My First Fig

I ate it too!  ((and savored each morsel).  I had never tried a fresh fig before, just read about them.  Yum. This plant grew in a large container and we got about 15 figs this year.

At the Zoo

What to do when your car has 7 seat belts and there are 8 of you.  Bummer.  Since we traded our Astro for an Uplander, we lost a seat.  So… to have “Camp Grandma”  (This week is dedicated to the grandchildren and for lack of a better name, we are calling it “Camp Grandma”. Five funfilled days and 3 overnights of cheap, local, fun entertainment!)  But, back to the seat belt problem, I “bought out” Grace.  For $2.00 yesterday, and $5.00 today, she is staying home with Tom/Dad.  She’s happy, wealthier, and less stressed.

So here we are at the zoo, after playing Putt Putt and visiting PetSmart.  Before swimming and digging our own delicious potatoes for dinner.

The Potatoes Actually Grew!!!

What you see here are 3.25 pounds of potatoes which grew from 3 or 4 teeny pieces of potatoes and required NO effort on my part.  They were in a 4 gallon bucket (hole in bottom) placed (strategically) under a dripping upside down tomato bag.  Wa hoo!

No weeding, no bugs, no spray, no watering, JUST POTATOES!

Yesterday being the end of July, I tallied our monthly yield.  We did almost 35 pounds, for a total this year of just over 50.  Not close to the folks in CA who have 10k as a goal for their 1/5 acre farmlet, but hey, for us it’s awesome!

The Amazing 5 Gallon Detergent Bucket

You are probably getting tired of this particular bucket, but it amazes me.  It was picked from a friend’s trash heap, then I planted a huge, awesome looking cucumber (which turned out to be a pepper plant).  Next, I planted pretty flowers on top to keep moisture loss down.  Then, I added used up jiffy pots as another moisture keeper.  Except that they weren’t used up.  It turns out that some lurking seeds were waiting to sring into action.  Here you see a Delicata squash with 2 huge fruit growing off of the top.  The peppers are growing well too.  Four new babies are growing from the bottom.

Just to the left of this bucket is a 4 gallon bucket with a grape tomato on the bottom (very prolific, already given about 50 tomatoes), and on top is a bird house gourd and red basil.  These are all part of my experiment to see how much is too much.  How much one teeny container can grow without committing suicide.  We are still weighing the produce.  For all of June our total output was 15 pounds.  We did that in about 2 days for July.

I Never Thought I Would be Excited by a Salad!

(But I am!)  This one has the following ingredients from our garden:

Lettuce, spinach, sweet basil, red basil, celery, carrots, green pepper, summer squash, broccoli, grape tomatoes, cucumber.  That’s ELEVEN things!  Wow!!!  I used to hate the very concept of gardening.  Forced as a child to labor and all.  And thanks to Tom, this is all ORGANIC too!  Double wow!

Lest you be too dazzled, I need to point out that there is a fair amount of iceburg lettuce mixed in.  The next batch of “my” lettuce won’t be ready for a few days.  Still, this rocks!

Today I made cucumber pickles with my container cukes and the huge green pepper from my upside down pepper grower.  I could have used our own onions but they are not quite ready.  Can’t wait to try it.  Also, last night in a fit of desparately not wanting to waste perfectly good sourdough bread that no one was going to eat, I cut it up and made croutons.  They were delicious.  I will make a salad tonight with them.  I also picked a pound of broccoli this morning.  Tom wants that for dinner.

Monday I used the dehydrater to dry summer squash slices (some with popcorn seasoning, some with salt and pepper), the rest of a can of mushrooms, and some grape tomatoes (very prolific, also from upside down planter).  The tomatoes were awesome!  So sweet, chewy, like little Starburst (which I hate), but tomato-ish.  Yum.  I can’t believe these words are even coming out of me.

The Side Yard

Here you see the Tomato Tree, with it’s 4 buckets.  Tom has the 2 green ones, I have the buckets, five gallon this year.  His are fancy self watering kinds with wicks, mine the old fashion kind, with crops on top to retain moisture.  One is marigolds, the other sweet basil.  Both have flowers.

To the left you can see some tomatoes which I grew from seed.  Some started in bottles and some in jiffy pots.  One of the vine tomatoes is in a self watering container, the other just a bucket.  I put them side by side for comparison.  We are keeping track of dates and yields and stuff to see what works next year.

We did get some bunches of grapes.  I am off to pick some leaves to freeze.  I do love stuffed grape leaves!

Upside Down Tomatoes (and Peppers)

So far this is working much better than last year.  The white bucket is 4 gallons, I thought it was too small because last year was such a dismal failure.  This year it has about 50 baby tomatoes (grape) already.  The difference?  I started this one right side up and let the roots grow conventianally for a few weeks, then inverted and hung it up.  We also started crushing our eggshells and adding to the 1/2 compost  1/2 coconut coir potting medium, with a handful of Tom’s special fertilizer. It is totally organic and is the best producer so far.

The blue bucket is the best cucumber in the lot.  A joke because I went looking for a cuke plant to try upside down.  I picked the best looking one, came home, planted it, and as the tag fell out, I read it.  It is actually a pepper plant.  Tom finds this very amusing.  I did not as I really don’t like peppers.  Oh well.

We Have Green!!!!

This is lettuce and spinach for our first salad.  (Oh, um, best not to tell the kids about the spinach – they picked out all of the mushrooms and thought that was all they had to worry about for “unapproved” items).  We also had our own huge, fat radish.  Soon to come:  celery, carrots, and tomatoes.  We can make our own dressing, and Ursula points out, our own croutons, from our own bread, from our own wheat…

It was yummy!  They all came from our 3 x 3 raised bed.  I also have two other containers started, and will probably start one a week for a while to ensure a steady supply.  This was too good!!

This is All Planted Now

This is the Square foot garden which is now ALL planted!  The back row has two grape vines and a clematis.  The front row is marigolds, behind that are 4 of the broccoli from the “broccoli experiment”, they are doing better than the ones with the blueberries, but not nearly as well as the ones in the SWC’s.  Other than the chive you see, which I just divided into 4 other clumps, the blank spaces are filled with cutting flower.  To the right is the potato bag row (an upcoming post on this will explain!)

The Other Side Yard

On the far right is a blackberry bush in a cut up barrel.  Beyond that is a lasagna bed with 5 blackberry and five raspberry canes, some lillies, and a cabbage.  To the left is a rain barrel and a yet unplanted lasagna bed.