This is for Magan. She asked me to put pictures of my garden on our blog and since I love my garden and talking about it and showing it off, here it is:
In “Garden A,” we’re growing corn (which has not been successful in the past – so we’ll keep our fingers crossed), green onions, carrots, bell peppers, and eggplant!
In “Garden B” we’re growing tomatoes, artichokes (an experiment), New Zealand Spinach (normal spinach doesn’t do so well in Texas), and soy beans. We’ve never grown soy beans (or “poppy beans” as we like to call them) before, but they are doing great so far and our family loves them. Maybe if they work out well enough, we’ll plant enough next time to manufacture our own soy milk, since cow’s milk is over $4 a gallon!
And in “Garden C,” we’re growing cantelope, watermelon, cucumbers, squash, onions, and romaine lettuce.
I’m also growing some herbs in a separate pot: oregano, basil, parsley, and rosemary.
And…that’s how my garden grows.
p.s. Scott commented that you can’t tell how much I love gardening from this post, so I’m adding more. I LOVE IT! The method I use is called Square Foot Gardening. There is virtually no weeding, hardly any thinning, and it’s all so easy to reach. When I was little I really wasn’t excited about gardening. We had a huge part of our side lawn that was full of rows of raspberries that we had to bundle up (remember, this was Rexburg, Idaho) early in the morning and go out to pick, getting all scratched up along the way. Then, when I was a little older, we had a garden (almost as big as my back yard now) that was full of corn. At the end of the summer we would spend a whole day picking, shucking, washing, boiling, cutting, and freezing the corn. We had another garden the same size full of all the other usual vegetables. There was constant weeding to do. I like my gardening much more now!
The blog cannot capture how excited Jeana is over her garden. Jeana’s garden is her escape when she is having a stressful day.
If this crop is successful, we’re likely to add Gardens D, E, and F.
Our garden is doing pretty well too. We planted big tomatoes, grape tomatoes, anaheim peppers, bell peppers, carrots, onions, carrots, and a lettuce mix. I think we did too much though and will have to thin it. We used the whole packet of carrots and lettuce in two or three 4′ troughs and planted all 100 onion starters. Eek. What are we going to do with 100 onions? When we grew a small crop of corn growing up, we hand pollinated the corn and got a better crop (large fields will do it by itself with bees and the wind).
Oh, BTW, I saw you and Jamie at REI last night. You probably didn’t see me because I was in disguise trying on sunglasses. Riley broke my other pair, so she came with me to help me pick some out. I looked later, but you were gone, so maybe you went to the paddling class? Are you preparing for another adventure race, like the aqua terra?
We did go to the paddling class last night. I think the Aqua Terra got cancelled because they didn’t have enough people sign up, but we are planning to do the Adventure Race Girl again in June!
It looks great! It looks like you have your same square foot gardening as before, just a lot more of them. I am a little jealous. It is still too cold here to plant anything, but we’re hoping we can get our peas and radishes in soon and then work on the other stuff. It has to warm up sometime.
The only thing I know about corn is that you have to plant a LOT of it. It has to be able to be cross pollinated so if you don’t have much, it won’t do very well.
Happy Harvesting!!!
Okay- so now from the comments on corn, it kind of makes me want to pull it out and do more soy beans.
Perfect timing for your post! Eric just built two more boxes for us. I will have to try SOY beans. We still have two weeks before recomended planting begins. Happy Gardening
I would love to grow a garden, but the deer and the squirrels would eat everything. Who knows what other critters it would bring down from the mountain. Sigh.
Hey Jeana!
I love your gardens – I tried to start some last year but I was pregnant and it just didn’t happen. So this year I have 2 boxes so far and am going to start a 3rd here as soon as I get my plants! I love the SFG method, I’m glad to see you have had such great success with it. Gives me hope that I can do it too!
I’m blogging my progress on it at mommyandbeyond.blogspot.com if you’re interested….
I really want to try this gardening method. It looks way manageable and hopefully productive. Have you done this before? Any tips for a first timer?