I wouldn’t say that the tomatoes from my 2011 gardening experiment were a great success, and yet they weren’t a failure either. The tiny container Bitonto Cherry was prolific and delicious. My Matt’s Wild Cherry got off to a rough start, but in the end it practically took over the tomato trench. I learned that [...]
View Article blight, early blight, fertilizing, garden, gardening, organic, SFG, soil, soil amendments, square foot gardening, tomatoes, vegetable garden, vegetable gardening, watering
Some time around early June my garlic sent up these tall curly cues. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with them and thought that maybe the would flower or something. A friend of mine told me that the garlic would do this but for some reason I was completely unprepared. He also said that [...]
View Article garden, gardening, garlic, garlic scape pesto, garlic scapes, organic, recipes, SFG, square foot gardening, vegetable garden, vegetable gardening
Last year one of the worst failures of my garden were my squash plants. Epic fail is really more like it. No matter what methods I tried, I couldn’t make my squash grow if my life had depended on it (and thank goodness it didn’t). Summer squash, zucchini, winter squash… it was all the same. [...]
View Article garden, gardening, hand pollination, midnight lightning zucchini, organic, seminole winter squash, SFG, spineless beauty zucchini, square foot gardening, squash, vegetable garden, vegetable gardening, veggie gardens, waltham butternut squash, yellow crookneck squash
Last year I had some issues with soil nutrients. It’s no lie… The little plants that I had so carefully cultivated in my library got starved when I put them outside. Regardless that this faux pas was not on purpose, the damage was still done and my garden struggled for much of the season. In [...]
View Article SFG, soil testing, square foot gardening, vegetable gardening, veggies
Welcome to the 2012 edition in the collective blog series: Painting Our Black Thumbs Green. You can find other related posts in Veggies Squared. This blog meme is held in conjunction with Christina of The Table has Shoes and Other Ambiguities. Last year we both conducted fairly successful experiments in edible gardening… and this year [...]
View Article blight, carrot grow bags, carrots, copper fungicide, garden, garden location, garden planning, gardening, Jerusalem artichokes, Landreth Seed Company, Mel Bartholomew, organic, Painting Our Black Thumbs Green, POBTG, Potato Grow Bags, potatoes, Seven Springs Farm, SFG, square foot gardening, sun mapping, tomatoes, vegetable garden, vegetable gardening
Drought, flood, locusts… Sounds like an introduction to The Old Testament, right? Sadly it’s just what ordinary farmers and gardeners have to deal with every season. I knew that when I started my garden I could expect to have some stumbling blocks along the way, but I didn’t expect to beating back the hordes right [...]
View Article aphids, beans, Black Swallowtail Caterpillar, blossom end rot, broccoli, brown marmorated stink bug, cabbage worm, carrots, caterpillar, honeydew, margined blister beetle, Organocide, potatoes, praying mantis, Tabasco, toad, tomatoes
I can hardly believe that I harvested the last of my lettuce yesterday… January 1st, 2012. Most of it actually still looked really good, but I thought that my luck would shortly run out with the absence of any killing frosts. After all, we don’t live in the Deep South, Virginia’s weather is bound to [...]
View Article garden, gardening, lettuce, SFG, square foot gardening, vegetable garden, vegetable gardening