Successful Season Jan 2021

 I'm loving our cherry tomatoes, which my little newly 2-year-old son calls "balls" and then pops one in his mouth several times a day. My 7 year-old son loves grazing on basil, cilantro, nasturtium, carrots, tomatoes and even sometimes broccoli leaves. I wonder how many caterpillars he has accidentally eaten in his life.

I prayed for my gardening this past fall as I began planting. I am grateful that we have been able to enjoy the beauty and nutrition from our little garden boxes once again. No prayer is too small.

My Garden in Nov 2020

It's been a while since I have posted my gardening experiences, but here is my garden in Nov 2020.

This season I have cherry tomatoes, rainbow carrots, broccoli, cilantro, basil, green onion, lettuce varieties and flowers.

Garden Discussion Documents

I'm catching up on getting our Gardeners Meeting Notes on here for availability.

Gardening Meeting #3 
Top Crops, Companion Planting and Pest Control

Companion Planting
A brief overview of plants that benefit from being planted near each other in the garden; taken from Carrots love Tomatoes & Roses love Garlic by Louise Riotte

Top Crops #2
Details on these crops: cabbage,
broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, carrots, peas, beans.

Common Garden Pests and what to do! 

Gardening Meeting #4
Cold Weather Protection for our plants

November's a good month in the Vegetable Garden

My garden is growing beautifully. I've harvested 2 zucchini squashes and my son hasn't been patient with the carrots, so we have pulled a few small (and delicious) purple, yellow and orange carrots too. Cabbage, brocolli and kale plants have needed extra care with removing caterpillars regularly, mostly about 1 month ago, it has become less of a problem now with only an occasional caterpillar. I have been fertilizing about every two weeks with Miracle Grow and the soil structure seems to be improving with the straw mulching and other organic materials decomposing. The weather has been perfect and I deep water every 2-3 days. The garden gets nearly all-day sun.

What's growing: green cabbage, purple cabbage, brocolli, leeks, kale, lettuce varieties, garlic, green onions, basil, cilantro, snap peas, cucumber (volunteer), petunias, marigolds, nasturtium, zucchini, green beans (stunted growth), purple, yellow and orange carrots.

Flowering Broccoli

I've been observing my two broccoli plants over the past months and wondering why they are behaving so differently from each other. One of them began making yellow flowers a while ago while the other did not. Now, the non-flowerer is creating some impressive broccoli heads and the flowerer is not. So, I went to my gardener knowledge center, Google. I came across another gardener with the same problem and the comments to her post were insightful. Apparently if the weather is not just right (too hot or too cold) the broccoli plant will go into seeding mode and skip the creating edible broccoli mode. So basically, it is now useless and I can pull it out after I let the bees have a little more fun with the blossoms.

My flowering plant got so top heavy a few weeks ago that it fell over, right on top of some of my lettuce. I would have just pulled it out then if I would have known I would get no veggie from it. 

All in the process of learning while gardening. That's why I do it, to learn from experience!

After 4 nights of below freezing

Last week, many plants died all over this valley, including all of my beautiful tomato plants. 

Here are the after photos in my garden and of the 3 hibiscus that I hope will make it.

I'm grateful that the cilantro, broccoli  spinach lettuce and peas seem to be ok. I covered everything and kept them watered in hopes that they would be strong through those nights in the 20's. 

One of the broccoli plants have blossoms and many attracted bees.

Loving this Time of Year

Every year around this time, I again fall in love with gardening and being outside. What a beautiful alive world we live on. 

Our family gained a member about a month ago. We now have a small Russian desert tortoise living in our backyard. We first made a small enclosure for him, but then decided to enclose the garden area and let him roam free so he could eat weeds and hibernate in a place of his choice. He's now half way under the ground near our home foundation and hasn't moved for several days, so maybe that's his location of choice. 

Here's my garden today with its new cinder block surround:

I planted more cilantro and lettuce on Saturday, November 24th as well as some spinach and I will be planting more sweet peas tomorrow after they soak. None grew from my first attempt, so they may be bad seeds.

Lettuce (what's left of it after tortoise and pests) and Brocolli

Big tomato plants are the heirlooms I received from friends. All the small ones I planted.

Tomato plants and Cilantro

I love you cilantro!

And my 3 year-old daughter was so excited to see this gorgeous hibiscus flower yesterday, so we had to snap a photo.

A few weeks ago, she helped me plant some random flower seeds in these pots. I look forward to some flowers.

And oranges, grapefruits and tangerines are on their way! Ripeness is a few weeks away!

I'm grateful for this little space that I can use to enjoy creation.

Some additions...

Yesterday, I was able to plant the soaked pea seeds along the bottom of my newly acquired wire trellis that goes all the way up our block wall. This should be the stretching room those vines are wishing for, unlike past seasons when I greatly underestimated their potential height. 

My garden is mostly covered with some light-weight netting as part of its defense strategy  I used some stakes for supporting the netting over the areas where I have new seeds growing. The netting is there to prevent birds from pecking at my seeds and neighborhood cats from pooing and digging in my soil. 

Our friends who gave us some manure also gave us some little plants today. 

2 broccoli plants (below)

This is my first time doing broccoli and since I wasn't expecting it, I ended up planting it in the location that I was planning to plant more zucchini seeds. I will just plant a few more zucchini seeds on the single hill and that will be good for this year. I am limited in space for the winter season because of the location of the sun and sunny areas in my garden area.

 And 5 little tomato plants (below). He called them Czechoslovakian tomatoes and he has enjoyed them in his garden in past seasons. He said they will need to be covered when it gets colder in the winter.

And I am excited to see some little tomato plant seedlings in the pods that I experimented with.

Last year's pea trellis is now placed over this wild invasive plant that has provided a beautiful green covering and purple flowers in the springtime without any efforts or watering on my part. Last week I had the idea to put the trellis there and see if it can crawl up and cover some of our ugly wall. If it does crawl up, I will keep it well trimmed so it doesn't go to crazy.