So... I am taking on a new hobby this year...one I haven't tried before and I don't know if I'll be any good at it. Square Foot Gardening. (Let me just preface this by saying that I don't have house plants because I can't keep anything alive....I stick with silk stuff that only needs dusting....so this will be an interesting experiment.)
Why, you might ask, would I want to suddenly take up gardening when I can't grow anything (other than weeds...as my neighbors will attest)? Well, after working hard on the whole "food storage" thing, I kinda felt like maybe I needed to learn to be self sufficient in other ways. It just feels like something I need to learn how to do. And since I am brimming with spare time (insert belly laugh here) I figured, why not?
So I got the book from the library... This one:
And I read it cover to cover. I got really excited and just KNEW I could do it... I was ready to go build myself 15 garden boxes and start planting right away...and it was only February. But then the book was due and I took it back to the library. After about two weeks I realized I had forgotten everything I had read and I was going to have to buy the book. So I bought this one:
After all, it is the ALL NEW book...and I'm glad I did because somewhere between the first and second book he really simplified things.
Now, a couple months later, this is what I have:
These are my strawberry plants. There are some seeds planted in the back but the rest of this box is still empty. I need to stagger things because I don't need everything to decide to be ready to eat all at once.
These are tomatoes and peppers... with lettuce, onions, and garlic (hopefully) growing in the front. I know it's early to plant the tomatoes and peppers, but the Square Foot Gardening expert I talked to swore up and down that if I made these little greenhouse huts they would be okay so I am trusting her. So the white plastic goes closed at night and then open to vent them during the day.
These two boxes are deeper for things that need more space. The back box (that isn't full yet) has potatoes in it. Apparently, I was supposed to just barely cover them, then when they sprout I am supposed to cover the leaves with more dirt and keep doing that until the box is full and it will fill with potatoes. I'm awfully impatient and it's all I can do to not go dig around in there and see if the potatoes are doing anything.
The front box has broccoli (my kids were SO THRILLED), carrots and onions.
The book (and several hopefully reliable sources online) told me to plant my tomatoes horizontally with only the tippy top sticking out of the dirt. Supposedly, a tomato plant will grow more roots from it's stem, and this will give it a bigger root ball. It was scary burying the whole plant... I felt like I was killing it. You may notice that I already have everything covered with bird netting... because I don't want to find any cat crap hiding in my garden
And this is my dandelion farm, which we affectionately call "the lawn". I'm hoping to kill these buggers before they go to seed and fill up my nice new garden boxes with stinking dandelions. Hopefully these aren't the only things that grow in my yard this year.
After a hard day of digging, planting, watering, etc my hands are dry and I have dirt caked under my fingernails. Now I can truly be called a gardener...or do I have to actually grow something first?
No comments:
Post a Comment