Filed under: Austin, food, Garden, go green, Heath + Beauty, outdoors, personal | Tags: Austin gardens, garden planning, square foot gardening, tomato plants, vegetable seeds
How does my garden grow? Quite contrary, indeed: my garden does NOT grow, but my compost pile sure does!
Last week while turning my heap of kitchen scraps (which I lovingly refer to as a compost pile), I came across a 2008 yellow onion of unknown origin. It didn’t immediately strike me as odd amidst the other rotting vegetables of 2008: a flabby pumpkin carcass, a stubborn grapefruit or two… but the onion caught my eye because of the bright new taft of greens exploding from it’s top. I rescued the onion from the heap and thought, “what the heck…” and took it up front where I planted it next to my Candy Onion sprigs.
Speaking of onion sprigs, they seem to have survived their transplant and are doing well in the square foot garden. My lettuce have had a hard time of it, though – starting with a few cold nights the week after I planted them. This week we’ve seen hard freezes… there was honest-to-god frost on the lawn this morning. With the threat of ice and freezing rain on Tuesday night I decided to protect my little lettuces with kitty litter boxes (hey, in a pinch…), and when I checked on them last night they seemed to be doing pretty well. We’ve still got 2 more cold nights ahead of us though… I’m hoping the lettuce can come out from cover for good on Saturday.
My cold, cold garden. Check out my neighbor's cat's rendition of Mount Everest front and center. That cat makes some serious monuments to poop. Maybe the kitty litter covers led her to misconstrue my garden as a huge litter box? hrmm.
The most successful gardening thus far has been on my windowsill. My tomatoes are all up now and are THRIVING. It was an absolute delight to follow their growth in the first week or two – it was the first thing I ran to in the morning and the first thing I’d check on after I got home from work at night. The yellow cherry tomatoes came up first, followed by the Amish Pastes, and Matt’s wild cherry tomatoes were the last to poke through (and are still a lot smaller than the other 2). A day or two after I started the tomatoes I sowed a few green pepper seeds that I’d saved from my Boggy Creek scavenges last fall. It was a whim, and I didn’t do a very precise job of planting so I wasn’t expecting much. Sure enough, the soil didn’t move and the seeds seemed to be duds until 2 days ago when 4 plants began to bend their necks up towards the light.
L-R: Matt's Wild Cherry's, Amish Pastes, Peppers & Yellow Cherry Tomatoes
I had hoped to start carrots and spinach this month as well, but with the chilly nights we’ve been having I think I’m going to hold off for now. Besides, I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with all these tomato plants that are growing on my windowsill… anyone want some tomato babies in a few weeks?? J
