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)

Baby Bee Garden in week 8

Well! Quite the spectacle! What you see here is about two thirds of the planned garden, gone from plan to reality! It's been 8 weeks since we planted the first pots on February 27th. Watching the plants mature has been exciting! The peas in pot 1 have begun to flower and the little white blooms are so pretty! The flowers don't last long, though, and the peas form quickly after the blossoms fall. In pot 2 the biggest broccoli plant has grown the beginnings of a crown. Let's hope the caterpillars don't get it! We have lettuce in pot 3 that looks ready to eat, and a few radishes will be ready, too. The poor, caterpillar ridden kale looks bigger lately, but it seems like half the leaves get chewed off every other day, so who knows if there will be anything left for us to eat. We're going to try planting kale again in the fall, maybe it will do better then.

Oh, pot 5... the pot we planned for dill. Unfortunately, the tree rats have destroyed about 80% of the little dill sprouts. As you can see, one dill plant seems to have taken root near the side of the pot, so we may have some dill yet. Several zucchini sprouts came up in the same spot over in pot 11, so we shifted one into the center of pot 5 to fill it in. Good luck little zucchini! The chard in pot 6 seems to be doing well, alongside the carrots that have hung in through the squirrel digging. It's nice that the caterpillars don't seem to like chard! The cilantro in pot 7 has gotten so big, it's overdue for a harvest! Next up is pot 8, with pansy plants looking good. Soon there will be pansy flowers, and we can't wait to see how they look since they came from a mixed pack.

The tomato in pot 9 has tripled in size and the parsley is filling in the rest of the room nicely. The tomatoes in pot 10 will reach the second rings of their cages soon, and we have some marigold action for a little color. Pot 11 has three good nasturtium plants that came up and the zucchini in the cage is growing quickly. Now the other trellis in this pot is for the cow peas, but they haven't sprouted for some reason. Maybe squirrels like to eat cow peas... Guess we need to plant another handful on our next planting day. We've got more marigold action in pot 13, and they have more buds ready to open soon. Pot 12 is the basil pot. The basil did well for the first few weeks, but lately we noticed the whole plants had this yellowish tint. Then, they started to look more yellow than green. After a bit of research, we came to the conclusion that they may not need so much water as we've been giving them. We're going to back off on the water and see if they look better soon.
So that's the Baby Bee Garden in week 8! `Bring on the harvest! And just in case you haven't been keeping up every week, check out this side by side comparison of week 2, week 5, week 6 and week 8! Now that's cool... (click pics to enlarge)

New pots in the garden!

Transplants in the terrarium

With our cool season veggies well established, the time for planting our warm season veggies had arrived! Warm season veggies are those that cannot live through a frost, like tomatoes, peppers, and squashes. We learned that here, in hardiness zone 8a, our latest probability of frost is around the middle of April. Our winter was very mild and spring arrived early, so we thought it might be safe to transplant some tomatoes in early April. We set April 1st as our goal date for adding pots for tomatoes, zucchini, cow peas, basil, catnip, nasturtiums and marigolds. Just like the rest, we're growing them all from seed. The tomatoes, basil, catnip and marigolds should be started early indoors, so we started those seeds in early February, about 8 weeks ahead of our planting date. We planned to sow the rest of the seeds directly into our garden pots.

Pot 10

Well planting day finally arrived, the transplants were ready as planned, and pots 10-15 went out into the front yard! Pot 10 had been planned for tomatoes, marigolds and basil, but the basil got cut at the last minute in favor of having more space for the tomatoes. Besides, we had reserved a pot especially for basil, pot 12. Pot 11 was for zucchini, cow peas and nasturtiums. We anchored trellises for the zucchini and peas and planted the seeds directly under them. We're hoping the nasturtiums will trail over the edge of the pot. Pot 13 was planted with only marigolds. Pot 14 became home for the catnip transplants.

Top right: pot 15, middle right: pot 14
 and random flower pots

We had a 15th pot planned for more dill, however pot 5 had already been devoted to dill and it has performed very poorly, so we decided not to plant any more just yet. Instead, we picked up a couple of strawberry transplants at the nursery and planted those in pot 15. Hopefully one day we will be eating fresh berries from this random addition! We also added three other pots at random, one planted with zinnia seeds, one with morning glories, and the last one planted with "flower balls" that a little hippie girl gave me, which are flower seeds rolled into a ball of clay. It'll be nice to have a few extra flowers around! With the seeds sown and transplants in place, it's time to sit back and let Mother Nature do her thing for a while...
stay tuned... (Click pics to enlarge)

Side view of the expanded garden. It's reached about two thirds of its total size.

Another month later...

Fast forward another month and... Wow! It's starting to look like a real garden!

 In pot 1 the sugar pod peas are climbing the trellis nicely. In front of that is the spinach, and look how big it's grown! Is it ready to eat yet???

Pot 2

Pot 1

The broccoli plants in pot 2 are HUGE and they look delicious! We'll be really happy if we get to eat homegrown broccoli florets next month, because these guys are quite popular with the caterpillars... Whenever there's time, we check the broccoli leaves to seek and destroy all caterpillars and eggs. We filled in pot 2 with spring onions, beets and green garlic hoping they would help fend off broccoli pests with their strong odors, but can't tell if it's made any difference. Several fellow gardeners have told us horror stories of broccoli failing to grow florets or getting eaten up by pests, but it looks like we'll have a mess of broccoli leaves to eat, if nothing else!

Pot 6

To the right of the broccoli is pot 6, home to the Swiss chard, nestled with carrots all around. See the tiny carrot tops? Tree rats, er... squirrels keep digging in the carrots, so they're not doing too well. Pot 5, down in front of the broccoli, has a few dill sprouts, but they've taken a beating from the squirrels, too. We've learned that even though we live in town, our garden can still be vulnerable to critters! Between the tree rats and the caterpillars, it's practically a battle zone!

Pot 4

Pot 4, front and center, has seen the worst of it. One of the kale plants died after a caterpillar ate all its leaves, but then we had a spinach seed come up in an awkward place over in pot 1, so we just moved it over into pot 4 to replace the dead kale. It wasn't even a whole day later when we came home and found the new spinach had been dug up by the tree rats! Bastards! Oh well... we will soon have another kale seedling ready to take its place. Pot 3 is a low bowl of mesclun lettuce and radishes. We had to thin out some of the plants after the seeds came up too close together, but hopefully everything has enough room to grow for a while now.

Pot 3

Over on the left side of the garden, you'll notice we added three more pots! Pot 8, on the end, has 5 little pansy plants. Next is pot 7, just for cilantro. Pot 9 we had planned for parsley alone, then it got a tomato plant added at the last minute. See, what had happened was... so we got this topsy-turvy tomato planter, you know the "as seen on TV" type... anyway, it's really hard to get a tomato in there without breaking it, so when we thought we had tortured this poor tomato seedling enough we ended up just sticking it in pot 9 and planting the parsley around it. The pot might be little small for a tomato, but we just had to wing it with that one! Gardening is a good exercise in adaptability in addition to patience. Well, that's the Baby Bee Garden about 6 weeks into our growing season here in zone 8A! This is approximately one third of whole garden, according to our garden plan! It won't be long now til we're eating fresh spring mix salads with radishes and sugar pod peas... mmm... (Click pics to enlarge)

Two weeks later..

We put our first transplants and seeds outdoors in the very early spring and here's what they looked like after a couple weeks. The peas in pot 1 came up within days, and started toward the trellis. You can barely see the spinach plant there in front. The pansies around the edges have survived the squirrel digging assaults. Those tree rats have been digging around all the pots every morning! Over in pot 2 the broccoli has grown bigger. There's not much to say about the kale in pot 4, it's still about the same size. Pot 5 was sown with dill seed and pot 6 with carrot seeds that haven't had time to sprout. Pot 3 is up on the porch, a bowl of mesclun lettuce and radishes which have just sprouted. The Baby Bee Garden is off to a lovely start, stay tuned for new additions coming soon... (Click pics to enlarge)

Pot 1

Pots 2 and 4

Pot 3

Seedings to transplants, and the first few pots!

It generally takes 6 or 8 weeks for a seed to grow into a plant big enough to transplant into the garden. We started our cool season vegetables in mid-January, aiming to transplant them in late February. On February 4th we started another round of seeds, including tomatoes, kale, marigolds, and basil with a goal planting date of April 3rd. Within a few weeks, we had so many little seedlings we ran out of space in the terrarium!

The terrarium sits in our south-facing window, so the seedlings get lots of light on sunny days. We nursed all the little guys until it was time to put out the first few pots near the end of February. About a week ahead of our first goal planting date, we began to set our broccoli, spinach and pansy seedlings outside for a few hours a day, to help them get used to the cruel outdoors after living inside their cozy terrarium for so long. We had planned for February 27th to be our planting day for pots 1 and 2 (see previous post for the garden plan) and that turned out just perfectly. All our seedlings had four or six leaves, they looked a little smaller than the size of the seedlings we have seen at nurseries, but we figured they'd be happier with plenty of room to grow in the big pots. If we had learned anything from our seedlings over that six week period, it was that plants WANT to live! They want to live way more than they want to die! Especially the pansies... they're tough!

We only had one spinach seedling to transplant, it went into the middle of pot 1 along with several pansy transplants around the outer edge. At the back of the first pot we anchored a pretty trellis and planted our sugar pod pea seeds, which we had soaked in water overnight to soften them. Three broccoli transplants went into pot 2. A few days later, we added pots 3, 4 and 5. Pot 3 is a large shallow bowl-shaped planter into which we sowed our mesclun lettuce mix (in the back of the picture on the steps). Pot 4 was planted with three red russian kale seedling. We sowed seeds for dill into pot 5. So, by March 3rd our container garden was up to 5 pots. We're off to a good start and it looks so cute! All that's left to do is water and wait...

The garden plan

It's never too early to start planning your garden. Gather 'round some gardening books and study up! In today's busy world it's easy to leave your garden planning to the last minute, but we have found that when we spend more time planning, we have better results. If you are working with a limited garden space, effective planning will ensure that you get the most food, beauty and joy from your efforts. One book we found that has been extremely helpful to us in our planning is McGee and Stuckey's The Bountiful Container.
This is a pretty popular book, easily found at a bookstore or online. It contains all kinds of great information on garden planning, like how to get started, how to combine different vegetables, herbs, fruits and flowers in to attractive container arrangements, and best of all, the book lists detailed information on how to start, care for, and harvest all the most popular garden plants. If you can only afford one book about container gardening, this is a good one!

We learned that container gardening could be a lot better than just sticking a tomato plant in a pot... you can combine more than one plant in each container to increase the variety, yield and beauty of your garden! Genius! Once we got past the old one-plant-per-pot idea, we started researching the best ways to combine our plants... this is when we got into the theories of companion planting. The idea is that some plants grow well in close proximity to other plants, and perform poorly next to certain others. The classic example was practiced by native Americans and is called The Three Sisters: planting beans, corn and squash in the same bed. The corn provides support to the beans and squash, the beans add nitrogen to the soil to feed the squash and corn, so they all do well. Some plants may offer pest control benefits to others, like planting stinky marigolds or fragrant dill around your tomatoes. The marigolds are so stinky, pests won't go near them, and the dill is so attractive, pests prefer eating the dill to eating your tomatoes. Radishes are good companions for most anything, loosening the soil for the surrounding plants' roots. There's a lot of great information out there, just do a google search on companion planting to learn all about it. Or you can take the easy way out and copy the Baby Bee Garden's combinations! We've spent countless hours researching to come up with our particular container combos, just be forewarned: this is all an experiment! We can't say for sure how things will turn out, because for the most part, we're trying everything for the first time! Maybe our plans are a bit ambitious for beginners... We've planned for at least 18 different vegetables, about 5 different herbs, several kinds of flowers and at least one fruit. All in all, our container garden will use more than 20 pots! There is a stone pathway in our yard going from the curb to our front steps and that's the home of the Baby Bee Garden. We figured placing the pots over the stone path would minimize the amount of our landlord's grass that gets killed. There will be seven, 24 inch diameter pots staggered in two rows to make up the heart of the garden. Those will be surrounded by seven, 18 inch diameter pots and seven or more small 10 or 12 inch diameter pots. The whole garden takes up an area of about 10 feet by 6 feet in the front yard! Yes, our neighbors do think we're freaks, but we don't care! At least we decided to do it in a classier way than last year, by buying huge garden planters rather than using ugly 5 gallon buckets! Those 24 inch planters are about $30 each... ouch! But we figure we'll use them for several years in a row, so next year we won't have to spend that money. Since we have our garden plan ready so early, we're able to spread out the expense of buying the containers by picking up a few every weekend instead of having to buy them all at one time, because we know we'll be starting with a few pots first, then adding more pots as the season progresses.
Here's a cute little sketch of the Baby Bee Garden!

Wow! It took a lot of time and planning to get this far! All the pots are numbered and labeled with the date the container will go in the yard, its size and its contents. Here's a detailed list of the garden plan:

• Pot 1, February 26, 24 inches: Bloomsdale spinach, Oregon sugar pod peas, and pansies
• Pot 2, February 26, 24 inches:  calabrese broccoli, Detroit dark red beets, evergreen bunching green onions and green garlic
• Pot 3, March 2, large bowl shaped planter: mesclun lettuce mix and cherry belle radishes
• Pot 4, March 2, 18 inches: red Russian kale, evergreen bunching green onions, and green garlic
• Pot 5, March 2, 12 inches: dill bouquet
• Pot 6, March 11, 18 inches: Danvers carrots, ruby red swiss chard
• Pot 7, March 23, 12 inches: cilantro
• Pot 8, March 23, 12 inches: pansies
• Pot 9, March 23, 12 inches: parsley
• Pot 10, April 1, 24 inches: roma tomatoes, lemondrop marigolds, and sweet basil
• Pot 11, April 1, 24 inches: dark green zucchini, pinkeye purple hull cowpea, and jewel nasturtiums
• Pot 12, April 1, 12 inches: sweet basil
• Pot 13, April 1, 12 inches: lemondrop marigolds
• Pot 14, April 1, 12 inches: catnip
• Pot 15, April 1, 12 inches: dill
• Pot 16, April 29, 18 inches: long purple eggplants and sweet basil
• Pot 17, April 29, 18 inches: California wonder bell pepper and jewel nasturtuims
• Pot 18, April 29, 18 inches: early jalepeno peppers and cilantro
• Pot 19, April 29, 24 inches: straight eight cucumbers and junior sunflowers
• Pot 20, April 29, 24 inches: Waltham butternut squash and lemondrop marigolds
• Pot 21, April 29, 24 inches: hearts of gold cantaloupe and jewel nasturtiums
• May add extra pots for our alpine strawberries, morning glories, or any plants we decide to add on impulse

Like we said... ambitious! That's just how we roll, here at the Baby Bee Garden! Now that the planning is all done, its time to get started...

Starting seeds: A new beginning

Well, the trials and errors of last season are behind us. With a new year comes a new beginning, a fresh start for our little garden. We have all our little seeds, left over from last season. Growing from seed always seemed like such a mystery to us, especially since we failed so miserably at starting seeds in the past. But after studying gardening books all winter, by mid-January we had caught the dreaded garden fever! So, we decided to start a few seeds of some "cold season" crops. Some vegetables do well in cool weather, and can even survive a frost, so you can plant them very early in the spring. We chose broccoli, swiss chard, spinach, parsley, cilantro and pansies for our first experimental guinea pigs. There are several different ways to go about starting seeds. All techniques require the same basic elements: seeds, soil, water and, once the seeds sprout, light. We will experiment with different methods throughout the season, but for this round we began our seed starting adventure with peat pellets.

They're little disks of dried, compressed peat moss growing medium for seeds. Each pellet is wrapped in a really fine netting that holds the soil pellet together. So, you just soak the disks in warm water until they expand into a small plug of soil, then you put your seeds in. There is usually a small dent on the top where you can put the seed, but we found it helpful to spread the top of the pellet flat because some seeds are tiny and shouldn't be sowed more than a quarter inch deep. When the seeds sprout, the roots can grow through the netting, so you can plant the pellet right in your garden when the seedling gets big enough. It's great because you don't have to fool around with pots when you're sowing the seeds or when you transplant them. Works really well.... in theory. Actually, the pellets that we found were on sale 100 for $20, but then we figured out that the reason they were such a great deal is that they are about half the size of a regular peat pellet! They were just fine for getting the seeds to sprout, but the amount of soil there pretty much required immediate transplanting into a small cup of soil. The pellets definitely worked, though.

On January 19th we started small, just three pellets of each plant, except for the pansies which we sowed into twelve pellets. On January 22nd, we got our first sprout! A little broccoli! The chard soon followed, then parsley and pansies. Sadly, the cilantro and spinach didn't sprout in that first round of pellets. Oh, well. We were so happy with the sprouts we got!

So... now what?
How the heck were we supposed to keep our new sprouts in the sunny window, yet protect them from the fiercest of predators...
...the domestic cat!?

Mufasa is ready to nom these little plants!

We found a medium size aquarium at a thrift store to use as a home for our little seedlings. It sits on a table by our south-facing window and gets just enough sun.It's important to make sure your seedlings get enough light. If they don't have enough, they will grow really long stems trying to get closer to the light source. Gardeners call seedlings in this condition "leggy", and it happened to some of our broccoli sprouts right away because it was cloudy outside for a few days in a row. We ended up transplanting them into a deeper cup, burying them a little bit deeper so they could stand up better. All the sprouts had to be transplanted quickly anyway, because of the small size of the peat pellets. For now, we'll go ahead and pronounce our latest attempt at seed sprouting a success! Yes, we are quite proud of ourselves! We'll be nursing these little guys for 6 or 8 weeks, 'til they're big enough to go into their container homes. Cross your fingers and stay tuned...

Starting from seeds: UR doin it WRONG!

Last season, we ordered a lot of vegetable seeds. We hadn't really grown from seed before, we usually just got little plants at the nursery. We didn't have a clue about starting seeds! It was already mid-May before we got started. Our major error, we later found out, was putting our seed flat full of soil pellets outside on our front porch. Here in the South, in mid-May, it's already too hot outside for most seeds to germinate well. We were having days above 80 degrees. Out of the several dozen seeds we planted, only a couple sunflowers and zucchini squash came up... As it turns out, most seeds sprout best at room temperature, more or less, and some seeds just can't germinate at high temperatures. Well, at least we learned what not to do, and as usual, we had to learn it the hard way!

 Here's a pic of last year's porch set-up: the seed tray, small pots with some of the sprouts, and some transplants we had bought from the local nursery.

The great thing about starting with seeds is that you get a ton of them! We spent $40 on seeds last year and we didn't even put a dent in them. Now, the seed companies would like you to think that your seeds expire after a year, so that you can buy a new supply for every season... but, really? I've talked to some experienced gardeners who tell me that seeds will last 3-5 years or longer if kept in a cool, dry, dark place. Now that's more like it! So, we'll be starting off this season with the seeds we bought last year, supplemented by a few others we picked up at our local nursery. We spent most of the winter studying gardening books to increase this year's chances of success...

Experiments in sub/urban composting

Part of our goal for this season is to make our own compost, so we can keep our food scraps out of the landfill and make nutritious soil to fill our plant containers. Our yard is small, so we looked for a way to avoid having a giant compost heap out back of our house. We have a lot of 5 gallon buckets around our house, so we decided to try composting in those.

The idea is to turn them into mini compost bins by drilling holes in the top, bottom and sides. Then you just layer up your food scraps with leaf and grass debris from your yard and... wait. Usually it takes about a year to go from food scraps and yard waste to compost. That's in a traditional compost heap. Our research has lead us to believe that we may cut that time in half with our small scale compost buckets. Back in January, we started our first bucket compost bin. After drilling all the holes, we put in a layer of leaves and dirt a few inches deep. Then we alternated layers of food scraps with layers of leaves and dirt. We dug up a handful of earth worms from the yard and tossed them on top before we put on the lid. The idea for adding the worms came from learning about worm bin composters for small sub/urban spaces. The worms eat the biodegradable stuff and leave their "worm castings" behind to enrich the soil. We made sure to put the bucket in a cool, shady space in the yard so the worms wouldn't get baked in there!

So, fast forward about two months... when we opened up the first bucket to stir it up and see how things were going, we found that most of the produce scraps had broken down completely! There were a few big things still in there, like egg shells and pistachio shells, but mostly everything was... turned into dirt! Oh, and it was packed with ants! And would you believe, some worms are still living in there! So far, the buckets seem to be doing the job! We built two more compost buckets today. Right now, one 5 gallon bucket is good for about a month of our food scraps. Look for another update on the bins in a couple months...

Baby Bee Garden Blog's Beginning

Last season my partner and I made our first garden together. We had learned about self-watering plant containers and decided to build our own.

The self-watering part worked really well at first, but as the season went on, the water in the reservoir turned into a green sludge... ew! We weren't too sure about growing our vegetables in slime, but it was too late to turn back. We soon found out that the slime was the least of our garden's problems.... Mosquitoes began to grow in the water reservoir! Every time we went out to check on the plants we would get eaten alive! We read about putting cooking oil in the water, because it would supposedly make a film on top of the water and discourage the mosquitoes from laying their eggs. We tried it. But this is the South! The mosquitoes had a good old laugh about the oil and kept right on multiplying! All we could do was dump 'em out. So last year, 2011, our self-watering  container garden grew 1 tomato, 4 really small bell peppers, 4 nice eggplants and a whole colony of mosquitoes! Then we gave up. Unlucky!
This year, we vowed to do better...