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)

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)