Planted tomatoes & peppers

So actually before I go in to what I planted today I have to say... I have been in a conundrum. what's a girl to do when she wants to garden but will be moving in the middle of the summer?


grow in containers! :)
So what i ended up doing this afternoon was loads of back breaking work. I am exhausted! I filled tons of containers I got from my Mom and planted tomatoes and lots of peppers.









Here you can see a few of them. I can't remember what's what, but those are mostly peppers and the small one is an old dried up petunia, I'm not sure if it will live.









Here's my tomatoes. And yes I had to fill the containers, plant the maters, and then I dug holes in the beds and put the containers in. In my theorizing this will help them from getting too dried out (plus I'll mulch too) and then I can utilize my fancy shmanzy irrigation system that I put in. You can see the lines going over the maters. This way when I move, I can just pull them out.




Here is my only fully planted bed. On the far side I've got 3 different types of onions, then I have some carrots. I did have radishes but they weren't bulbing out so I pulled them and just stuck the peppers in there. All those are peppers. And way to go me for recycling - the white containers on the far right are milk jugs with the tops cut off.





And just for fun, here's one of my shady beds, you can see the peas growing in the little patch I planted. Also you can see the lone BROCCOLI which is what I thought initially was some sort of weird lettuce.








Here's my Borage that I direct seeded. I dug one of them up and put it in a container next to my strawberries and potatoes.










And here's my happily mulched strawberries and a few surviving runners in the black container. Those will go up to my parents' place.










Some more of my starts!Most of these are my melons, cucumbers and pumpkins. I don't know how many of those I will plant, but many of them will probably end up at my parents' place too. On the right there are two raspberry starts that I dug up from my friend's house. I have someone mailing me some salmonberry starts too, so we'll see if those survive!





And here is some of my other plants. Some leftover peppers & maters that I'll plant at my parents' place and you can see the grape cuttings in the back out for some sunshine.









My tropicals! They are growing like crazy.












Except my pepper vine has mites! I'm going to try smoking them out tonight and see how that goes. I'm pretty sure the mites were on it when it got here.









My vanilla orchid is growing! That green shoot at the top is brand new.











And here's one of the first citrus trees that I got - allll of that is new growth. Crazy huh! It's also setting bud for another flower... I had pulled off all the flowers when I got it because I wanted it to establish first for about 6 months but apparently it's pretty happy :)

My new obsession - tropicals!

Ok so here's the deal. I have this thing about the supply chain... basically, it's not infallible. Things could happen. And with our economy, who knows what could happen?

And here's practical little me saying - zomg if the food chain was interrupted how would I get MANGOS or AVOCADOS??? LEMONS AND LIMES???

This thought has been ricocheting around in my brain for about a year now so gradually I have started researching growing tropical plants. Not that I really think I'd have a big crop, but hey, if bananas or pineapples were expensive or impossible to get I think it would be nice to have them once in a while. Plus, it's just COOL to grow tropicals indoors.

So here's my little collection so far! I am very proud of each of my pieces. I don't know if I will ever get fruit or anything but it is FUN to have them, I love it.

Here's a couple that are really fun! I won't get anything out of them until someday when I have a good-size greenhouse, though, but it's still a novelty. The vine on the left is a vanilla orchid. The flowers bloom for ONE DAY only and need to be hand-pollinated in order to grow a bean. Oh yeah, and it needs like 40 feet of length in order to be mature enough to flower. That's why I need a greenhouse :)




The one on the right is Piper Nigrum AKA black pepper. Somewhat easy to grow from what I've heard but also one that needs a LOT of room to climb. It's a vine so I'll basically need to get a greenhouse with a really big looping trellis. The berries grow in little clusters. What we know as black peppercorns are actually the immature green peppercorns dried. You can also make white pepper by allowing the berries to mature and removing the outer shell. Either way, they are very potent, way moreso than the black peppercorns you can buy so I am really hoping I can try them! Something a lot of people do is just crush the green berries right off the plant and use them. Lots of experimenting potential... if I just happened to have a huge greenhouse with lots of room for this vine to roam, that is ;)

Here are two of my citrus trees. I just got them a few weeks ago when I went to Home Depot with my mom and happened to naturally sorta gravitate towards the plant section. What did I see but not only a Meyer Lemon for $14.95 but also a SATSUMA mandarin! I was having a hard time finding them, and mail-order it would be hard to beat finding 4 foot trees in such great condition for only 15 bucks! So I got the two...












... and then the other day I went back and got another - a navel orange. The last one they had, too! Isn't it beautiful? Just $15, too... a steal considering what I'd pay for a tree like that shipped to me. The first two had already put on new growth in the week they were at my house so I decided to get this one. They had a few other citrus trees but those were the main ones I wanted. I might still go back for a blood orange, though, that one looked cool, but I'm running out of room on the ONE window I can keep them by :)










And this one doesn't technically count as a tropical but I forgot to blog it earlier with my starts :) These are my grape cuttings that I got earlier this year. I got 5 Thompson Seedless, about 20 Concord, and 4 each of two different wine grapes, Chardonel and one other I can't remember.

Anyway, I completely did them wrong (the Thompson and Concord, that is) so I am not expecting much of a turnout but you can see I do have SOME! The big leaf you see is the Chardonel wine grape (thanks, Gary!) and the one right behind it right on the vermiculite is a Concord (and there's one more Concord putting out a leaf but you can't see it in this pic). I know some more of the starts are still alive so I guess we'll see what the turnout is like once it's time to plant them. I hope Papa gets his tractor ready! Hopefully we'll have quite a few to plant.

Oh and honorable mentions that don't have a photo - I currently have a pineapple that is trying really hard to grow roots and two germinated key lime seeds that I have planted. Key limes do grow true to seed so I'm hoping to get some trees, although I could just swing by Home Depot and get a 4 foot lime tree for 15 bucks! lol... I am terrible. I got a choice of $50 gift card from work when I won a drawing and what did I choose? Home Depot so I could get gardening and irrigation supplies... haha I am such a nerd. Oh well. I still have about $18 left, so I could probably go get another tree. Just no place to put it.

Oh and I also have some ginger, two pots of it but no sprouts yet, those are just recently planted.

So, not bad, right? :)

4" soil blocker

OK so I finally got to put the 4" soil blocker that Tommy made me to the test. Best illustrated with pictures, of course.

Here's the blocker. It's an 8 inch length of 4" PVC pipe with some sort of end cap that happens to fit perfectly right inside it. There's a u-shaped bolt that forms a handle and then the nuts that it attaches to on the bottom form sort of "dibbles" for the seeds, 2 per block.















So basically I hold the cap in place, flip the blocker upside down and fill it loosely with my blocking mix.









I carefully set it onto a plastic lid that I'm using as a cover just for me to press onto. You could press onto the table directly if you wanted to.











A closer look at the bottom of the lid, you can see the two bolts that are good sized and form a good size dibble on both sides.









So here is the lid once I have flipped the blocker back on to sit on the plastic lid, I'm getting ready to press.

















Time to press! The handle works great although I will say next one I make will only be 6 inches long (the tube) and I'll just fill it in place... to get a decently compacted block I had to press further than my hand could comfortably reach and so I had to use a towel and a stick to push it in all the way. I think if I made the tube shorter and just filled the whole length with mix I'd end up with the same amount of mix but not so far to press.












And here it is all compacted!


















I carefully slide the tube upwards, leaving the "plunger" top in place sitting right on top of my compressed soil block.

















Using a spatula, I move the block from the plastic lid to it's permanent home in my seed tray.











And then once it is in it's home I lift the top off very carefully and voila!


















And here's a tray almost filled with the blocks. You can sort of see the two indentations on each side that the bolts made, they are a great size for the bigger seeds you will plant in these like melons, pumpkins, etc.

I got cucumbers and melons planted in these, and I also started some marigolds and basil in some of the 2 inch blocks.



Speaking of the 2 inch blocks, one thing I wanted to do was to make the bigger block so I could easily pot up a 2inch block into it. But I found that this design didn't work well for that. I had a 2 inch block but I couldn't seem to get the soil mix compacted enough on the sides of the block. I tried doing it in layers which worked a little bit but then it occurred to me - I'm trying to make this simple, right? It was really just too complicated to make it work so I just took the blocker for what it was, ran to the store down the street for some 18oz keg cups, and potted my tomatoes & peppers up into those. They worked perfectly and were way quicker to fill than making 4 inch soil blocks with 2inch square holes in them :)

Garden update - April 2010

Well, my garden is doing QUITE well so far. Due to the warm winter and spring we have had I decided to be a little adventurous and plant some things before I am supposed to. I covered them with a row cover and it helped protect them quite nice! Mostly just that I planted my onions SUPER early and I also have planted carrots and beans which I am not supposed to plant for a few more weeks. Oh well :)

So here's some pics!
Here's my strawberries. I trimmed them all back and they are all starting to put out new leaves, although a couple of them are being slowpokes.










I've pulled the row cover back on one of the beds to let the green onions grow... those are left over from last year and they survived the winter so I am hoping for a batch of seed.









Some petunias we planted. Notice I finally have my irrigation system hooked up and being used! It's nice :)










Cute little garden helper












Can you believe she's almost two??? Oh and in the background there you can see my spring planted garlic which is ALMOST as tall as those volunteers in the last patch that got left last year.









Here's a peek underneath one of my floating covers, you can see onion seedlings poking up. They took so long to germinate I'd given up hope, but kept it covered because I planted carrots right next to them and lo & behold, both of them are coming up!







Here's a picture of my grass-invaded bed, this is where my garlic volunteers are from last year. i think when I planted them in the fall of '08 some of them just never made it past the thick layer of leaf mulch I had on them because I know I pulled up all the garlic that had come up last year but I have at least three separate plants, and then one of them is technically three plants of it's own because apparently it had a few cloves last year and each one sprouted.



And here's another shot of the spring planted garlic. On the right is a broccoli I unsuccessfully tried to overwinter.










And here's a shot of the whole garden. It's so beautiful to me :)


Anyway that's it for my garden update so far. My seedlings are doing well in my basement but that's for a different post. I don't know how much I will actually be planting in the garden this year, actually, because we might be moving in June. I plan on doing a lot of containers because there are a few types of tomatoes I need to save seed from since I planted my last ones... mostly just the Dad's Sunset and Tess' Land Race Currant tomato.

Oh I almost forgot - Potato SEEDS.

I forgot to add on that last post that I'm doing an experiment :)

Last year I had gotten some heirloom seed potatoes from Ronniger. They were fingerling types, and 2 different varieties.

To my surprise, they set seed! Ever the curious one, I saved those seeds the same way I would save tomato seed and I am going to grow them this year to see what I get! Depending on who pollinated them they might just be duds but who knows, right? The potato seeds have also sprouted and so I think that will be a fun experiment for me to do this year, we'll see! I never had seen them before but according to my google searches this is a rare thing but it does happen occasionally.