It’s been a whole while since I’ve posted here; not for lack of cooking or ideas, but for lack of time. The past 3 months have been packed with things that had to be done, even if they weren’t the fun things. Things like unpacking, decluttering, paring down, but also things like medical appointments, follow-ups and tests. Everything is fine, but it made for a stressful and busy end-of-winter.
But that’s not what I want to post about. What I want to post about is this: In Year 3 of the garden, I finally feel like I’ve gotten it dialed in some. Year 1 was cleaning up, taking down the horrible chain-link fence, putting up the basic beds, and learning about the sun and the light. Year 2 was, well, not productive! Hah! And come to find out from talking to others; it wasn’t just me. Everything grew well last year but nothing pollinated or fruited. I think we got 3 tomatoes, a handful of eggplants, and we had one lovely cantaloupe that went from “not quite ready” to “overripe and fermented” in the space of a weekend. We did get a lot of the landscaping in the back done, but the garden was just a sad loss.
Much of what I planted in Year 2 was bought at the nursery or at Home Depot. I tried some seed starts, but nothing really came of it because I didn’t have good light or a good location for things to start. (News flash: Finnegan J. Derpcat likes to nibble on new sprouts! It makes seed starting inside difficult, to say the least.)
However, this year, Year 3, I got the garden shed (“The Barn”) set up with shelving, heat pads, grow lights, and some amazing starter trays from Epic Gardening. Seriously, no affiliation here, no kickbacks; I just really really love these starter trays and base trays. I’m only sad that the “color drop” versions weren’t available when I ordered mine in all-black.
Here’s specifically what I had in my setup in the Barn:
- 6-cell propagation trays – 48 of them
- 4-cell propagation trays – 32 of them
- Universal bottom trays – 8 of them
- Waterproof seedling heat mats – 8 of them
- LED 5000K shop lights – 2 sets
- 5-shelf wire rack
Each shelf held 2 full size trays plus some smaller square micro-greens trays (more about those in a future post). I hung the lights above each shelf using the provided chain that allowed me to raise and lower the light as necessary for the size of the plants. The lights were on a timer that turned them on at 6 am and off at 10 pm every day. Once all of the starts got an inch or so tall, I set up an oscillating fan on low to help build stem strength for all the seedlings.
Do I have photos for you? Of course not! But I will next year, I promise!
I started most of my seeds in mid-to-late February and moved them outside to harden off in mid-March. I did have to move everything back inside for about 3 days near the end of the month when the overnight lows dropped into the 20s. That’s a lesson for me; I lost 2 nicely developed San Marzano tomato plants because I was impatient. Luckily I had 4 more to fall back on!
This past weekend, I planted all the tomatoes, the peppers, the squashes (zucchini and yellow), the cucumbers, and the eggplant. I also dedicated a whole bed to various lettuces, bok-choi, and spinach. I’m having much more luck with those this year, starting them in propagation trays and transplanting them when they’re about the size of my thumb. I’m hoping to keep rotating through lettuce and bok-choi starts and keep us in salad all year this year.
The asparagus are in year 2, which means we won’t harvest for another year or two, but they’re looking good so far. I’m finding that there are some female plants which I will wind up rooting out later this year.
So yes, I’m back and will be blogging about the garden quite a bit as things are coming along. Plus I do have some good recipes and some things we’ve tried this year to add to the mix. It’s time to get this show back on the road.
Coming next in the garden series: Seeds and sources, irrigation setup, and more general discussion about the property and landscape plans.