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)