Vegetable Garden
Contents |
Introduction
When I was younger I helped Mom in her garden, so now that I have kids and a home of my own, I figured I should start my own veggie garden. I'll be using this page to keep track of it's progress and document any successes and mistakes I make along the way.
I'm not a complete newbie to growing this, back in the apartment we had a couple of tomato plants that did OK on the porch. I hope that this garden does much more.
Sprouting Seeds
It's more typical to buy starter plants, but I like to do things from seeds when I get started early enough. As we had been planning this garden since last fall, we had plenty of time to get the seeds started. We started by germinating 8 each of the following:
Cucumber
Jalapeño Peppers
Squash
Zucchini
Early Girl Tomato
Brandywine Tomato
Cantaloupe
I had some extra pots so I did 16 Bell Peppers.
The cucumber's sprouted first. After the first week, they were almost 2 inches tall! Squash seems to be coming up next.
May Update
The cucumbers and squash did very well, and the jalapeño peppers did ok. Out of the first batch I didn't get a single tomato or bell pepper. Reading up on the Internet, these guys needed it a bit warmer so I moved some new pots to above the water heater. This did the trick, and now I've got 5 little tomatoes and 3 of the bell peppers are peeping out. Next year I'm going with multiple smaller greenhouses, one for each type, rather than one larger one.
Garden Layout
We tilled up a 15'x30' plot for the garden and ended up not using all of it. We don't need wide rows for a tractor or anything, so we went with smaller 4'x4' beds and a couple of 8'x4' beds for tomatoes. We've only planted one 4x4 for cucumbers one for jalapeño peppers, one for bell peppers, half an 8x4 for squash and zucchini and an entire 8x4 for tomatoes. This still leaves us with 2 4x4 beds and a 8x4 bed, not to mention a 4 foot strip on the side for flowers.
Soil Prep
I didn't do a lot of soil perpetration other than tilling it up and picking out the big clumps of grass. I added about 15lbs of a 10-10-10 fertilizer to the entire 15x15 foot garden before we split it up into beds. I did start a compost pile, so hopefully by next year I'll be able to use that as well.
ToDo
- Buy tomato cages
