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)

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)