March Garden Update!! - Spring is finally here! YAYYYY!!!!

Nothing like some good old fashioned manual labor to kick off SPRING!!!  WOO HOO!!  Had to hand till the small bed and part of the large bed due to carburetor issues with the tiller. 

Jill planted our broccoli and lettuce.  I decided to give the big bed a 6 inch buffer from the edge of the box in hopes to control overgrowth.

Lettuce in the small bed.  Grid all laid out and ready for herbs and cucumbers.

Worm.

Moving away from the rope method that I used last year and replaced it with recycled wire mesh from my sister.  Even though the rope worked well, the cucumbers are going to love the mesh!  I'm also going to chance not having a fence around the small bed.  The squirrels and birds did not seem to be a problem last year due to the success with feed and quenching their thirst via bird bath.  I do however still have some fence on hand.

AHHHHHHH A SNAKE!!!!!  Found this little guy by the stairs of the house and tossed him into the neighbor's yard.   I thought about throwing him in the garden but I feared that he might get chopped up.  I don't mind worms, but I can't do snakes.

A couple of hours bustin' out the old carpenter skills.  Result: 3 rows of trellis for the tomatoes!!!  Wood is recycled from my old bedroom and music room at my parent's house.  I ran out of mesh midway through but I think I'll have no problem buying some extra.

Grid and mesh on the small bed.

Herbs and Flowers

Tomatoes and Peppers

He's so handy

Our friend Wes gave us an old tiller that wasn't working. Phil set to work this evening to fix it up. He had it fired up in under two hours. What a guy!

Bed Layouts

This year we decided to plant different crops in in different beds and try to leave more space, especially around the bigger plants. We also decided to not plant some of the types of vegetables we did last year.

Phil said the smaller bed is more my  bed. It has lots of herbs, plus some vegetables (cucumbers, pole beans, jalapenos, lettuce, and carrots). I am also going to put in a few flowers. When we went and bought seeds today I grabbed some lavender which wasn't part original plan, so I'll need to figure out where that is going to go.

Small Bed (Jill's Bed)

The bigger bed will house most of the vegetables that we plan on growing. I guess this is Phil's bed (since the other one is mine). This one will have beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, bell peppers, banana peppers, broccoli, lettuce, carrots, onions, bush beans, and zucchini. Unlike my small bed diagram, this one does not accurately represent how many square feet we are giving to each plant. 

Big Bed (Phil's Bed)

The beefsteak tomatoes, bell and banana peppers, broccoli  will all have 4 square feet with one plant in the center. The lettuce will have 4 square feet for 4 plants. There will be a total of 32 bush beans in 6 square feet, and the same for the carrots. The zucchini will have 9 square feet per plant. 

So that is our plan. We'll see how it plays out. 

The start of 2012

Phil shoveling dirt

 Phil and I used our day off today to get the garden prepared a little for this year. We raked some leaves and added them to the larger bed. Phil made many trips to Carondelet Park for some free dirt. There was quite a bit of trash in the dirt so we had to be careful to pick out what we could find, but it's free!

We use plastic bins I previously used for a container
garden to haul the dirt in our van.

The large garden bed that as we filled with the new dirt.

All of our hard work paid off. I don't even know how many
trips it took to fill the big bed.

Small bed - only took 1.5 trips!

I was thinking about doing some cardio before yoga tonight, but after all the shoveling and raking I did today I think it is necessary.

Next up starting seeds. I'll also be doing a post that shows our layouts for each bed this week. We are going to do things a little differently this year. 

It's a jungle!

Small bed

Eggplant blossoms

Roma Tomatoes

Zuccini 

Small bed

Big bed

This week's haul

For the second time this week we'll be enjoying green beans from the garden with our dinner. That is the third cucumber we've harvested so far. I think we might have waited a hair too long on the broccoli but we'll see. I also picked a bunch of catnip that I think I am going to try drying in the stove.

Also the watermelon grew a lot this week!

Drying Basil (and Catnip)

I harvested some basil last night and decided to try drying it in the oven.

I preheated the oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit. I cut the basil into small pieces and placed it on a baking sheet.

After six minutes in the oven it looked pretty dried out. There were a few pieces that I didn't cut small enough so they felt a little damp still, but I didn't want to burn the rest so I am leaving the tray in the oven overnight to dry more before putting into a little jar.

I also hung some Catnip in the basement to dry.