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.