My first Garden

I turned 30 this year and set a couple of goals for myself. My first was to lose weight and get healthy. My second was to improve our yard (we have never been good at caring for our yard. Its always filled with weeds and nasty. Lastly I wanted to have my own vegetable garden. I have never ever grown vegetables before. To be honest I’ve never grown flowers either, or anything really.

The first step in the gardening process was to find a place to put the garden. Our side yard has full sun and horrible grass thanks to oddly placed sprinklers. I decided this would be a perfect place. So I started digging up the grass by hand. Let me tell you this was not an easy task. After digging up just a few feet I started having that “I don’t want to do this anymore” feeling. But it was too late. Here is some pictures of what I lovingly referred to as “The Grotegut Bare Spot”.

Day 2 of digging up Sod

After digging up all the grass, John built my boxes and we laid them down to make sure we had enough room.

I spent a whole day leveling the ground so the boxes weren't on a slope. John and I installed the boarder edging to keep grass out. Then I laid decorative mulch around the edges and between the boxes. We also put down weed block and I hand tiled the dirt in the area outside the boxes. Once Everything was level and the boxes were installed I followed the recipe for soil in the "Square Foot Gardening" book. It was 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 of compost (I used chicken poop, veggie, and cow poop based compost). I mixed the soil and filled the boxes. For the area outside of the boxes I used garden soil and compost. It wasn't as great but it grew some awesome sunflowers and pumpkins. I decided I wanted to do a salsa garden and try my hand at canning my own salsa. So I planted all things salsa!

I originally planned to sow the seeds right in the ground but found out I was planting too late to be successful with that. Next year I plan to germinate all of mine inside since those little plants are PRICEY!  On may 16th I planted everything in the boxes. 13 tomato plants, 2 cilantro, and 17 pepper plants that included Anaheim, Garden salsa, Red, yellow, Fajita, and green Bell’s, Jalapeno’s, and hot Banana peppers

This is my Garden 60 days after planting. I sowed the seeds for the sunflowers and pumpkins right into the ground. I did those about a week after i put the transplants in. They took off!

I dealt with some over water issues. I had no idea what over watering looked like so when my plants started to sag and look greenish yellow I assumed they weren’t getting enough water. Nope! Too much! So I cut back and didn’t hand water at all. Just relied on the sprinkler to do the work. The over watering stunted my peppers a lot. They didn’t grow much for the first 5 weeks. After applying magnesium to them they became healthy again. Then came the grasshoppers! Those little suckers are hard to kill. I tried so many different killers. I wanted to stay organic so I did Dio Earth, some organic killers made just for grasshoppers, and finally just sprayed the yard (not the garden box) with Sevin dust. That took care of it.

My Garden 100 days after planting. Two of my sunflowers ended up being 12 feet tall!

My sunflowers are by far my favorite thing I planted. I sowed them from seeds right in the ground. Same with my pumpkins which grew clear out into the yard. But because of overhead watering and a super hot summer I got Powdery White Mildew . I had no idea what it was at first. I thought my plants were just not getting enough water or it was just too hot. Then I went in to get my gallbladder out and my poor garden was neglected for a few weeks. When I came out to work on it I noticed the spots on my pumpkin plants and noticed one tomato plant was almost dead. I decided to trim off the dead branches and then used the same scissors to trim some weird branches off of all the other tomato plants. Thus infecting all of them .

My garden 100 days after planting. This is right after i found out I had powdery white mildew.

Ollie loved to hep water the garden. This particular day he snuck out of the house and turned the water on himself. He's the best

Ollie helping with the watering

My gorgeous Sunflowers!

After discovering the powdery white mildew I took action. I made a homemade fungicide and spent the next week treating them daily. I ended up pulling up all the pumpkin plants besides 3. Most of them had just small gourds on them that kept dying because of the mildew anyway. I wanted to try to contain it. I trimmed the infected leaves off the pumpkins plants I kept. I then pulled all the dead leaves off of all the tomato plants (well as many as I could) and treated them daily. My pepper plants were stunted but not too far gone to save. After a few days they showed improvement. I ordered more Neems Oil which is an organic fungicide. I treated everything (including our front tree, bushes, and flowers since they caught the fungus too) and they have been improving even more. They are all producing tomatoes again and so far every plant I’ve had has produced at least one vegetable. The pumpkins are improving. The mildew was preventing them from turning orange and now they are all turning orange! I’ve harvested a total of 22lbs of Tomatoes and was able to make 13 quarts plus 12 pints of homemade salsa!

My first Huge harvest

Here is a photo of my garden today, almost 120 days into growing. Everything has yellowing leaves because of the mildew but its contained for the most part. I learned so much this year and i know next year will be so much more successful. I plan to even expand my garden out so I can plant even more. Who knew gardening could be so much fun?

My three pumpkins. Perfect amount for the 3 kids we have

Garden box #2

Garden Box #1, all my lovely Bell Peppers!

My tall sunflowers! Unfortunately they are not doing well and are not going to give us any seeds. I'm okay with this because they were just fun to admire and watch grow!