Suburban Gardening

It has been a very odd year.  While I am just now coming upon my one year mark of moving to San Antonio, it is hard to figure out this weather.

We have had only about 1/2 inch of rain in two months, and we have been over 100 degrees for about the same amount of time.  We are in water restrictions because of a drought....and no end in sight!

It is so bad, I planted potatoes, and in two days they EXPLODED in the ground, just like if you had microwaved it a little too long.  It was the craziest thing I had ever seen!

Well, just about everything died in the garden.....here is where I pulled out all the old tomato plants, as well as a few lingering green bean plants.

Here was the pile for the dump....remember, I really have a small garden

The only things remaining in the garden at the moment are

• a watermelon vine, that refused to be trellis trained,
• Two Okra plants, still producing two to three pods a week (see the blossom below),
• one jalapeno pepper plant that I forgot I ever had in there, buried in between some tomato plants
• one tomato plant (unknown variety) that SEEMS to be hanging on.

Here is a picture of the okra blossom, I love the simple yellow flower with burgundy coloring in the center.

Here is all that is left of the garden.....

I even posted on the discussion board at the Modern Victory Garden asking for advice of planting in this hot weather.....the censesus was it was a "break" before the fall plantings.

As I was pulling the tomato plants and general garden clean up, I did go ahead and harvest the few green tomatoes (mostly pear shaped) along with the okra and a few peppers for the forgotten plant.....

Shoot!  a week earlier, and one more Okra, I could have entered them into the Down on the Allotment's picture contest!!   (Congrats to Modern Victory Garden for her carrots).

So I have cleaned up the garden, spread a little compost that I have ready, and spread some hay as mulch, and hope for a break in the weather.

Then Saturday I listen to the local garden talk show on the radio, and they are saying that this comng weekend is when we plant the fall tomatoes, peppers, squash and pumkins to be ready by Thanksgiving time.  So I am looking forward to going to the nursery and finding out exactly which varieties I should start from seed now, to get it going.  I am stoked (excited) !!!!!!

Well that is my update so far...

Stay tuned, I hope I can get something going in the garden soon!!!

So it was time, the potato plants were all dead.  I was worried as I never got any blooms on the plants as everyone else's blog were talking about.

I was pleasantly surprised from the Great Potato Experiment.

If you remember from one of my first blog entries, I just popped two red potatoes in the ground with no clue on how they will come out.  Only after the fact did I learn that you needed to build up the soil around the potatoes for any type of harvest, so I added a cardboard box.  I am all about recycling.  In the end the box just degraded away (hopefully improving the soil in the process).

Well I am pleased to say we got 3.5 pounds of nice red potatoes to enjoy.  A few small seed potatoes for next year's planting.

Here are the pictures taken while I was harvesting them (sorry some of them are a little dark, it was starting to get a little late, and I don't have the best digital camera).

I will be starting my next potato planting next weekend.  This time it will be in a 24" high pot that is about 18" round.  I am hoping they will do a little better in there.

I have been working a ton of hours at work, so I have been a little behind on all the home chores (which I was reminded of last evening)....so I am playing a little catch up on my harvest updates.

MY FIRST TOMATO!!! 

This was Wendesday's harvest.  The tomato came in at 6 oz..  I harvested the three canalopes (actually one fell right off the vine as I was standing there, so I figured it was time and they were quite heavy.  They weighed a total of a womping 14 pounds, 10 oz. .  Then two large okra.  This put me well over my annual goal of 20 lbs. 

The tomato was delicious!!!!!  a little warm, sliced up with a tiny bit of salt.  It was perfectly ripe.  The melons were so juicy that they were even dripping on the counter top in the picture.

My Goal was only 20 pounds, as it was my first year really, really tending to my garden, so I will just have to continue on to see my total year end weight, and add 10% to 20% to it for next year's goals.....

I apologize for the imagine, my digital camera went AWOL, so this came from a camera phone, not the best quality, but it does show the harvest.  Also forgive the dirty counter, I literally just finished cleaning and chopping up the harvest....sorry mom!

Thursday night's harvest include kolrabi and 2 small yellow pear tomatos, and one green tomato that I accidentally knocked off the vine while attempting to fix them...I'll explain in a moment.     This harvest included 10oz of small kolrabi, 1oz Yellow Pear Tomatos and 6oz green tomato.  TOTAL FOR TODAY:  17oz.

In the garden, all my tomato plants, cages and all, fell over, in the process creating a domino affect (or is it effect, I always get confused).  All 6 tomatos were basically laying on the ground on top of each other.  I got them all straightened back up and tied the cages to the fence for added support.  In the process knocked off one green tomato....it is ripening on the window sill for now.

On Saturday evening, we harvested basil (6 oz of it!!!!, I am not sure what I am going to do with all of it), 1 single yellow pear tomato, and 2 more okra (1oz).

I have only two okra plants, but each are kicking off an okra every four days or so...I think I am going to have to start pickling some to give to friends. 

So another item we finished yesterday is we vacuum packed a Ham & Bean soup for the freezer.  We will love this in the fall and winter.  While I can not take credit for all the ingredents in the soup, it is taking fresh items, and saving it for later.

2 bags of fresh Balck Eyed Peas, from our favorite farmer's market stand (Oak Hill Farms at the Pearl Brewery's Farmer's Market)

1 left over ham bone, I threw in the freezer last Christmas

about a dozen or so "pearl onions" or at least that is what I call them from my garden.

All thrown in the Crockpot all day with a little water.  in the end, we ended up with three large food saver bags weighing in at almost 7 and a half pounds of soup. (It only cost us $2.00 for all the beans).

UPDATE ON TROPICALIZATION

We also continued the "TROPICALIZATION PROJECT"  yesterday evening.  I will give you a little preview in the picture below.....I will post details tonight or tomorrow.  Other than some of the banana plants, this whole thing is RECYCLED AND/OR REUSED!!  It is not close to being done yet, but we are working in 102 degree heat, so everything is in spirts.

Until next time!!!!

First, I wanted to annouce that a new feature has been added to the site.  The Garden Calendar.  You can see it  by using the link above labeled of all things...Calendar.  Here I am noting my Harvest days, planting days, and the misc tasks such as fertiziling.

I wish I had thougth of this, but I have to admit, I explored another site from Annie's Granny's Blog Roll and stumbled upon The Modern Victory Garden.  In reading this site, I found tons of information, as well as other similarities.  For example:  we are both accountants, she is a CFO and I am a Director of Finance.  Both love gardening, we are different climates, but techincally we both use the same web host. 

Check out her site, chat on the discussion boards, and enjoy!!! 

Another small shout out.....I love to support the local farmers.  Whatever I can not grow for us, I will get from the local farmers.  The newest farmer's market here in San Antonio is the Pearl Brewery's Farm to Market that occurs every Saturday.  They are picky on who they allow to set up as vendors, all must be in local driving distance, and have quality products. 

The other nice thing they do is have local chef's come in to do cooking demostrations with the local products.  Last week the Chef produced Goat Cheese stuffed Squash Blossoms served on a bed of Roasted Eggplant cavier.  It was to die for, but the easiest thing to make.  I will post the receipe here a little later.  You can check out Chef McMullin at his restaurant's website here.

As for my favorite vendors there....Oak Hill Farms  for all our vegatable, herb and fruit needs and Scott Enterprises, which does local farm rasied tilapia.  I have to tell you this is better than ANYTHING you can get at the store. 

Well, that is all for now.  My garden is kind of running on its own for now.  I just direct sowed some corn with cabbage interplanted into the new raised bed I put in over Memorial Day.  It is a little late in the season, but I just can't stand to have an empty spot in the garden that is not producing.  Please keep your fingers crossed for me!

Until next time!!!

SG

Well, two things to report.

Something ate my Corn!  I got in the garden to water and looked at my corn.  It had been shredded and eaten.  I have my suspects, a small group of squirrels that like to torment my dogs by running back on forth across the fence.

Oh well, I ripped out all but one.

The other is.  I definately have some LARGE canalope coming in.  There are a number of small melons coming in that are about 3 to 4 inches long.  But I also have three large ones, each about the size of a normal melon you get at the store.

The only question is...When do I harvest them, how do I know they are ready?  Any comments would be greatly helpful.  I have NEVER grown them before.

Well that is all for now....I promise to post more tomorrow.

It has been a while….I apologize!! I was working long 15 to 18 hour days, and it left me exhausted, and little time to manage my blog obsession.

Here it the happenings in the vegetable garden

I have pulled up all the onions. Some were very small (barely cocktail onion size), but most were about the size of a golf ball. Since the green stalk was bend over on all of then, as well as turning brown, I did not think they would last too much longer. Since I got a very late start on them, I didn’t expect to get as much as I did from them. I got over 3 pounds in total. This final batch ended up 1 pound, 10 oz. The plans are to chop them up and freeze them. We will pull them out when the tomatoes & jalapenos are ready, so we can make some fresh salsa.

All the corn was silked, and was hoping to pull them in the next week or so. However, I went out this morning, and found that a squirrel has eaten one of the ears. So I pulled that stalk up for the compost pile (it only had one ear), and moved the owl statue over to that part of the garden. Hopefully this will buy me a little time.

Boy, will I have some tomatoes when they turn ripe. After losing my first batch of 12 or so to one of the dogs, I have about 25 of them coming in on the red tomato plants (three plants total), and dozens coming in on the yellow pear plants (two of them). They all look about the right size, now we are just waiting for them to ripen.

We just filled the newest bed with soil, and since it is hot right now (over 100 degrees every day) I am still trying to decide to plant there. I can’t wait too long, as in September, I need to start the plantings for the fall season.

I HAVE CANALOPES!! I was not sure how these would come in, it was a transplant I bought at the local grocery store. I worked on getting the vine to trellis on the fence, and it had tons of blooms on it. I looked a couple of evenings ago, and found three LARGE melons coming in. I am telling you, large like the size you would get in the store. I had to run to Walgreens to purchase some panty hose to give them some support. The cashier kept looking at me a little strange! I will post some pictures of this later in the week.

We are starting our project that I have decided to call the Tropicalization project. We are taking to entire length of one side of the backyard and adding a koi pond (left over from the neighbors), native rocks as the outline, and tropical plants including Bananas, papaya trees, agave cacti, and purple plants (sorry I am unsure of the name of them). I will post as we go along in the stages. We started the first third of the garden this evening.

I will also try to post some pictures of the garden as it stands now this week also.

Take Care….Have fun in the garden!!

SG

So no time was wasted..... I was instructed to grab certain plants for the back yard and after 20 minutes of arranging, and re-arranging, and more re-arranging.  The bench from the Honey Do list was offically complete.

Have a great week!!

SG

Well it has been a very productive day!!! We had rain the rest of the weekend, so I accomplished nothing. But today...it was a good day.

GARDEN: I harvested 10 more oz. from the garden. 6 ounces of Argula and 4 ounces of two small onions. This has brought me over 2 pounds produced and harvested!!!! Check out the harvest dashboard on the home page.

I will be eating this as a salad this evening, with a little grilled chicken. Know that I am thinking about it, I think I will harvest another 4 ounces or so of Parsley and make a chimchuirri (I am sure I have misspelled this) to use as both a basting of the chicken breast, as well as a salad dressing.

COMPOSTING: I have turned the entire pile. Back breaking, put amazingly, as I was turning it tons of steam was coming out of it. Even in the high 90 degree weather we are having. I am going to watch for another bag of grass to add to it, I want to keep that thing COOKING.

NEW PROJECT ON THE LIST: I have added a new project to the list. Not exactly gardening, but felt I would add it anyways. We are installing a multi-tier pond. Can we say Aquaponics!!! Well, we could not pass it up. It is Bulk Trash pick-up week, so the neighbor, who is going thru a divorce, decided it was time to CLEAN. So she ripped out her pond, and threw it to the curb. So we decided to take it (we asked) and now we are finalizing the plans in our yard. It was the whole kit (pump, pond, and even some plants). We have cleaned it out, and have it storing out back. The pump was cleaned and in the garage, and the plants are in a large flower pot that has no drainage holes, filled with water. I image this will be a long weekend project, once all the plans are finalized.

EXPANSION OF THE GARDEN: The same neighbor ripped out some of her raised beds, so I took one of them, and added it to the veggie garden. Below is a new Plot Plan with this 7 foot bed addition. They are labeled as plots 49 to 55. Double click on the link to open it to full size mode.

THE MAP 2009

The bottom of it is lined with cardboard.  It will degrade, but in the meantime will kill the grass that is beneath it.  Think of it as weed barrier.

DOGS & THE GARDEN: So as everyone noticed in the previous post that the dogs invaded the garden. They ate all my green tomatoes. Well I went to Lowe's as pick up some metal posts to secure the temporary fencing. I thought, well, they will not be able to knock that down, and will keep them out of it. I WAS MISTAKEN! My 80 pound dogs squeezed thru the 12"  holes in the fence to get into the garden!!!! So now, I have interwoven some wooden stakes thru it to make them too small to squeeze thru. Let all keep our finger's crossed. I would really love to have some tomatoes this year.

One item off the HONEY DO list: When we moving into this house about 9 months ago, the previous owners left a old wooden/cast iron bench. The wood had rotted away, and the cast iron ends were sitting beside the shed. This was put on my honey do list, about a month after we moved in. Finally, I got around to installing new wood pieces to it as well as some carriage bolts. Now it is sitting on the front stoop...not for sitting, but as a decoration piece to hold plants. Sometimes it is better not to ask..

Well that was the productive day!!!

SUGGESTIONS NEEDED: I am a planner! That is the accountant in me. Here is my planting calendar so far. Anyone has some suggestions for a late season plantings. I would also be interested in any mixings! I know that Engineered Gardener inter-mixes Corn and Cabbage. I am open to ANY suggestions!!!!!! Below is my "planner". Please click on it and open it and give me some suggestions! Remember this is my first real true year at this. Sure, I have planted tomatoes for years, but I am new to everything else. Net year, I really do want to attempt some heirloom tomatoes??but man can not live by Tomatoes alone!

THE PLANNER

Thank you in advance!!!

I will try to post the recipe for the sauce/basting/salad dressing tomorrow for any that is interested!

Thanks!!

SG

Well, everyone can see my garden tour pictures on the home page.

Unfortunatly, my tomatoes that I was so proud of, are GONE. My eldest dog, Lady, has taken every one of them and has eaten them..... I was just bragging about them last night on Granny's blog...

She is a character. I have planned tomato plants for the past seven years, and I have NEVER gotten to harvest a single one!! The minute they are large enough, she will grab every one of them off the bush, play with it like a ball for about five minutes, then eat them.

I thought this year would be my year, I have a make shift fence/gate set up, but she jumped right on over and got to them. You would never guess that she is 13 years old.

Well, I see a few small pea size green ones coming in, I will have to try something different, if I expect to get any.

Here is Lady...one of three dogs that I have

I decided that I would plant two red potatoes that sprouted indoors. NEVER grew a potato before, I didn?t know anything. I knew they grew in ?hills? so I popped them in the one of the square foot garden patches in my new garden, and figure what can it hurt?.

They came up like wildfire?. So I decide to get online, and found Engineered Garden Blog and his potato experiment. Surprising, they are pretty close. So I read other blogs, to find out as much information as I can. Well, I did not dig them down very deep, and my little 2 inch hill was not doing anything. So I built it up using a cardboard box. I figured it would biodegrade into the soil eventually, but it would last the 3 or 4 months until it is harvested. So now I have a 12 inch box with no bottom that is containing the dirt and the potatoes.

Well the potato plant was starting to take over the rest of the garden with its foliage. Today I decided to cage them up with some Bamboo steaks and some garden twine. I didn?t want them to drown out the sunlight from the surrounding neighbor plants. Hey, its an experiment anyways?.

I am open to any comments?.. The best references I found are to visit Annie?s Kitchen Garden, Engineered Garden Blog, or Sinfonians?s Square Foot Garden.

Here is what I have so far?..