Project Garden Noob - Year 6

Hmm, no post since September.  I wonder why? Oh yeah, because our garden looks like this: We got an early cold front.  Well, maybe not early, I have no idea.  It was cold enough that I ripped out our tomatoes, and between that and the mildew, the garden was toast. Lessons Learned?  Where to start. Good Things: -We ate out of our garden.  I told myself I'd be happy if I got onions and zucchini.  We did.  We even got small amounts of lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, watermelon, pumpkin, and spaghetti squash (the pumpkin and spaghetti squash didn't get eaten by us...whole other story). -I have a newer found respect for farmers.  I always knew farmers work hard to fill our grocery store and fridges, but I really feel, and I'm sorry if this is snobby, until you do it yourself you really don't know just how hard it is.  Especially organic.  The fact we ever even survived as a species boggles my mind at this point.  Mildew decimate...

Our latest garden development has been animal destruction.  Everyone said we'd have an issue with the rabbits.  Because of hubby's awesome fence, that hasn't been an issue. But recently, our near ripe tomatoes were suddenly being eaten (sadly, I have somehow not taken pictures of the devastation).  We were worried about two culprits - rats and squirrels. Squirrels seemed like an obvious culprit.  We were finding tomato chunks in the yard and  this one in the tree.  I apologize for the truly terrible picture.  But you get the idea.  Limb, red blob = tomato. Rats we were a little skeptical about.  I've never seen a rat in Colorado, but we noticed that something was digging holes underneath the fence that faces a busy street and we didn't think it could be rabbits because the tomatoes are in cages, and the damaged tomatoes were high off the ground.  Something had to be climbing.  Hubby decided to get traps and make some fanc...

So remember pumpkin looking like it had a cocaine problem? Here are some close ups Asked the Grandpa.  He had no clue.  I was floored, this has to be bad if a man who's been gardening for over 30 years had no clue what I was talking about.  I took to Facebook, because I have a fair amount of gardening friends (3), and thought I'd venture there.  Yes, I'm too lazy to Google.  The verdict was mildew, thank JC.  She suggested a combo of milk and water and if that didn't work the ever mentioned neem oil. I tried the milk and water.  Nada.  This was right around Labor Day weekend.  Now, as mentioned before, I have a great nursery around 15 minutes away, but I find them a little spendy.  So I was lazy and waited until after Labor Day to hit up the nursery by my office.  Mistake. Mildew spreads.  And worsens.  Fast.  The mildew is now on the pumpkin, zucchini, spaghetti squash, and cucumber.  Tomatoes, than...

August went pretty well, mostly good growth, really got some harvesting done.  Here was a batch of veggies I sent home to my mother-in-law. So nice to have little vegetables coming out of the garden. The tomatoes and zucchini have been doing their thing.  Still a little leaf roll on the tomatoes, but 5 out of 9 plant seem to be doing alright. Zucchini has been zucchini (Where did that one come from?!). Oh the pumpkin.  I will never put a pumpkin within the confines of a garden again.  I feel I can safely say that was our biggest noob mistake this year.  Pumpkins crawl, EVERYWHERE.  No plant or fence is safe. I've had to chop it back several times and remove it's creepy tendrils from the tomato plants. See how well it got outside the fence. Yeah. Sadly, if you look closely in this picture, you will notice some white spots on the pumpkin and zucchini plants, like someone dusted them with flour, or perhaps cocaine.  Hello mildew...

Dear Time, Please stop moving.  Thanks, Me Hello August, or what I like to call the gateway month into Christmas.  The garden has been moving along.  I did a major cleaning this weekend of overgrowing leaves and vines, tomato suckers, and ripped out all our broccoli and cauliflower.  They had issues, let's just leave it at that. Sadly I didn't take a lot of pictures of the work I did because quite frankly, I was frantically trying to get it done before a very busy weekend.  I'm glad I did as this week has been nothing but rain, so all my freshly groomed plants can soak it all in. Our first tomatoes are starting to turn red, mostly the Romas and heirloom cherry tomatoes.  I find that I like these heirloom versions much better than the standard grocery store ones.  Go figure.  :-) Hubby also has a baby watermelon.  Watermelon are notoriously hard to grow out here, so we'll see how he does, but so far, so good. Zucchini is ...

On Saturday, July 6th my husband and I attended a "Common Tomato Problems" class at Tagawa Gardens . It covered a lot of the usual that I've heard about, blossom end rot, cracking, etc.  Also covered some pretty gross looking bugs, which luckily we have not seen. But we also learned about Physiological Leaf Roll, which is pretty much how it sounds.  The leaves roll inwards.  It's brought on by a variety of environmental stresses (i.e., temperature, moisture levels, nitrogen levels, etc...).  So we come home and look at our plants, sure enough, looks like we got a bit of this going on. Good news is, this shouldn't affect our yields at all.  I gave them a little TLC today - pruned, side-dressed, and put mulch around the base of the plants to retain moisture. Up until this point, I'd been hesitant to apply mulch.  One, I just don't like it and two, since our soil is soooo clay ridden, I feel it should be retaining moisture a little too well.  ...

My peppers are looking funkified.  I know it's a horrible picture, but I'm sure you can see those blackish spots. I'm not sure if they have picked up the previous plant herp, aka fungus, that the broccoli and cauliflower had.  Or maybe some other kind of blight?  I'm treating it with the fungicide and rolling with it.  I've come to accept the fact, long before we even started this whole gardening thing, that not every plant was going to be a winner.  If they don't make it, they don't make it.  C'est la vie.  For a dose of good news, we had our first zucchini harvest this week. I made lovely zucchini ribbons with a meat sauce for a couple lunches this week. In the background, you'll notice a zucchini accident (young one I broke while trying to trim off dead) and a pepper.  Apparently, you are supposed to remove the first peppers to encourage growth.  So I lopped him off and here's to hoping between that and the fungicide, the p...

So I guess now that our garden has moved passed the infancy stage, we are starting to notice some issues as everyone is getting bigger. I had a mild heart attack taking a closer look at my zucchini this weekend.  Mainly this: Can you see that gnarly baby zucchini.  What the hell is that?? Called grandpa (duh), he said it just didn't pollinate correctly - trim off and move on.  So I did.  Here is close-up grossness. Otherwise, our zucchinis are looking beautiful.  I've been admiring all the blossoms and wondering if I should try and cook them.  I've seen it done on Chopped after all....   I hope that I'm complaining about how much zucchini I have in a couple of months, desperately trying to pawn it off on poor saps.  My poor parents - they are going to get it from me AND grandpa!

Am I the only one experiencing June whiplash?  It's July and I'm in complete and utter denial over this. I'm also mad at myself because I really want to be posting three times a week and my last post was 6/12.  Not cool. Not cool at all. Then again, at this point, we are really just watching stuff grow.  We've been harvesting sugar snap peas and lettuce as needed.  It's super fun to finally tastes some fruits of our labor.  And they taste pretty amazing. We've also had a couple of set backs: 1) A mystery sprinker decided to randomly activate last week in the garden.  It took out a broccoli plant, but my spaghetti squash seemed to bounce back from the deluge of water.  Said sprinkler has since been capped off.  How it even pushed through all the soil, I will never know.  Here's a blurry picture of that mess: 2) I missed a broccoli harvest, it bolted (flowered).  It's really shocking how fast that happens.  One day...

I've quickly realized that my intent of having this blog serve as record-keeper has not been as organized as I would like, so I figured since planting is done, now might be a good time to do a quick review and take note of planting dates/varieties and reflect on how it's gone so far.  This is gonna be a long one, so feel free to skip ahead and go strait to the video tour!   March 30th Yellow Onions: Direct sow from "sets." Asparagus (M. Washington):  Direct sow from "crowns." 4 stalks grew and flowered. April 6th Lettuce (Buttercrunch):  Direct sow. Kale (Italian Lacinato/Tuscan):  Direct sow.  Did not produce!  A few seedlings grew, but they never got their mature leaves and then just kinda puttered away and died.  I'm guessing it was too hot, I think we'll retry in fall. Spinach (Bloomsdale - Heirloom):  Direct sow, bolted by end May/early June.  Try for second harvest in fall.  Sugar Snap Peas (Oregon Sugar Pod): Dire...

Well this is a little late in coming, since it's now June.  Despite our blight breakdown, we decided to finish planting all our warm-weather plants over Memorial weekend with the exception of cucumber, I still feel our soil isn't quite the 65 degrees necessary for successful germination.    I went out to O'Toole's Garden Center to buy our tomatoes.  I have some mixed feelings about this.  O'Toole's is a really well-known nursery here in Denver and I found them cheaper then Tagawa Gardens , but I found their selection a bit lacking.  I had to hunt high and low to find two suitable Celebrity tomatoes, which I know exactly where to find at Tagawa. After some searching, I purchased the following plants: 2 Celebrity Tomatoes 2 Early Girl Tomatoes 2 Roma Tomatoes An heirloom cherry tomato (name escapes me) 3 peppers (also don't remember the varieties) I also picked up a few herbs to supplement our herb transplants - specifically basil, chives, and pa...

Yes, that was a cheesy reference to Star Trek, which hubby and I went and saw last week to start our Memorial weekend off right.  It was great by the way. Things in our garden have been not so great.  I was taking a closer look at our broccoli and found this: At first I was thinking, maybe they aren't getting enough water.  But typically, if a plant is parched, it just gets wilty.  They aren't wilty.  Naturally, I call Grandpa.  He said they're sick - caught a virus.  Awesome.  I did some Googling, just to confirm what Grandpa was saying, maybe it was something else (hope of hopes).  Nope, Google Images confirmed it - our broccoli caught broccoli herp.  On top of the illness, I found some tiny aphids.  ::grrr:: Grandpa recommended Sevin Dust: So I see this takes care of bugs, but I needed to clarify if it takes care of the virus.  Are the plants salvageable (he said yes)?  Did a bug cause the virus?  And...

And by jerkoff, I clearly mean insect. We have been noticing these little holes in our baby spinach: I'm pretty sure it's a bug because,  1) If it were rabbits, I feel they would be at the edges of the leaf, not dead center, and 2) we haven't seen any bunny impress so what else could it be? I did a quick Google this morning - what insect is eating my spinach in Colorado - and I found some rather vague references to beetles, praying mantis, and "other leaf eaters."  I have caught no one in the act.  So my guess is some coward insect is going this at night. Two days ago I put on my natural pesticide of Dawn soap, Listerine, water, and cayenne pepper (recipe found here ).  So far I haven't seen new chew holes, but I plan to reapply this mixture every few days as I'm sure it washes off with our waterings.  The blogs I've found this recipe on make no mention of how often it should be used, so I'm just rolling with it. Other than this dev...

My husband came home a couple weeks ago from one of his many, many trips to Home Depot and presented me with this: I really hadn't given much consideration to our water set up.  I was thinking hose + maybe a wand thingy.  He said it cost around $25.00, so we both were pretty stoked and he worked on getting everything set up. Here are a few action shots: He then added some of these guys:   Super fancy huh? Hubby put these slow-soak hoses in and catastrophe struck - the water isn't soaking into the ground.  Our soil is so awful, that it's just laying on top.  Hubby's frustrated, I'm just plain perplexed and quite frankly just haven't had time to even research how to fix this problem.  Anyone out there have a suggestion?? In other news, everyone is growing.  We put in cauliflower and broccoli (and strawberries!) last weekend (5/11).  I was informed last night that something is eating my spinach.  So tonight, I'll b...

We are getting super close to getting our fancy french drains installed.  My husband has dug all the necessary trenches and our back yard/side yard look a dachshund obstacle course. Aren't these some beautiful trenches?:   Right now our only problem is rain.  It's been raining for two days.  This pushes back the install AND all this exposed dirt + puppies = really muddy house.  My weekend is going to be filled with lots of vacuuming and spot cleaning our abused couch.  There is literally perfect, muddy dog prints all over it. But it's supposed to warm up next week, so hopefully we'll get all this finished and can get back to working on the garden and taking care of our weed issue.  We have weeds.  Lots of them.

Thanks to the blogosphere, gardening is much more crafty then I ever imagined.  We already covered the trellises and strawberry pyramid my husband built. This weekend, I decided to wrap up some smaller crafts that are aimed at improving the garden. First, I made plant markers.  You never realize just how useful those things are until you don't have them.  I found a link using old spoons, print outs, and modge podge. Et voila, garden markers: We ended up going to Goodwill to get the spoons (10 cents each, woo) and I printed out the clip art veggies at work (shh, don't tell anyone).  Whole project was less than $5.  And I made 30 of them.  Yes, 30. Next up, another idea via Pinterest, was some strawberry stones .  You are supposed to put them in your strawberry bed BEFORE the strawberries grow, so birds try to eat them, realize they aren't real, and leave the real strawberries alone when they do grow. Here is my best attempt at painti...

Let's do a quick recap of April.  In addition to sharing our experience trying to garden, this is also a diary to help us remember next year what worked and what didn't. 1. Herbs - Herbs are running out of room!  We started them in late February and that was just way too early.  If we moved them to a bigger pot we would be fine, but I really just want them to make it another two weeks and they can be moved into their permanent home, the pyramid.  Our parsley is starting to look a little sketchy. Might have to start over on that one. 2. Don't start carrots inside - I think we covered that already, but we continue to see them flounder in the pots we moved them into.  So next year, let's not do that.  We planted carrots and parsnips directly in the ground on April 28th. 3.  Again, do not get over eager.  Potatoes should not have been planted this month.  We just had too many cold snaps and they just didn't make it.  We will start new...

This crossed my Facebook the other day: And it's pretty accurate.  I should say that 99% of the time, I get really tired of Coloradans bitching about our "variable" weather.  It's been this way - FOREVER.  It is absolutely nothing new.  Side Note: I was born here, I lived here from 1982 to 2005, when I moved to Los Angeles for grad school, moving back in 2010.  So I can comment on this whole situation. But this year is the first year the weather is pissing me off, but not because of the heinous commutes or the constant stream of mud my dogs like to bring into the house, but because of the garden. Just after I planted our leafy greens (spinach, kale, lettuce), we had two really rough cold snaps - single digits at night.  I figured the seeds were toast.  The onions are somehow surviving.  Potatoes were also toast. Shockingly enough, we saw the leafy green burst through this week.  And guess what? More snow, with a low of 27 degrees W...

I enjoy Facebook, just like the rest of the planet, and naturally I subscribe to a whole bunch of posts relat ed to g ardening/urban farming.  One favorite is Tiny Farmstead .  They have a super cute (read: much cuter than mine) blog about gardening in the burbs.  Today on Facebook, they posted this bad boy: Red Dragon VT 2-23 C Weed Dragon 100,000-BTU Propane Vapor Torch Kit Whos-a-jigga-what?  It took me a second, but I figured it out.  This bad boy gets attached to a propane tank and burns your weeds.  You heard me, BURNS your weeds.  So you don't have to put any of that chemical shit on your yard. Here is a meager action shot: And as if I couldn't be more excited, here is the description of all the things it can do besides burn weeds: Flaming reduces or eliminates spraying chemicals and is a lot more fun than pulling weeds. BURN heavy weeds and brush, stumps, debris and more. Perfect to burn off irrigation ditches, fields, culvert...

As I scour the blogosphere absorbing the overwhelming amount of information on gardening, I've come across many natural/household gardening tricks that I've been mulling over using in our garden this year. 1. Eggshells Apparently eggshells can be used for a lot, see this post from Care2.com - pest deterrent (slugs), starting seeds, general composting, and putting in planting holes for tomatoes and peppers to provide extra calcium. I've decided to save some shells for the tomatoes/peppers, but I've also read the eggshells do not provide any immediate calcium benefit - the shells need to break down for that.  But hey, why not get that started? 2. Epsom Salt Pinterest has been blowing up with "use Epsom salt for fertilizer."  I investigated a little more and I guess Epsom salt contains magnesium, which can help with yellowing leaves in tomato plants.  There is a very thorough, sciencey article about Epsom salt and gardening on the National Garden...

This technically is not a garden post.  It's April, it's snowing right now as I type.  We are supposed to have record lows this week.  Maybe my onions won't survive after all.  So far, they have survived! While the garden is a big part of our outdoor living experience, we have lots of other stuff going on around our 1/3 acre (well, little less, there is a house on it). One of our MAJOR projects for the year is drainage.  Woo. What is drainage? Hell if I know.  Kidding.  I do, it's just that it's so boring. When you live in a place like Colorado, where there are basements, you have to make sure you have adequate draining around your house or all sorts of disasters can happen: 1. Foundation cracks - check 2. Pooling water in yard - check 3. Water leaking into basement 4. Other horrible expensive things Let me give you a brief tour of what bad drainage looks like/leads to. Exhibit A:  When you don't have a slope of dirt at a downward ...