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...