Tuesday, September 17

I tried my hand at growing this year. Part II

As I said in my earlier post, there were successes and failures in my endeavor to grow veggies this year.  The mister and I played is safe and continued with our CSA membership, but decided to opt for the half share in lieu of the full share.

Some of the seeds I started inside were looking great, like the broccoli, pictured below:


Some of the other seeds (kale, cucumber, zucchini) called for a direct planting in the soil.  So, around Mother's Day I got the seeds in the dirt and within  three weeks, I already had some success.  I decided to also look for some plants at the farmer's market and picked up some eggplant plants from an organic farmer.  So, by memorial day, my garden looked like this:

Lettuce (up front), broccoli (middle), sunflower and eggplants (left and top), hints of kale (top right)
We were able to set up a watering system by running the hose from the house (some 50') along the top of our fence line and connecting it to a diverter connected to two soaker hoses.  Once in the AM and PM we watered the beds for 10 minutes.

Top row are cucumbers; bottom two rows are zucchini
Carrots in the foreground
As I said before, I had some failures in this process.  My tomatoes that I started from seed did not transplant well and died, so I bought 5 tomato plants from a farmer at the Phoenixville Farmer's Market.  My broccoli transplanted well, gave me lots of green leaves, but never delivered on the florets. 


Within a few weeks I was harvesting food and the garden was thriving. 
Before (upper) and after (lower)
In my next post, I'll give you the rundown of everything we harvested this year. 

No comments: