I bought one shop light fixture, a single tube 20" T5 flourescent, plus some S-hooks and small chain. I was able to build this for about one fifth of cost of a commercial setup. Now.. you can certainly argue my aesthetics are lacking but it works well.

The first three cell packs are under there. All doing well.. they are as follows.



Top to bottom; sweet onions, green onions, broccoli.




Top to bottom; sage, oregano, rosemary




And finally.. parsley.


These were the earliest seeds.. 90% plus germination.. so far so good.