Best of 2013

2013 was a great year for vegetable container gardening here at the Baby Bee Garden! As the years go on, we get more adventurous with our planning, and it's so interesting to see how each season turns out a bit different from the ones before. The season started off with soooo much rain! It worked out really well for some of our plants, and not so much for others. Let's begin with the stars of our 2013 garden!

Lettuce, carrots, beets, eggplant, tomatoes, green beans, bell pepper

Bell peppers, cukes, tomatoes and eggplants

Stake your lettuce for extra harvests!

Our bell peppers loved the soggy weather! We had so many big, delicious bell peppers. We always hold out for them to turn red and they're always worth the extra wait. Our cucumbers had a great turn out. We had eggplants out the wazoo! But for some reason, all the eggplants on one plant were this golden yellow color instead of purple like the rest... weird! Most of the tomato plants suffered from disease and rot from excess moisture, but fortunately we were able to get a good amount of tomatoes before the plants lost all their leaves. Way more than we got in the endless scorching heat of 2012.

It was our first year growing green beans, and we couldn't recommend them more! We planted about 12 seeds and ended up with literally pounds of green beans. We never get tired of them when steamed lightly and tossed in garlic and butter. Big bang for your garden-space buck! We also had several monster basil plants, which the bees just loved! We're going to let some flower earlier in 2014 to attract more bees to the garden, because they go crazy for basil flowers. Lettuce was one of the big crops this year. It's so nice having endless salads full of freshly picked lettuce. A little tip for all you container gardeners growing lettuce out there: when you harvest, don't pick the whole lettuce! Put stakes by your lettuce plants and attach them as you pick the leaves working from the bottom up. By picking just what you need for the day and leaving the rest to grow, you'll get several harvests instead of one! Some of these slow-bolting lettuces, like the oak leafs we grew, just kept growing and growing and producing mad amounts of lettuce!

Along with the wins, we had our fair share of fails this season. Corn on deck was a huge disappointment! Not one single plant survived to be more than six inches tall, they all succumbed to some kind of bug that crawled into the stem up from the roots and killed them so quick. We tried at least three successions of the corn, all with the same sad result. We may have harvested one zucchini. We only planted one this year and squash vine borers took it out pretty early, just after it had set flowers and a few fruits. Beets, radishes and carrots saw pretty poor production. The potatoes were pretty much a bust, yielding only about a pound of small potatoes from about six plants. We've decided to give up trying to root crops for the most part, they just never turn out. The green onions did just fine, but that's all, so we'd prefer to save the space for something that will yield better. Beet's cousin, swiss chard, never really took off this year. They never grew much in the first place, and then worms just decimated them around mid-season.

Hey, every year is different, right? It's always a process figuring out what does well and what doesn't, but all-in-all it was a very successful year!

It's all about the harvest!

Here's a list of all the things we grew and ate:

Tomatoes
Lettuce
Potatoes
Snow peas
Green beans
Cucumbers
Eggplants
Jalapenos
Bell peppers
Carrots
Strawberries
Green onions
Not to mentions the herbs and flowers!


Once again, the Baby Bee gardeners have proved that you can grow a significant amount of fresh produce to supplement your food supply right in your own yard with a minimum of space and labor. Enjoy the pics and stay tuned for the debut of the 2014 Baby Bee Garden plan...

First harvest update

The first few little strawberries

Spring has been kind to the Bee Garden! The weather here has been so mild compared to last season, and the garden is looking good! We've got everything all planted out according to our plan, and it's been such a pleasure watching our little seedlings grow into their new homes. We've enjoyed our first harvests of a couple kinds of lettuce, and a few strawberries, radishes and snow peas. Some of the herbs have reached picking size, as well, giving us an early supply of cilantro, basil and green garlic. As usual, we've endured a couple of pest problems so far. The squirrels have been up to their usual shenanigans, digging in the pots, uprooting more than a few tender seedlings. Our small carrots have been about three-quarters wiped out by the tree rats. We started out using ground cayenne pepper sprinkled over the pots to deter them, but have since switched to ground cinnamon, which seems to work a little better. Unfortunately, all of our corn sprouts have been killed by a small beetle we found out is called the southern corn billbug. This creepy little guy burrows into the corn roots, digging up into the stem from the bottom, killing the sprout. The corn had pretty poor germination rates for starters, giving us only 4 little sprouts... and now they are all dead. Time of year supposedly has something to do with presence of billbugs, so we will try again in a couple months to grow some corn for a fall harvest. Otherwise, everything's doing really well! Stay tuned for next post, which should be coming up shortly. The plants are growing so fast, they'll have doubled in size by time you finish reading this post...

Clockwise from top left: front porch scene, yard scene, siamese twin radish, garden salad, first harvest

Clockwise from top left: heatwave tomatoes and lettuce, bush cherry tomatoes and green garlic, snowpeas and zucchini, cucumbers, and lettuce and a small corn sprout

Baby Bee Garden Plan 2013

Spring is here in the South! Time to break out the gloves and get gardening! We're off to a bit of a late start here at the Baby Bee Garden, but it's a long season ahead and we've got plenty of time. So, where to start? With our garden plan, of course! Planning is the key to successful gardening.

We started by re-arranging the pots since last season. The way we had it set up last year, some of the pots were difficult to reach. This made it hard for us to keep certain plants trained to their supports. It was also hard to check the plants and keep them rid of pests, like the caterpillars in the tomato plants. We decided to move about half of our containers up onto the porch. The rest of the pots are out in the yard, resting on the pathway stones leading from the street to the door of our house. The pots will be easier to reach and we thought it might help deter some of the birds and squirrels if the pots are closer to the house. Maybe? Hopefully! We shall see! Another reason for moving the garden is that we're trying to grow back the grass in the old spot, in case we end up moving to a new house sometime this season! If we do move, it will be extra important that we keep the plants from sprawling out of their pots, so they can go in the moving truck without risking much damage.

Now that we've decided on the arrangement of the pots, we can think about what will go into them. We're starting out with a lot of seeds that were left over from previous seasons. Of course, we could not resist picking out a few new additions! The most exciting new veggie is... wait for it... CORN! Yep, we're gonna try an newly developed variety called On Deck which is bred for containers, and we can't wait to see how it does! We ordered three packs of tomato seeds, because we were unhappy with our tomatoes last year. We had grown a Roma variety that just did not produce well through the heat of the summer. So, Roma's are out. The new tomatoes are Patio Princess, Baxter's Bush Cherry, and Heatwave. The first two are specially bread for container gardens and are supposed to only reach about 2 feet high! The Heatwave are bred to produce through the hottest temperatures. Naturally, we have high hopes for all three! We're adding 3 lettuces, Tom Thumb, a small buttery lettuce, Cimaron, a purple-tipped Romaine variety, and Black Seeded Simpson, a lettuce considered a 'classic' that we've never eaten, all supposed to be slow to bolt in the heat. The other new guys will be Spearmint, Blue Lake 47 green beans, and Yukon Gold potatoes. We're trying out some potato growing bags we received as a gift, and we're looking forward to seeing how they work out. Even though we are technically past 'potato planting time', shhhhh...

Here's a list of all the items to be grown in the Baby Bee Garden this year!

• corn
• tomatoes
• lettuce
• spinach
• chard
• potatoes
• snow peas
• green beans
• zucchini
• cucumbers
• eggplant
• jalepeno
• bell peppers
• carrots
• beets
• radishes
• strawberries
• green onions
• green garlic
• dill
• basil
• spearmint
• catnip
• parsley
• cilantro
• pansies
• morning glories
• marigolds
• sunflowers
• zinnias

Below is a sketch of the garden plan, along with a couple pictures of the new arrangement. Time to get out there and get those pots ready for planting! Happy gardening...

The best of 2012

Happy New Year, Baby Bee readers! Planning is underway for the 2013 Baby Bee Garden, but we can't look forward without taking a look back at 2012. We began the 2012 gardening season with the single goal of growing a better garden than ever. Well, we certainly out-did ourselves! Our plan was bold, and an overwhelming success! We planned for 21 vegetables, 6 florals, and 5 herbs in 21 containers. In the end we harvested and enjoyed 17 vegetables, 5 florals and 4 herbs, a success rate of about 84 percent! Here's a list of what we grew and ate:

• Spinach
• Snow Peas
• Broccoli
• Green garlic
• Lettuce
• Radishes
• Kale
• Carrots
• Swiss Chard
• Roma Tomatoes
• Zucchini
• Cow peas
• Eggplant
• Bell peppers
• Jalapeno peppers
• Cucumbers
• Strawberries
• Cilantro
• Parsley
• Basil

All grown in pots right out in the front yard! Now, it wasn't always easy. Our spinach was good, but grew slowly and bolted too soon. The broccoli and kale were primarily consumed by cabbage worms. The carrots, beets, and onions got crowded out by their container companions, resulting in tiny carrots and the death of the beets and onions. The cow peas grew beautifully, but the harvest from so few plants yielded barely enough for a small bowl-full of peas. Butternut squash and cantaloupe were abandoned early-on due to space issues. The dill never stood a chance against the squirrels. The cucumbers, zucchini and tomatoes out-grew their supports and spilled over into neighboring pots. And as vigorously as our tomato plants grew, we only got to eat about a dozen tomatoes. The birds, squirrels and caterpillars ate all the rest.

Of the plants that did well, some became the stars of our garden. The zucchini plants were lush and lovely and gave us plenty of succulent fruits. The swiss chard was big and beautiful, with tender leaves, and grew untouched by any pest. The snow peas grew fast, gave us multiple crops of crunchy sweet peas, and looked great on the obelisk trellis. The marigolds and nasturtiums lent the garden bursts of bright color all over, and it was a delight to eat the peppery nasturtium flowers in our salads. The strawberry plants grew a few hand-fulls of strawberries, just enough to munch on while visiting the garden. The eggplants were prolific, giving us pounds of the long purple fruits, some of which we were forced to give away since we couldn't eat them all. And nothing could be easier or faster to grow than cucumbers, which went from seed to fruit in just a few weeks. It's such a joy to prepare a meal with produce you grew at home. Just take a look at this, eggplant parmesan casserole!

All in all, it was a good season.We learned a lot about how much food you can grow with limited space. And can you believe we grew every plant from seed, with the exception of the strawberries? All this bounty from a handful of tiny seeds! That's the miracle of Mother Nature, right there. A big "Thank you!" to all the readers who followed us on this adventure in 2012! We hope you all will join us for what promises to be an exciting 2013 Baby Bee Garden... (click pics to enlarge)

Summer's here!

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Welcome back to the Baby Bee Garden! It's week 19 for the garden, and we can say this year's efforts have definitely paid off. Since last month we have harvested several zucchini, a few bundles of Swiss chard, a crop of small carrots and a few tomatoes. There's been a steady supply of basil and parsley, as well. Our garden meals have been delicious. So far we've made squash casserole, zucchini pancakes with a swiss chard marinara, zucchini bread muffins, and, perhaps the best dish, a coconut curry with zucchini and featuring our little carrots.

It's been about a month since the last update. We were hoping there would be good news to report about our peppers and eggplants, and so there is! We have multiple pepper plants producing flowers right now, and one tiny pepper is beginning to grow. We got our bell peppers mixed up with our jalapenos during the seedling phase, so we're not totally sure what we're growing at this point... The small one developing looks like a bell. Two eggplants are getting big, both have flowers by now and one plant has a fruit about 2 inches long already. We planted some purple hull cowpeas which have just gotten started. These are new for us, and they look a lot different from the snow peas we grew. The plants look more like pepper plants than anything else. They're planted near the trellis, but they don't seem to be very vine-y. They do look healthy, though, and they're starting to form some flower buds. We can't wait to see what the flowers look like.

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The stars of the garden right now are the cucumber vines. We started these in June and boy have they grown fast! They've completely taken over their trellis, and now they are reaching out for support in nearby pots. We have to check them twice a day to make sure they aren't creeping too far. They have cute little yellow flowers all over and we're very anxious to see our first cucumber grow. So on the whole, we've had a lot of success up to this point. Of course it can't be all kittens and rainbows, now can it? We've had a heat wave for about two weeks recently, where the temperature got above 100 degrees every day. Plants don't really grow too well in that kind of weather, it seems. We've lost the kale plants, they just kind of shriveled up. The pansies are pretty much dead at this point. The strawberry plant took a hit because we missed watering it for a couple days. The leaves were almost completely burnt up, but it's bounced back since, sprouting some fresh bright green leaves. All of our zucchini plants have pretty much overgrown their pots. Next year we plan to stake them from the beginning, and prune them as they grow to train them to a small space. Our green tomatoes seem to have stopped growing, and they're just not turning red for some reason. Also we've noticed some of the green tomatoes developing "blossom end rot". The fruits get a dark spot on the bottom where the flower was, and they slowly rot. We've plucked so many of our little green tomatoes because of this!

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On top of that some creature has been eating the green tomatoes right off the plants, but we haven't been able to catch anything in the act. Hopefully, we'll see improvement as we move past the hottest part of the summer. We're just happy to be eating some food that we grew, it doesn't get much more satisfying than that! It's about time to begin planning for a new crop of fall vegetables, so stay tuned for more action in the Baby Bee Garden!

What happened in May...

Well, May has come and gone... the Baby Bee gardeners have been too busy to post! The garden looks lovely in this shot, we're about 15 weeks in here at the beginning of June.

Looks nice, huh? A few weeks ago, the combination of our lawn mower breaking down, a heat wave of 95 degree weather, and too many demands from our grown up jobs left the garden looking like this!

How embarrassing! The squash and kale were wilting and looking quite poorly. The cilantro is spent, the peas have over-grown the trellis, the weeds are creeping up... not pretty! Oh, well... so it didn't look as nice as we wanted for a few weeks... it still produced some food and that's what really matters! We harvested the rest of our broccoli which made a decent amount of florets. Broccoli leaves are edible, too, and there were plenty of those to eat. We got several small baskets of snow peas, lettuce, radishes and herbs.The kale has given us a half-pound bundle from one pot so far, not a lot, but just enough for one dinner for two. Our tomato plants have just grown their first green tomatoes. The swiss chard looks just about ready to eat. The zucchini squash plant is a huge, thirsty girl, with big, beautiful yellow blossoms and a few small zucchini growing under the shade of the leaves. Our flowers are doing well, too. We have several large marigold plants blooming, pansies bursting out of their pot and brilliant red nasturtiums.

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The only veggies that don't seem to be doing well are the peppers and eggplants... They're still alive, but they just don't seem to be growing. We'll keep a better watch on their food and water for now and see how they do. All in all, the success we've had this May is more than we had all last season! We hope that in our next post we will have good news to report about our peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, sunflowers, cantaloupes and butternut squash...

Bolting... harvest... dinner!

What happened to spring? Blink and you'll miss it, down here in zone 8a. The last few weeks have brought temperatures in the upper 80s, so it looks like spring is over!

About two weeks ago, we came out to inspect the garden and we saw something growing from the spinach that looked a little odd. We looked closely and realized that what we were seeing was a cluster of flowers... our spinach had bolted! When the temperature rises, plants grown for foliage start to make flower buds, and gardeners call this process bolting. Bolting is bad news. When you're growing a plant for the purpose of eating its leaves, you want the plant to grow as many tasty leaves as possible.

However, when the plant begins to make flowers, it shifts its energy away from growing nice leaves toward growing flowers and seeds for reproduction. At this point, some leafy greens like spinach and lettuce begin to lose their sweetness and become bitter. So, we knew it was time to harvest the spinach... oh well, it looked delicious! We decided to use the spinach, along with green garlic, basil and parsley from the garden, to make a hot pasta salad tossed with tortellini, tomatoes and olive oil. Our first meal from the garden was beautiful, healthy, delicious... and SATISFYING!

A few days later, we discovered that one of our lettuces had sent up a little cluster of flower buds in the middle... uh oh, bolting! Some of our peas had reached four and five inches long by this point and some of our radishes looked good enough to eat. It was high time for another harvest! We picked all those, plus a big double handful of cilantro. We don't know what kind of lettuce this was... it came from a mesclun seed mix and had a sweet, pungent flavor. We made a bed of this lettuce, added the radishes and sugar pod peas, and topped that with a dressing we made with the cilantro, lemon juice, garlic and oil. It all came together for a very interesting side salad.

The most recent plant to show signs of bolting was our biggest broccoli. We noticed that the floret cluster had begun to spread out a bit, it looked a bit looser when it had been densely packed. It was starting to show a hint of yellow color in some spots, and some of the individual buds looked big... these are all signs that the bud is about to flower, at which point it would be ruined for eating. The total diameter of the broccoli crown was about 3 inches, but we were forced to harvest it... We ate it raw on the spot! (click pics to enlarge)