Garden Update 2013: Week 1

My how the garden has grown :)

Not only are my cute little plants growing but we have added some MAJOR additions to the homestead garden! We've only been in our home for four months and I can't believe what we have accomplished!! Husband fenced in a 50x60 foot area and started building my raised bed garden boxes. Last week, he trenched from the house (probably 100 feet away) and put plumbing and electric in various places! I now have 2 running hoses, a timed watering system (with separate valves from the hoses) and a plumbed earthbox garden! We are still awaiting the finishing touches on the earthbox plumbing so I will share that later :) 

Two days ago we picked up a 50 foot soaker hose from Lowes and did our best not to ruin the grid system I stapled in place.. not sure we succeded but who cares! Now I don't have to spend a half hour a day standing in the hot sun/rain/cold :) My number one rule about this garden is that it would be as LOW MAINTENANCE as possible! So far looking good :)

One of many future raised beds :)

 Eventually, we will have 17 more that look just like this :)

Far Left: acorn squash climbing the trellis.
Left to Right- Back row: left 6 are caulflower, right 6 are broccoli. Middle Row: spinach, lettuce, carrots x 2 then onion. Bottom row: lettuce, newly planted garlic, onion x 2.

The other changes to the garden was that I added a trellis for the Spaghetti Squash plants. They were growing way too fast! I also planted 2 of the 4 acorn squash plants my good friend gave me, right next to the trellis, so assuming the weather holds out- we should have plenty of squash this spring!

The first female flower! I hope it's warm enough for it to mature :)

 The carrots seem to be happy in the raised beds as well. They were a little tricky since there are 16 plants in one square foot. I think we covered pretty good with the soaker hoses though. 

Happy Little Carrots

The broccoli and Cabbage plants also seem to be quite happy in the raised beds. Again, I am WAY past season with planting these since they started indoor from seed, but if they make it past the last frost, we'll be having broccoli and cauliflower early this season!

Cauliflower

 I spent some time today planting some garlic bulbs (cloves actually- which by the way, look exactly like those you buy in a grocery store!). From what I read, it's important to peel them back to remove the basal plate, but be sure not to damage the little root growth spots at the bottom. Supposedly this is the time of year to plant them, so we'll see. Since I live in Florida  none of the "suggested" times are ever correct!

That's all for now! On to raised bed #2, which is currently half full of soil. The plan will be to top it off with quality soil, add soaker hose and grid off for planting. I'm thinking tomatoes for sure.. maybe beets, cucumbers and squash as well. Will keep you guys posted :) 

I love the feeling that I am able to grow what we eat, it's healthier and more sustainable, and tastes SO MUCH better grown fresh!

Happy homesteading :)

Garden update: Week 49

Just an update, stay tuned for a "how I built my square foot garden" post :)

Early December has been quite warm so far with an average temp in the mid 70's. We've had some rain (thank goodness!), which the plants LOVE. I had always read about how great rainwater is for a garden (referred to as liquid gold even!) because of the nitrogen content and that it is not chemically treated. I never really saw the effect because I always used Earthboxes, but now that I have things in the ground, it's so much more obvious! It's literally like they grew overnight!

My super awesome neighbor had leftover onion transplants, so those were added at the beginning of the week (sorry for the poor photo quality- iphone photos are what I have right now!):

New happy onion transplants in bottom left corner :)

Iphone panorama of the garden, note the BROWN unhappy,crunchy grass around the raised beds!

After the rain came, they seemed MUCH happier. You can see the brassica family growing on the right (broccoli and cauliflower). The two winter squash plants are doing very well in the back too! 

Growing right along

I have been working 12 hour night shifts so I hadn't the time for close ups of the plants.. but they are all doing well! Even the carrots (left, bottom 2 squares in and 2 squares up) have started to peek through the soil! We also had a cold snap come through with night temps in the low 50's, so we will see if that stunts growth or not!

That's all for now, I will keep you all posted as the zone 9 winter begins.

Happy gardening :)

The Garden

Part of the reason I wanted to start a blog as also because I wanted to keep a virtual "journal" of sorts for my garden!

I have always gardened in containers. Always. I've mostly just used plastic pots from big box stores but over the past year I expanded to earth boxes. Since we finally moved into our dream home, I wanted a more permanent garden.

But, of course I didn't want just and old plot of dirt- I wanted to build and plant in raised beds.. Specifically square foot garden beds. I chose this method for two basic reasons. To start with, our soil here in zone 9 is basically sand. I'm not kidding when I say this- if you dig down 1 foot, you unearth what looks like wet beach sand (note what's around the fence posts? That sand was not brought in!) Not good for a garden. The second, and more pertinent reason was because I'm a numbers girl and with square foot gardening (SFG) I can get more bang for the buck.

SFG basically means you break up the raised beds into one square foot sections and plant in a grid system instead of rows. The benefit is that the soil never gets stepped on, and as a result, you can grow things much closer together (aka the bio intensive method). I'd never done this type of gardening... Until today :)

My sweet husband was kind enough to build a fence around the area we determined was best for the garden.. Ill go into details in another post, but basically we have a 50x60 area to do whatever we want to. He built me two awesome raised bed boxes out of lumber (not pressure treated)- then I stapled a combo of weed wacker line and garden tape to make the grid system. Today, I officially became a square foot gardener, after spending many hours transplanting and seeding the grid. It looks pretty good, I think :) I wish we could have afforded the drip irrigation before the plants went in, but we gotta start somewhere, so I decided to go ahead and start planting! I love the result.. There are still a few empty squares so I will have to decide on what they'll be filled with. Regardless, here's the final product, I'm quite proud :)

Happy gardening :)