Corn a Month Later

I mentioned before, this is the first time I've ever grown corn. I bought an heirloom variety called 'Blue Jade' that is only supposed to get 2-3 feet high. They said you could put it in a container, so I did.

This was it on May 27.

June 27.

Not bad, huh? It appears to be most of the way there. I've been keeping it well watered.

Spring Garden

Finally, FINALLY I have time to write about the garden! I've been so busy trying to get things in the ground, weeded, prepped, covered, mulched, etc etc. So, here is the update:

One of the new things we're trying this year is corn. Corn! I've never grown corn. I picked a variety from Seed Savers Exchanged called Blue Jade. It is a sweet corn that only gets 2-3 feet high, so it is ideal for containers. And I know corn is best grown in clumps (not rows, per say, unless you clump the rows) so I planted it in the half whiskey barrel we have by the porch. We'll see how it goes.
The radishes are giving such a great burst of color here in this patch. Also planted here are peas, beets, parsnips, and carrots. The carrots didn't sprout. Not. A. One. I don't know why. I think I planted 6 different varieties, and nothing. I'll put in a late batch in a different bed in July, probably, and hope for the best. Everything else did ok in this bed. I'm at a loss.
The two head lettuces I grew this year: Tennisball (right) and Dazzle romaine (left). Aren't they gorgeous? Notice the baby in front. I started a few more from seed, then transplanted them today so when I cut the heads of the older plants, the babies will be established and I'll have another batch coming along.
Another pic of the lettuce. I haven't tried the Dazzle yet, but I'm really happy with Tennisball, which I got from Montecello when we were there a year or so ago.
A flat of things waiting to be planted, including but not limited to tomatoes, lettuce, squash, and okra. Some have been planted since I took this picture.

Also, I have seeded beans and cucumbers, and put in some of the pepper plants. The garlic scapes are starting to show, the red shallots are starting to flower (but not the gray shallots yet), peas are on the vines, potatoes are flowering, blueberries and blackberries are in their infancy, parsnips are flowering (I'm collecting seed this year), and some of the tomatoes are flowering, too!

Work (and Play) Weekend

Saturday was all play. It was gorgeous weather, sunny with clouds and not too hot, maybe low 70s. We got up early for us on a weekend and met our friend Angie for breakfast and catching up at the French bistro in Gettysburg. Crepes with strawberries and cream, crepes with bananas and nutella. Brioche French toast with breakfast potatoes. Oh, my, theirs are the best breakfast potatoes I’ve ever had.

After, we walked around the farmers market on the square. Purchases were made, including 2 pepper plants, some rhubarb and strawberries (both destined for jam this week), a few celery plants, and a bar of great soap.

Then, Matt and I drove around a bit of the battlefield before heading home the back way, over hill and dale and avoiding the main interstate.

I can’t remember what all we did for the rest of the morning and the early part of the afternoon.

Around 3 we collected Matt’s parents and headed down to Baltimore for an early dinner. It was a celebratory dinner for my FIL’s retirement, his birthday, both Matt & my birthdays, our anniversary, their anniversary, etc. We went to Fogo de Chao, which is an Brazilian steakhouse. Matt and I have been there once before. It is by far hands down the best cooked and seasoned beef I have ever had. I can’t rave about it enough. I would happily go there more often, but at $50/head you kinda need a really GOOD reason.

I wrote about Fogo here, go read about it. The only thing I can add to that is 1) I had a cocktail this time, the Brazilian national drink Caipirinha. Very strong, quite good. I don’t think I’d make one at home, but it was nice. 2) I also had a dessert, I had the crème brule. I’ve made crème brule, but it was never like this. SO creamy. JoAnn ordered a slice of cheesecake. It was mislabeled on the menu, it should have said ‘A Slice of Cheesecake the Size of the Rock of Gibraltar.’ Ray laughed really hard when they brought it out.

Then we went home and lay around like bloated whales. Eventually we slept.

Sunday was a work day. We went out for a quick breakfast, then hit Lowes and got some garden-related hardware that we needed: big plastic tubs, smaller tubs, a couple hanging baskets, potting soil, some stone.

When we got home, Matt spent a few hours on lawn care and lawn mowing.

I planted 19 tomatoes: 12 Super Marzano paste, 1 Principe Borghese drying, and one each of Sungold, Brandywine, Japanese Black Trifele, Henderson’s Ponderosa Pink, Kellogg’s Breakfast, and Cherokee Purple. I still have some others to plant.

Last year, I used a technique I’d read about for tomato planting and that was putting them in horizontally, as in parallel to the ground, with only the top greenery above the ground. The thinking behind this was that as the roots grow along the planted stem you will have a root system that is close to the surface, therefore close to the water when you water it. The downside to this is the plant will also dry out that much faster, and when it does rain/you do water the plant, the dirt will tend to wash away and the plant will pop out of the ground. So, this year I’m planting them the normal way again. We’ll see.

I also put in the 3 celery plants (never grown celery before), and 4 peppers. Haven’t planted beans yet, way behind there. But the ground is mud. MUD! I was worried about the tomatoes drowning, and now they’re saying 3 more days of rain on top of all that MUD!! If I put in beans now they’d just rot anyway. So. Waiting. But I can get the poles in the ground now while it’s wet. MUD. Ugh.

After a lunch break, Matt was back at it with the lawn, and I started in on some self-watering tubs for large plants. I took the plans from the Frugal Life blog on these, I thought they were great. I made three, one for my fig and two for Matt’s parents, who weren’t going to do a garden this year. I also made last year’s hanging tomato baskets into potato pots. We gave three of those to Matt’s parents, too, and kept 4 for us.

Making the pots, mixing the soil, etc, was hard work! My back was killing me. Matt said I was walking like an old lady. I need to figure out some exercises to help strengthen my back a bit, this just won’t do.

After we got cleaned up, we wound up doing some much-needed grocery shopping and getting a Papa John’s pizza with accompanying garlic sauces, which makes 4 meals out in 2 days. Not good, and we’ll try to do better this week.

Indoor Gardening

Not too much going on outside, so I thought I'd add some indoor gardening pictures.

I re-did 4 of the mini moss gardens recently:
I added tiny blue seed beads as drainage at the bottom of each, too. I think they look nice:

The Christmas Cactus I was given is blooming:

We were given a juniper Bonsai from Matt's brother. I've already started training it. This is the before picture:

This is the after picture. I'm trying to do a 'cascade' style in the front. It is wired and pulled downward:

There's Been a Hangin' in These Here Parts

We decided to try making our own hanging baskets for tomatoes this year, loosely based on the infomercial kind. We made ours out of 5-gallon buckets. We'd decided to hang them from the posts around the greenhouse. Hooband reinforced the posts using cable to support the weight. This picture is before we planted:
We also decided to mix our own soil for the pots and Hooband had the great idea of using the concrete mixer to do it. Hooray Hooband! We wound up mixing 3 different batches from compost, sand, sawdust, potting soil and dirt. The mixer saved us a LOT of time and effort:

I used a garden hook to hang the pot while I planted it. I would have been straining to get them planted if I'd kept them on the posts, and since the plant would be coming out the bottom of the pot I couldn't exactly put the pot on the ground or a table:
I fitted each plant with some black landscaping fabric (you can see it wrapped around the rootball in the top left corner below), which I flattened out over the bottom of the pot after the plant was fitted through the hole. This was in order to keep the soil in while allowing the water to drain out. I was more than a little concerned about fitting a few of the plants through the holes. You can see the plant in this picture is pretty leafy:
But somehow I wound up getting it fitted with little trouble:

You can plant tomatoes way up the stem, those hairs along the stem will turn into roots. So, that's what I did; I kept adding soil, adjusting the root ball, more soil, until the stem was several inches up inside the pot.

Even by the next morning you can see the plant trying to right itself. I'm not sure how these planters will work. I can't help but think we're setting up and All-U-Kan-Eat Buffet for the deer. I'm also a little concerned about the amount of moisture they seem to be retaining, but we'll deal with that if it becomes a problem.

Toronto Gal on a Mission

I’m slowly adding links on the side of the page, these will include places I order seeds or plants from, local greenhouses, local farmers markets and other food markets, and also nice informational websites or blogs as I come across them. I’ll write about them as the mood strikes me.

The one I read daily and just adore is You Grow Girl, a gardening blog by Gayla Trail. She lives in an apartment in Toronto (ATTENTION TIM), and operates several gardens within the city. Make sure you read that correctly: WITHIN the city. She has two plots in two community gardens, she has a container garden on the roof area of her apartment, and she operates a few guerilla gardens as well.

Gayla has been operating the website for about 8 years, and also has a book of the same name that is on my Amazon list of things I need to get. There is an amazing amount of content in her website and while I haven’t looked at them there are also forums to gab with other gardeners and trade tips and stories. She has also been featured in a few magazines, a couple tv and radio clips, and has traveled to various cities in Canada and the US for speaking engagements. I believe her ‘real’ job is as a graphic designer, which you can see in her beautiful website and photos.

Not living in the city, I am most intrigued by her guerilla/street gardens. Basically, she seeds and plants a small plot of ground that would usually be infested with weeds. She can’t grow edibles there, though, because people often use these plots for other things. It is a curious way to brighten a cityscape. It sounds like something I’d do if I lived in a city.

One of the things I like most about reading the blog is that while she lives in the city, which in and of itself makes space per person limited, she makes it all sound so do-able (not necessarily easy, but do-able) for the everyday person, no matter where you live. And you can’t help but be bitten by her enthusiasm and humor.

Last fall, she posted about the Great Canadian Garlic Collection. You can read the details yourself, but basically many gardeners from all around Canada agreed to grow 3 different varieties of garlic for 2 years in order to collect data about which varieties do well in which parts of the country. She writes about her problem planning a garden out, and as you know I grow garlic. Last fall at this same time I was planning out how to plant my 400+ plants, so I emailed her directly and we compared notes. It was nice to have someone to email that gets the same thrill about it that I do.

So head on over to You Grow Girl and take a look at what Gayla’s writing about this week.