In the Garden and A Rice Experiment Update: June 19th,2014

Joining Amanda at Soulemama for a (container) Garden Update.

 Everyday there is growth in our container garden. A new surprise. We have cucumbers, Oh! how we will have cucumbers- they're trying to take over the porch! I love it! And a mexi pepper. Snow peas, and garden beans. Flowers on the tomato plants. Little buds where we think brussel sprouts will sprout. (Our new experiment crop, we're unsure of everything this these. Where the sprouts will grow, how tall the plants should really be, and why it seems 6 of the plants have stopped growing. But it's always fun to try something new.) The lettuce died off, sad. It's been in the 90s for the past week, and it's just too hot for it. Keeping everything watered wasn't a problem, for a bit, a two week stretch of rain, gave the plants a needed boost. But now we're struggling to keep up, having to bump watering up to twice a day.

Soon we'll be eating more than just a few tasty peas and beans straight off the plant. We'll have tomatoes to add to our salads, and more than enough cucumbers for pickles (a favorite here) galore!

(Top from today. Below two days ago)

 (top today, below two days ago)

And now for my long awaited Rice Update. (Joining along with Rachel of Clean) I've been waiting, and waiting for mold to grow on the Hate jar to do an update. It got to the point where all the jars were just pushed out of the way, and we forgot about them. No Love, or Hate going into them. Oops. But Rachel posted a reminder on her fb page, and I got to wondering.

We have mold!

But it's very colorful mold. Orange! And it's started growing in the Love jar too.

So about 6 weeks in, and there's mold in all the jars. Experiment complete. We may try again in the winter months, as I think the weather here played a part in it.

Read about the experiment here and here. And Rachel's original post.

Naughty cat likes to sleep in the plants. 

In the Garden- June 5th

In between rain showers, I ran outside to check on our poor plants, and snap a few photos. The rain on the roof, I've never heard it come down so hard. Like high tide coming in. They're fairing well, some of the newer sproutlings have been flattened a bit, but I'm sure they'll pop back up.

So exciting to see blooms, and a few beans on the plants. Soon, so soon. And the way our newest tomato plant just shot up! It tripled, at least, in a week.

Our container garden won't be enough to put up but a few jars of pickles, but we'll eat well this summer.

In the Garden

This year, where we are, we've had to opt for a new approach to our garden. We can't dig up the yard, and the cost of wooden raised beds is too much. So we're working with what we've got, or can get for free. (Free's always good!) With a bit of inspiration from Pinterest (yes, we are those people who do the things we see, not just pin them.), we've got ourselves some good container gardens going.

We didn't quite get everything planted we wanted, but some of them being cold weather crops, we could still do some planting this August/September (namely lettuce, and spinach). But our Brussel sprouts, cucumbers, and tomatoes are doing great. There's also snow peas, green peppers, a "spicy" pepper (for the husband, he says it's a good companion plant for the tomatoes. I just hope they are far away enough from the sweet peppers.)

 Our basil plant lasted from last year, it was pretty sickly looking, but Chris transplanted it after it started a new off shoot and it's doing very well now. He's also trying his hand and regrowing a lettuce plant from leftovers. It did well in just water, the roots started to regrow so he's moved it to the dirt. It looked pretty pathetic last night, but seems to have perked up a bit this am. We'll see.

There's also some "volunteer" lettuce hiding out under the cucumber plants. We'd reused the dirt from an attempt to start lettuce in the house for the cucumber seeds. Once we put the cuc seedlings outside the lettuce popped up as a surprise. Chris added some more seeds, seeing how well it did, in to a few empty holes. So we may have a lettuce crop after all.

There's bean plants out there too. But they are competing with dog leads, kids, and cats, so aren't as healthy looking as I'd like. But they're already flowering, so there's still hope. If I could get my hands on a few more large containers, and some dirt (our soil is clay, we have no lucky growing in clay), I'd like to plant some more beans. A loves to eat them straight off the plants.

Positives to container gardens- good black dirt, little weeding, the plants seems to stay moist longer. Negatives to container gardens- just not enough space. Unless of course dirt and containers are unlimited to you.

Frozen

I don't want today to end. Not because it's so good. But because I don't want tomorrow to come.

Tomorrow scares me. Tomorrow brings change. Tomorrow I will be alone. I am alone today too. But tomorrow is scarier.