are things complicated yet?

The Garden, Week 13: Blossoms, Mushrooms, and A Very Goofy Kid

Today while watering the garden, which I have not done in several days (thank you very much soaking rain from last Friday), I was picking at random bits of grass that had come through the soil and pinching off suckers and I noticed some BLOSSOMS!

Is it hard to tell what you're looking at? Well, I don't have a fancy lens to take close-up pictures of my garden, so I'll make it super easy for you:

This is a website that prides itself on excellent and highly professional photo editing.

This means I will spend time tomorrow at the garden shop, buying fertilizer. I am not sure what to buy, but I am banking on the garden people being helpful and I also read an article from the Sacramento Bee (that Elizabeth sent me, of course) so it doesn't look too hard.

I was feeling like my tomatoes were rather shrimpy to be blossoming (they're about 18") but Elizabeth's are about the same height so I guess it's fine. (Elizabeth and I spend a great deal of our friendship discussing tomatoes, what of it?)  I was just expecting GIANT HUGE TOMATOES OF DOOOOOOM and unless I start giving them steroids I'm not sure how that's going to happen in the next month or two. Perhaps I will be wrong? The Brandywines are easily 18" each but I have a lone Black Krim that's only 8" at this point and he is growing SO SLOWLY.

(Pretty sure he is going to get cut from the team for 2013.)

Mushrooms in my garden, WTF DO I DO WITH THESE?

A week or three ago, a found a stray mushroom growing in the garden. A clump of them, actually, right at the bottom of a tomato stalk. (I might have sent a panicked email to Elizabeth that said something along the lines of "WHAT THE SHIT DO I DO?") I pulled it out of the garden, but more showed up! I yanked those out too. About Day 7 I finally remembered there's this thing called The Internet and maybe I should see what it says about mushrooms in my garden?

They're okay according to a few oddball gardening forums. (Watch out for that first link, it's kind of FREAKY how excited some people get about garden mushrooms.) It's something about how they help the root systems? And some people BUY mushrooms to put in their garden to improve the soil? I don't know, but the spores were probably part of the vegetable soil mix and I felt silly for taking them out if they were supposed to be there. They pop up and disappear over a couple of hours and don't seem to be hurting anything, so unless someone leaves me a panicky comment otherwise, I'm ignoring them.

Can you believe the audacity of this bunny to just HANG OUT by the garden fence??! 

He is totally asking for me to pop him with a BB gun. HE SO TOTALLY IS. And you guys? He does this several times a day. He just loiters over there, plotting ways to get in once the vegetables show up. He's much smarter than he looks, I'm sure of it.

And here I am, with no makeup on at twilight, watering the garden. 

This is what I look like when I water the garden. Most of the time, I actually DO maintain a slightly wry look on my face because I can't believe I haven't killed anything yet. Also, I am wearing an Old Navy maternity t-shirt from 2008 because it has aged BEAUTIFULLY and is SO VERY SOFT and I will never get rid of it, even though it is a maternity shirt. Please don't judge me and my awesome 2008 maternity shirt.

Aaaaand, here are some pictures of Claire and the garden.

I know, I know. She appears to be dancing to Thriller. I....don't really know why.

The Garden, Weeks 10, 11, and 12: Minty, Smelly, Watery, Rabbity

I know it's been awhile since we talked about the garden, but it turns out once you get plants in the ground there's not a lot of day-to-day ACTION. (Perhaps this is a reason, "The Garden!" is not one of this summer's action-packed blockbusters.) Time to just throw out a big updatey-update.

***

This is an Apple Mint plant. I bought it at Home Depot and I thought it would be nice to have fresh mint for iced tea, mojitos, and whatever else I came up with. Mint is really hard to kill, it smells nice, and thrives in wet spots. Our hose bib leaks a considerable bit when turned on so I figured it was a GREAT spot for some mint.

Then, some bugs promptly chewed it up. There were hardly any leaves left and while I know mint is a very difficult thing to kill, I was sure the bugs had done it.

There used to be a lot more leaves on this plant. As in, you could tell it was actually a plant.

But! Lo! THE MINT CAME BACK! I was very pleased with myself for continuing to water a dead-looking plant. Surely only a very smart gardener continues to water a dead-looking plant, yes? (Don't answer that.) It was looking very leafy and healthy and I thought, "I should take a picture of it! To show how mint can come back!" 

And then, on Monday, Chris was making a loop of the yard with his trimmer and he mistook the mint for a weed. He said, "it suddenly smelled minty and I just KNEW." He knows how important my plants are. He felt pretty badly.

You can't even tell where a mint plant is supposed to be, it's just a jumble of sad plant body parts.

I told him it's okay. Mint is really hard to kill. It'll come back. Mint is the Pheonix of the herb world. (POOR MINTY-MINT.)

IN OTHER NEWS!

I (or other members of my household) have not actually killed anything, which is mighty impressive. I planted cucumber, okra, and scallion seeds and they came out of the ground a few days later with leaves and everything, just like they're supposed to. I don't know, man. There's something downright MAGIC BEANS unbelievable about this whole garden thing.

"You mean I just put these tiny things in the ground and FOOD COMES OUT?"

Yep. Allegedly, that's how this is going to turn out.

Spiders in my garden! I like to envision them eating bad bugs.

I fixed my ugly fence. Chris bought some actual stakes and I ripped out my sad version and re-did it one Saturday morning. I took before and after pictures and....you really can't tell a difference. This is disappointing only because I spent about an hour cutting wire and crawling around it for almost no reward in aesthetic. (On the plus side, it does appear to be keeping the rabbits out, so there's that.)

Before, with tables holding down the edges:

And, after with stout green stakes and excess wire cut off:

I know, it looks pretty much the same. How very disappointing. Perhaps I should have bedazzled it for true results. Because I know you enjoy seeing pictures of my mood after sweaty garden work, here's how I felt after I re-did the fence. 

PRETTY DAMN PLEASED WITH MYSELF.

I had a bunch of extra seedlings I was saving for delivery to locals, but one day the wind blew them off the table and because I was just tired of dealing with them and I didn't feel like performing seedling CPR, I threw them away. Next year I am for sure planting fewer seeds or starting a seedling co-op of some kind with local friends.

Sad tomatoes.

VEGETABLE STATUS 

California Wonder Bell Peppers

These are doing okay. They were planted all on the same day but they are VASTLY different sizes. I have one that is about 2" tall and another that is close to 8". Four of these, in all.

Cucumbers

One of the things I like to do is to smell my plants. I know, this sounds weird, but just go with me. The leaves of the cucumber plants SMELL LIKE CUCUMBERS! This sounds very "no shit" but it kind of blew me away when I figured it out. No actual cucumbers yet, but it SMELLS like them! How delightful!

Scallions

I have a bunch of thin, needle-like, green things that smell like onions. (Oh, come on, you knew I was going to smell these too.)

Tomatoes 

They're doing well! Getting taller and leafier. I have been pinching off suckers (leaves that grow at the apex of stalk and stems) as I find them, since they won't produce fruit and their leaves will just suck energy away from fruit-producing parts of the plant.

The Whiskey Barrel

Okay, I lied. I think I killed the thyme. BUT. I am still watering it, so maybe it will come back. There is a lone green stem, so I'm hopeful. The basil is getting bigger, so that's good because a key component of caprese salad is basil and the hell if I am going to have to buy any after all this freaking work. (Look how tiny it used to be!) I bought a rosemary plant because I planted rosemary seeds THREE times and they never germinated, so I think I got crap seeds. (Incidentally, these were the only seeds that came from Lowe's. NO JUDGEMENT, LOWE'S.)

Watering

Texas has been in a big drought for what seems like forever. The ground here is already cracked from a lack of moisture, and although this looks bad, I have cousins in west Texas with cracks in their yards big enough for cats to sleep in. The DFW area is faring better than the rest of the state, but it still isn't raining very much.

My yard is thirsty.

I have been SUPER paranoid about not watering enough, so every day I hook up the soaker hoses and let them run until I can see water coming out the bottom of the raised bed. I have no idea if this is the right way to do things, but it's what I do. Sometimes, if I feel like it's extra hot? I run out there with a cup or two of water and pour it on the basil and my favorite tomato plants. 

This sounds like a giant pain in the ass, right? Hauling the hose to that side of the yard and babysitting it for 20 or 30 minutes? It sort of is. Going to check the tomatoes has actually become one of my favorite parts of the day. It's oddly soothing to go through these small motions over weeks and weeks and hope they add up to creating productive plants. Plus, it's something that I usually do by myself (sometimes, Claire will "help") and I like alone time, even if it's only a half hour in the yard.

I'm pretty curious how this will impact the water bill. Last year when we started watering the lawn, the water bill went THROUGH THE ROOF. So much so, we cut waaaay back on watering the lawn. I'm trying to be thrifty with moisture, but I haven't figured out the sweet spot quite yet.

UP NEXT

I need to get some mulch and put it on top of the beds, now that the plants are a little taller. (Manual labor, UGH. I thought I was done with that for the season.) I also need to fertilize the tomatoes as soon as they start to flower and I don't know a lot about that so I'll have to make some garden shop visits. 

For anyone that made it this far (I should really go back to weekly updates because this is WAY TOO LONG), here's a picture of our resident bunny. He's one of at least two and these rabbits have NO FEAR. They don't even run off when we go outside. 

The Garden, Weeks 8 and 9: I Am Pretty Sure it's Ugly (SIGH)

I freely admit that when I started on this garden insanity last January I was under the vague impression that gardening WAS a lot of work but I would probably be able to fashion something attractive that produced edible things without TOO much effort.

I was looking at gardens like this on Pinterest and thinking they were actually achieveable. (Damn you, Pinterest, for making common people think they can DIY anything.)

Source: ana-white.com via A'Dell on Pinterest

 

Source: thisoldhouse.com via A'Dell on Pinterest

 

Source: goinghometoroost.com via A'Dell on Pinterest

 

You guys? I am dying of Pinterest shame, but my garden looks like this: 

(Good news! Nobody is going to Pin this sad garden! This website is as far as my shame will go. PHEW.)

It's SO UGLY. I'm so sad. I have two tables turned upside down, holding the wire in place so the bunnies don't go under it. I also did not bother to cut the remaining wire from the roll, electing instead to go inside and have dinner. Nothin' but high class, Pinnable gardens here, folks.

It was looking kind of okay, up until the part where I hastily wrapped chicken wire around the whole thing. We have a bunch of rabbits and I knew if I left those plants out there for even ONE night I'd come back to nibbled tomatoes. Towards the end of my TWO HOUR transplanting event (I am still not sure how I took so long to plant a dozen tomatoes and three peppers) I was of the "fuck this" mindset so I wrapped it up and decided to make it look better another day. (I'm still working on the HOW part of that plan.)

Also, I was having fits over those tomato cages. I wanted NICE cages. Perhaps DIY cages, because almost everyone on the internet that has grown a tomato says those traditional tomato cages suck. If the tomatoes don't have a proper place to climb then you won't get as many tomatoes and...this felt like a big decision to make. I didn't want to spend $200 on fancy cages, but I suspected that I didn't have it in me to MAKE my own, no matter how simple Pinterest said it would be. (PINTERST LIES! LIIIIIIIES!)

I talked to Elizabeth (my tomato garden sensei) and SHE uses the old school cages and if it's good enough for her it's good enough for me and also it was going to make my life eight million times easier to just buy the stupid things. I ponied up $5 for each the big suckers and crammed nine of them in my SUV. (I need to go back for three more.) We'll see how they do. I can always do it differently next year or keep these and add new ones to the mix. I spent $300 to remove a tree, $45 on cages isn't so bad. 

(In other news: THIS GARDEN IDEA IS GETTING KIND OF SPENDY.) 

Oh, yeah, we had a tree removed!

As previously noted, this tree was blocking all of the sunshine so we hired a guy with a chainsaw and about 15 minutes later the tree was in pieces. It was very impressive.

 

Then a guy came and ground the stump, which was ALSO impressive to watch.

I really loved the guys we hired and highly recommend if you're in the DFW area and need trees trimmed, removed, etc.

(LOOK AT ALL THAT GLORIOUS SUNSHINE!)

Aaaaaand I finally got some dirt

I got my soil at Living Earth. I paid about $45 for a cubic yard of Vegetable Mix, which is what the guy on the phone told me to buy. It has some good garden buzzwords in it like LOAM and MULCH so I said okay, give me some of that stuff. 

Vegetable Garden Mix is a unique blend of compost, loam, sand, aged mulch, expanded shale and Texas Green Sand. It will perform well with most plantings, especially vegetables. It has excellent drainage, moisture retention and friability. 

If you think this is not what I should have bought? Perhaps keep that opinion to youself since I hauled A CUBIC FREAKING YARD of this stuff around the house in about 20 trips with a wheelbarrow.

Oh, yes, that's Claire and my grandfather helping. COMMUNITY EFFORT, Y'ALL. Claire's wheelbarrow was an Easter gift from Grandma and it is basically the cutest thing in the world. She plays with it all the time, indoors and out.

I don't know, it's just not all that impressive. All of that work and I get....this? This is not inspirational. It's just a bunch of dirt.

Perhaps slightly more interesting, this is how I felt after hauling it around.

Thus endeth Weeks 8 and 9 of The Garden.

The Garden, Week 7: The Part Where It Starts To Look More Like A Legit Garden

The State of the Tomatoes

Claire helped me measure the tomatoes today. (Day 46, for those tracking towards Days To Harvest.) It was interesting to match all of the varieties up and see how they're comparing. In each grouping there is definitely one plant doing better than the rest and now I'm really glad that I started with so many seedlings, then transplanted a bunch of those (and kept more seedlings in reserve), because it's obvious that not all of these will make it in the ground. 

(Short, squatty, shrively, Brandywine on the far left, I am looking at you.)

They're 3-6 inches tall and mostly happy. There are still plenty to plant and if only HALF of those produce, I should still have a mountain of tomatoes.

(Remember, the goal is caprese salad for dinner EVERY DAMN NIGHT.)

Raised Beds

Remember how I said that I was going to construct raised beds with lumber and my own two hands? Welllllll, I decided to throw some money at the problem as we are not very carpentry-inclined and we were probably fooling ourselves with the idea we'd BUILD them. (OURSELVES! HA HA HA HA HAAAAA. We must have been drunk.)

I bought two of these:

The reviews say good things and a few people have used them for a couple of years and say they still look great (they're not real wood, more of a plasticky composite with a wood pattern). They're not permanent, so if the spot we put them in doesn't work (for whatever reason) they're simple enough to relocate next season. And, for about $60? SOLD. I'm not even sure what cinder blocks or lumber or fancy cobblestone stacker things would cost, but the whole part where I can skip going buy it, cut it up, put it together, and hope I did it right? Oh, that is SO worth sixty bucks. (I bought two, so, $120, delivered to my door, hot ham I love the internet.)

This is what they look like if you decide to plant three-year-old children in them:

They took about six minutes to unbox and put together, which is exactly how long the baby can entertain herself on a blanket in the yard. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND these for would-be gardeners with short people wandering about.

(Obviously, I am not planting the children in these. Come on, please be serious, everyone knows children need large amounts of television indoors to grow properly.)

The Rabbit Problem

Look at how sad this is:

The rabbits got five plants last week before I wised up and moved the containers to a high table on the patio rather than the low, easily accessible for cat-size rabbits, wagon. 

For the most part, I'm super impressed that the only ones that died? They did not die because of my neglect! And? I had back-up plants to replace them with! (Don't tell anyone, but I think I am kind of good at this gardening thing.)

The Tree

I know, I know, it's a pretty tree. 

But it's blocking sunshine on that entire HALF of my yard and the other half has its own full sun issues and this is really the only way. It's also probably going to split if we get a really good storm in the next few years. (Highly likely.) The tree will be removed on Monday, sunshine will flood the yard, tomatoes will prosper.

The Whiskey Barrel

My local Lowe's had a stack of these and I kind of liked them. They're oak and the dude said they came from the Jack Daniel's distillery (who knows if it's true). I stuck my head in before I filled it and it smelled like delicious, sweet whiskey. (What? You would have done the same thing.) I stuck a basil and lemon thyme plant in (which I bought at Home Depot, since the bunnies ate all my thyme plants) and sprinkled seeds for oregano, cilantro, and rosemary and called it done. We'll see if they turn into anything.

Mid-way through my efforts (and after I'd gone to Home Depot TWICE in one morning, this is exactly why I do not do DIY) I noticed my sack of dirt had this note:

What the crap!? Not for containers? Well, too bad. I dumped two sacks of this stuff in there.

The Children

They played in the water table the whole time.

Me

Holy crap, gardening is a lot of work. I need a beer. Probably two.

The Garden: What does it cost?

My garden is a mixed-goal project. I'm not trying to spend less at the farmer's market or put food on the table for a dramatically cheaper price, or even make sure I have organically grown food. All of those things are fine and perfectly reasonable gardening goals (and the're definitely secondary goals of mine), but I mostly wanted to stuff my face with home grown tomatoes.

(It is a very elegant and noble goal, I know.)

I had NOTHING to start with. I've never even done a potted plant, so I was truly starting from scratch in both tools and knowledge. I tried to be frugal-ish, but I didn't devote a large part of my life to A Quest For The Frugal Garden because let's be serious, that sounds like a really boring way to spend my time. I'm going to weigh everything that we harvest, compare to the price of a similar, locally-available, item and do a sort of giant cost comparison at the end of the season. So, let's consider this Part One of the cost of a summer tomato garden.

Seeds, $54.60

Look, I know a lot of you are shaking your head saying, "Holy crap she spent fifty bucks on SEEDS?" Well, yes, I did spend fifty bucks on seeds. It's not that tough to do: 14 packets of seeds at $3-$4/pack, plus $10 to ship = fifty freaking dollars on seeds.

The thing about seeds is there are waaaaay more than I need in those packets. I don't need fifty of each variety. Next year, I want to go in with a couple of local friends to buy seeds and then split them up. (Ten or twelve seeds of each variety would be plenty for me.) I bought all Heirloom varieties and none of what I selected was available of my local Lowe's or Home Depot, which made me feel better about buying online and forking over ten bucks for shipping. I did not check my local gardening store, which might be something I should do but, eh, I'm lazy.

My seeds came from Burpee but I will buy them from Fedco in 2013 because the whole terminator seed thing makes me insane and fearful of the Zombie Apocalypse. (How will we re-start humanity with terminator seeds?? What a TERRIBLE IDEA that is.) (If I get REALLY hippie I will look into learning about seed saving in 2013, but I don't have the mental space for that this summer.) Next year, I'll probably buy from Fedco, because that's where Elizabeth shops and I got this whole crazy garden bug from her in the first place.

And, just to keep all of the information about my 2012 seeds neat, tidy, and in one post, here are my seeds and their descriptions:

Tomatoes

Brandywine. Heirloom. Dating back to 1885, this heirloom wins most flavor contests.

Mr Stripey. Pretty, sweet-tasting 1 lb. fruits with a high sugar content.

Amish Paste. Acorn-shaped Wisconsin heirloom: for paste, as a slicer, and in sauces.

Black Krim. Heirloom. Medium-sized, very dark maroon beefsteak, with wonderfully rich flavor.

Cherokee Purple. Heirloom. Its flavor is rich and full, and often compared to Brandywine.

Yellow Pear. Heirloom with pear shaped yellow tomatoes. Certified Organic. 

Herbs

Lemon Thyme, Oregano, Apple Mint, Sweet Basil, Cilantro

Other delectamables

Sweeter Yet Hybrid Cucumber, Clemson Spinless Okra, California Wonder Sweet Bell Peppers, Evergreen Long White Bunching Scallions.

Seed Starter Kits, $10 + $8 = $18

I started with the 72-count and, because I am insane, I thought 72 wasn't enough and panic-purchased an additional 25-count. (Note for next year: 72 is PLENTY.)

Jiffy Pots for transplanting (3 sets of 10, 30 pots total) $12

Soil (3) $18 

I got mine at Lowe's and Home Depot and it was cheaper than what Amazon is selling it for.

Whiskey Barrel, $30

Lemon Thyme, Sweet Basil, and Apple Mint plants, to replace the ones the bunny ate, $11

I bought mine at my local Lowe's.

Clamp Light ($10.68) and Bulb ($14.44), $33.02

I'm not sure what to think about these. I think having a light helped, particularly since I don't have a great window that gets a lot of sun, but I am not sure this bulb was worth fourteen bucks. I tried to do some research on what makes a bulb good for plants and what's just a regular bulb that lights a closet, but I could never figure it out. In the end, I have the sinking feeling that I paid for the word "plant" in front of "bulb." It seemed like a regular fluorescent bulb to me, but I really don't have any clue. The plants grew so....maybe?

Garden Stakes, (2) $16

Oh, look! This is where gardening gets kind of pretty! COPPER STAKES! OOOOOOO!

Trowel Shovel Thing, $10

 

Rakey Fork Thing, $.88

I think it's officially called a "cultivator." I like my made-up name better.

Raised Beds, (2) $126.32 

These are 3.5' x 8' and I got two of them. They're not here yet, so I'll let you know what I think after I get them together.

Still left to purchase:

Tomato Cages

Soil for the raised beds

Soaker Hose

Bunny Fence

Tree Removal (Yep, it still has to come down if they're to get any sunshine worth a toot.)

Probably a hundred other things I haven't even thought of. (Things to shoo away birds, bugs, and slugs! Fertilizer! Fancy tomato-harvesting basket!)

Total spent on garden, so far: $329.82

Oh my God, I literally just added that up for the first time and HOLY SHIT I am going to have to grow a CRAP TON of tomatoes to come even CLOSE to that number. WHOA. I mean, I know a lot of that is in start-up costs that I can use next year (like the raised beds, copper stakes, light, and tools) but WHOOOOOAAAAA. If heirlooms are about, what, $3 or $4/pound that's...about 94 pounds at $3.50/pound I'll need to harvest. If I don't spend another dime. I haven't even bought everything I need, so...We might be looking at something similar to $64 tomatoes. 

Delicious, homegrown, $64 (cringe) tomatoes.

The Garden, Weeks 5 and 6: Meh

I've been posting garden updates on Mondays but nothing has really happened lately. No, wait, a few things happened:

It rained a lot, so the wagon spent a lot of time in the kitchen under the light.

I put the wagon outside when it was sunny for a few hours and a stinking BUNNY ate a whole pepper plant AND a thyme plant. 

A few days later, he ate two tomatoes.

Yesterday, he ate another tomato plant. (A Brandywine!) (IN BROAD DAYLIGHT!) (He is a ballsy bunny.)

I began to think about acquiring a pellet gun.

But then decided that if I DID acquire a pellet gun I would not tell the internet about it because, well, PETA crazies know how to use Google.

So, I will leave this topic at THINKING about getting a pellet gun. Nothing more! Just thinking about it casually!

On one plant, some mysterious white spots appeared. Not mildew. Just spots. On others, they got a little yellowy. I'm not sure what this is all about and haven't bothered to Google.

They are tallish (six inches or so) and need to get in the ground. I'm HOPING to tackle it on Saturday but I need to build those stupid raised beds, find some soil and construct a fence for the rabbits. This feels like a lot to do on a single Saturday, but we'll see. if I get the beds built by Monday, I'll be happy.

I am planning to weigh my summer bounty and tally it all up and see how much my harvest is worth, as compared to the local price of heirloom tomatoes. I'm keeping careful tabs on what I'm spending, so I'm sort of interested to see where this goes. (I mean, I have almost TWO DOZEN tomato plants to stick in the ground, surely they will give me back the cost of at least the seeds, right?) My objective isn't to come out ahead financially, it's just more of a curiosity for me.

Plus, I got this awesome scale last year for Christmas and it's just so EASY when I have that in my kitchen so, why not?

That's it. Some rain, some bunny rabbits, some procrastination. See? I told you. MEH.

 

The Garden, Week 4: There's a wagon in my kitchen

Are we tired of talking about the garden yet? Because I've got A WHOLE SUMMER ahead of me and I don't plan on stopping the garden talk any time soon. As such, have a look at the wagon in my kitchen:

There's a clamp light on the counter that keeps the photosynthesis magic going 14-16 hours a day. On sunny days I take them outside, but they spend their nights indoors. We've had some rainy days lately and I've been glad to have the light on those days. We also went out of town last weekend so it was handy to have the light on a timer.

I think it's warm enough to leave them outside overnight, but we have some resident bunny rabbits and I think they might snack on my tomatoes if I left them out. (Good reminder: Must get fence-gate-type-thing for the garden.) They're all getting bigger, taller, more leafy.

And....that's about all we have going on with the garden. Ho-hum week for tomato farmers. Next week is a big one: the tree will be removed and the raised bed construction will begin. Eeeep!

The Garden: Week 3

On Monday, most of the tomatoes sprouted second and third leaves that were zig-zagged on the edges and looked more like real tomato leaves. The good people at Sprout Robot told me that it was time to thin my plants. I had no idea what that meant, so it's a good thing they told me via cartoon illustration:

Oh, man. I love these Sprout Robot people. They are speaking my (very limited) gardening language. I have to be honest, I felt SO BADLY snipping the seedlings. I mean, these are my wittle bitty tomato babies! And they were all doing so well and I wanted them all to have a good home in a nice yard, but that's just not how backyard agriculture goes. So, I snipped them all back.

On Tuesday, Claire and I transplanted all of them into cardboard containers I bought at Lowe's ($2.27/8). I also bought a giant sack of soil for about $8.

These are the 19 tomatoes we're going to plant. This feels like a lot of tomatoes, but I am counting on half of them dying or not producing. As Elizabeth told me, she planted 33 last year and,

"You could get so many you are leaving them in unlocked cars, you could just get a few extra for the neighbors."

Right. Would rather too many tomatoes than not enough for all of this EFFORT I am putting forth. Anyway, here they all are, tucked into their larger containers. I have them in the wagon so I can wheel them around the yard in the sun or take them in at night if we get a cold front. I kind of think we are done with freezes for the year (maaaaybe there are one or two left) and it's hitting somewhere in the 70's most days so they're living outside for now. I'll put them in the ground when they're about 6" tall.

Claire did the pepper plants. She planted all of them, covered them with dirt and watered them. The peppers are all Claire's this year. 

Here's what's left. Some of them are spoken for, but not all! If you're local and need/want tomato seedlings let me know before the end of the week. Free to a good home!

After we finished, Claire took the opportunity to play with the garden hose.

The Garden, Week 2: Watching (and thinking about) Dirt

My little pods of dirt didn't see much action this week. I am supposed to keep them warmish (70-80 degrees) so I stuck them on a heating pad in the kitchen window. We had a few days that topped out at 80ish, so I put them outside on those days.

(Can I take a minute to say this is THE BEST WINTER EVER? Seriously, it's like I'm living in California except with a dramatically lower cost of living! It's 60 or 80 almost every day, it hasn't snowed even ONCE, I have worn my winter coat ONE MORNING and right now I am wearing shorts and a t-shirt. THIS IS AMAZING.)

The lids got very condensation-y, which was satisfying and made me feel as if science-like things were going on. To my great surprise, they actually sprouted this week, on day 4! Not all of them, but SOME of them.

Just look at that! I grew something! And now that they're alive I find I am consumed with panicky thoughts about how I'll probably manage to kill every single one before I plant them in the yard. (This is why I planted 72 seedlings. A few should survive, right? RIGHT?)

This was all very good news but it is very boring to spend time looking at dirt and fretting about toothpick-sized plants dying. What I tried to spend my time on last week was figuring out where the garden is going to live in the yard. We have two trees and a large Maple next door that shade most of the space. The house faces SE/NW, so we do get some decent sun, but these three trees combine to make sure that no patch gets full sun, all day long.

Here, I drew you a picture, because writing that was super boring and I am pretty sure that even if you READ it, you still have no idea what my yard looks like.

See? There's not really a good spot to put the garden. If I were to get rid of that Bradford Pear (a totally crappy tree if there ever was one: they split easily, rarely live longer than 30 years [ours is about 20 years] and have a shallow root system) the whole left THIRD of the yard becomes a prime garden area. Plenty of space and sunshine for all of my vegetable dreams.

I called a tree dude and he said he'd remove BOTH trees, grind stumps and haul it all away for $550, which sounds pretty freaking cheap to me. I would like to just ditch the Bradford Pear for now, since Charlotte's swing is in the Magnolia tree and this is a nice baby-containment-device for when Claire and I play outside. (Which is every single day, as winter never really arrived to this part of Texas.)

Once it gets hot and/or Charlotte starts to walk (imminent!) the Magnolia will have outlived its usefulness to me and then it can go. (I've mentioned before about how it was planted too close to the patio and the leaves ohmygod THE BOAT-LIKE LEAVES I hate this tree.)

Now that I had imagined myself a sunny area of yard, I was trying to decide if I should dig up a section of yard to put the tomatoes in or if I should do one of those fancy raised beds, like this:

Source: ana-white.com via Brooke on Pinterest

 

But, that looks like a lot of work and it also means I have to figure out where to buy quality dirt and then have the dirt delivered and something tells me that even though it's just DIRT it is probably kind of expensive. Digging up the yard sounds....simpler, somehow. 

THEN I went down a rabbit hole about the Mittleider Gardening Method and I was all, "Chris! WE SHOULD DO THIS! HIGH YIELD HYDROPONIC WHOOZITS!" but after reading I think it's a lot more work than I am willing to put forth. I am already wondering how to build cages for the tomatoes and keep our flock of neighborhood bunnies away from my tasty vegetables. While the Mittleider Method provides very specific instructions (which I am a HUGE fan of) I think it's too many instructions, even for me. 

After that, I decided I had not spent enough time worrying about my seedlings for the day, so I bought a clamp light and a grow light bulb. Seedlings inside are supposed to get 14-16 hours of sunlight/day because (I think?) the quality of light isn't as good as the actual sun so they need more of it. I'm not sure if these were The Best or The Right things to buy, but I bought them because the only window that gets direct sun only gets it for about 2 hours a day and I figured something is better than nothing.

The Garden, Week 1: Plant Seeds

So! I had a big weekend. My brother got married and Charlotte has her first ear infection but what I think you are all just dying to know about are my tomato seedlings. 

Katie clued me in on Twitter to this darling site called SproutRobot.com where you can put in your ZIP code and it will tell you what to plant and when. I am very fond of the internet telling me what to do, so when the directions for this week told me to start tomatoes indoors, well, I listened. (It was helpful that my seeds came in the mail while we were at the wedding.)

I bought a seed starter thingy at Lowe's a few weeks ago. (This is probably a good time to remind everyone that I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm making this up as I go along.) I had read that a lot of people start seeds in styrofoam cups, old paper egg cartons or other oddball things around the house, with the sentiment seeming to be,

"You don't need to BUY something to start seeds! That's PREPOSTEROUS! A Real Gardener could start seeds in her belly button if she wanted to. It's so easy! Don't buy into the marketing hype!!"

Yes, well. I am not a Real Gardener and I thought I might like a little $7 crutch. It's basically a plastic tray with 72 of those little pop-up things of soil. You pour hot water on it and they puff up and turn into 1.5" cylinders that you can start seeds in. There's a little indentation for each one in the bottom so they all stay in their proper spot.

Next, I got my seeds out. This feels like possibly the only appropriate moment on this website to tell you that I am 1/64 Cherokee. One might say these are My People's Tomatoes. (You know, if you take a multi-generational leap with me.)

Here, see? This is Sarah Lockridge. She is my great-great-great-grandmother and she was born in 1830. She's 1/2 Cherokee. I wonder if she grew tomatoes? Hrm.

Anyhoodle, it took a lot longer than I thought to pluck a few seeds in each pod, but the girls watched with semi-interest and it didn't even make a big mess. In fact, that was my favorite thing about this seed starter tray thingy: it was ridiculously simple and I didn't have to buy a bag of dirt or scoop it around and now all of my seedlings are in a very compact and easy to move around tray. It's all very tidy.

I put two or three in each one and I planted a dozen pods of each variety. I'm hoping half of them germinate and another half make it far enough to planting and another half survive in the yard, which would be 1.5 plants per variety. (I are keeping my expectations LOW.) If I have extra seedlings I'll bet I can find good homes for them because can you even imagine if I had SEVENTY-TWO tomato plants in my back yard?!

No. We are not going there this summer.

I made some labels with toothpicks so I don't forget what's what.

And then I stuck the lid on and walked away. I think they are supposed to get 14-16 hours of sunlight/day to really do well, so I'm thinking of rigging some kind of fluorescent light over them and then making jokes about my growhouse and pretending I'm on Weeds.