are things complicated yet?

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.

If my tomatoes die, I will be SO PISSED.

I have decided to give myself another role I can add to any future bios I might have to (painfully) write for myself: GARDENER.

I was really waffling about whether to go ALL IN on the garden and throw a bunch of seeds in the ground and build my own tomato cage from rebar, or start small with one or five plants from Lowe's and see how that went. I went back and forth on this for a while. On one hand, I would love to be An Amazing Gardener Type Person and grow lots of delicious things and basically bathe in tomatoes all summer long because I am So So So Good at it. On the other hand, it felt like I was setting myself up for a huge disappointment if they failed. So much time and energy and heart....WASTED. (Possibly.)

Then I decided that if I did go the simple, "just visit Lowe's"  route, I'd be frustrated if it turned out well. "Just THINK of what I COULD have done!"

So. I have purchased seeds. A lot of seeds. We (hope) to be eating:

Tomatoes

Brandywine (Elizabeth told me to buy it.)

Mr Stripey (I admit, I could not resist this name. I shall be cooing to Mr Stripey all season. "Oh, Mr Stripey! How are you doing today!? Would you like a spot of water? It's dreadfully warm today, don't you think?") (I have possibly watched too much Downton Abbey.)

Amish Paste (I don't really know what this is but people say it's good for sauce.)

Black Krim (I picked it randomly. It looked kind of pretty.)

Cherokee Purple (Elizabeth told me to buy it.)

Yellow Pear (I just like these little suckers and they're pretty in a salad.)

Herbs

Thyme, Oregano, Mint, Basil, Cilantro

Other delectamables

Cucumber, Okra, Bell Peppers, Scallions. 

Oh, and lettuce. I got lettuce because Elizabeth says it grows anywhere and is very simple and is very satisfying to be all, "Let me go get some lettuce from my yard for a salad!" I think I got some kind of butter leaf lettuce variety packet.

We'll start the seeds that need to begin indoors when they get here (next week, I think?) and I have no frakking clue what I'm doing but I am pretty sure I will get my hands dirty and I will swear a lot but it will all be worth it if I get my plate of tomatoes to feast on come May. (Or, June? Have I mentioned I have no idea what I'm doing?) Claire is going to help and I anticipate that much of our day will revolve around the feeding and care and maintenance and OH SHIT PLEASE DON'T DIE mentality of the garden.

Let's do this shit. Mama wants a homegrown caprese salad this summer.