Week 2

This week moved along a lot faster than I expected it to, we lost a few of our seedlings to mold, I think it’s because we’ve got them in the living room and with the humidity from the rain and the warmth of the heater I set up a bad climate for them to grow, I’ll try to re-seed when I actually get them in the ground.  In addition I think the spinach I planted bolted, so they’ll be more re-seeding outside, other than that the remaining seedlings look like they’re doing really well, the cucumbers and zucchini are getting their second set of leaves already and the corn that has survived is almost 6 inches tall.   It’s really funny how the plants grow at different intervals even though I planted them all on the same day, I’m just starting to see sprouts from the watermelon and sunflowers but I have onions and lettuce that are ready to be weaned out.  I did do some research on strawberries, and I’m thinking, the seeds that I stared will be good to put in a pot this year, from what I understand from the article I’m not going to get any fruit from them for at least 2 seasons, so I’ll go ahead and grab some starters from the local garden store when I get closer to planting in the ground.  With that I’m looking at getting things actually into the ground by the middle of next week if not sooner, I want to give the plants a few more days indoors and with the weather forecast I don’t want to start the hardening process until I’m sure we’re no going to get below 40 at night. 

On another up note we did get the bottom planter boxes finished, and we were able to use the rest of the good wood from our old fence, so thankfully we didn’t have any cost out of pocket this week.   On the downside we don’t have enough wood to start the planters on the upper level, but, since I know what size they should be now and since the dimensions we used can be made with untreated fence boards we should be good to go after the rain stops this week.   For the upper beds we’re making them 2 feet wide by 5 feet long, 2 boards tall and just putting some longer 2 x4’s in the corners to dig into the earth a little bit.  The lower boxes we made into an L shape for each of the corners of our lawn, one planter is 2 feet by 5 feet and the other is 2 feet by 3 feet so they frame the edges of our “grass” – I use the term grass very loosely, between the dogs digging and the doughboy pool we put up last year there’s very little grass out there – on top of that there’s nothing level about the yard itself so we’ve have a few more issues that one would have thought trying to get the planters into the ground a few inches and still have them look level or eye pleasing – my thought is that once the plants are in and growing well that there won’t be as much of an emphasis on the empty boxes.  The dogs are adjusting to the boxes as well – for a while on Saturday both Tara our shepherd and Zola the bulldog mix spent time hopping in and out of the boxes trying to figure out what they might be for and if they were edible – I’m sure they’ll try and do the same thing with the plants.

 I did some calculations for the amount of dirt we’re going to need and it’s almost double what I thought it was going to be, that makes sense though since I only planned originally to put raised beds on the top tier of our yard not down on the grass level but in order to get all of the basic plants I wanted I needed more room.   So hopefully this weekend we’ll have the raised beds done up top and have a local company deliver 3 cubic yards of topsoil/compost mix to our house to get the outside planting started.

I know I said I’d put pictures up, and I’m sorry I just didn’t get to it this week – I’ll try really hard to make a point of doing that this week.  Until then Happy Planting!