May 20, 2008

Today was a good day off. The weather was crappy all morning, so we cut out early from the planned beach activity and went to the Children's Museum after a big lunch at Red Robin.  After some more phone investigation, we went for our walk.  By the time we got home, it was late and my wife needed to leave so I was alone with the kids.  They were tired and needed to be fed and put to bed, so there was no time to go out and garden.  The only thing I got done off my impromptu to-do list was we separated half-way through our walk with my wife going to pick up salad stuff and I went and got washers to help hold the trellis in place. Boy were they expensive for stainless steel, but they'll last and hold it in place without it falling off when it's full of plants.  Oh, and for grins I picked up a third variety of radish from the local hardware store. They're Ed Hume seeds, but they were only $1.50, hehe. 

The weather was actually perfect for the garden.  It was rainy in the morning, sunny in the afternoon and rainy in the evening. 

The only time I was out there was to harvest my dinner. I went light (after a bacon cheeseburger from Red Robin) with a huge salad.  I say huge salad, but here's a shot of them with store-bought carrot and tomatoes. I can't wait to eat my own, but lettuce, spinach and radishes are not quite enough. 



What I can say about the salad is that all this was harvested as what I would call "the bare minimum" lettuce and spinach I could do to protect the rest of my garden. It was overgrowing and crowding the other squares. It appears this is common with intensive SFG.  But I felt bad for the seedlings in the adjacent spinach squares that were covered by the huge spinach leaves.  Boy were they tasty.

After my first harvests of greens, I rushed out and planted more squares to get more harvest to feed us.  Now I'm thinking I don't need any more greens because they re-grow, but the single-use veggies, like radishes, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower need more space. So I'll plant some additional squares of those. Tonight I planted some more radishes, I tried the variety I got today.  We'll see how they turn out. 

Back to work tomorrow. So the last thing I did was to start up a ton of more corn seeds to germinate.  The nice weather we've had sprouted everything nicely and the first plants are starting to really look like corn stalks. Short but real corn!  So it's time to plant the rest of the bed. Nice succession I think. I just want it all to grow, hehe.

Enjoy your garden!