Smriti's World: Plants

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Update on the seedlings

Remember the seedlings? Well they've grown!

Those are the beans at the lower level. The upper level mostly had marigold.

Those two plants with the big leaves - they're summer squash! Don't they look handsome?!?! All the others are marigolds.
The plants seem to be doing fine. We do wish we'd planted them earlier but given that this is our first year from seeds I think it's ok.

Monday, June 11, 2012

A peek at our edible garden

After our tryst with vegetable gardening last year (you can read about it here, here and here) we decided to go full blown this year. I don’t know how but I came across a new method of gardening called the Square foot gardening. My DH always asks me where do I come to know about all these things…honestly even I don’t know! Serendipity I guess! We went and bought Mel’s new book, All New Square Foot gardening. If you’re lucky enough to be in WA you can get it at the Half price book stores. Buying the book was just the start of the journey. Then we’d to collect the ingredients for the special mix – five different kinds of manure/compost, vermiculite and peat moss. Once we’d the ingredients it was quite a project to setup the raised bed. Mixing of the soil requires quite some muscle power. Of course and then there was the most pleasant part of it all – getting the required veggie starts. Picking veggie starts is like asking a child to pick a candy. However many you take, you’re never satisfied! There’s always that one veggie that you wanted and couldn’t get!

I do remember taking photos of when we planted the bed but don’t remember where they’re. So unfortunately I can’t show how much the veggies have progressed but I can vouch for it that they’ve come a long way! Here we go with the photos…

The Square Foot garden bed – the first 4 squares are zucchini and summer squash

Monrovia blueberry bush – if you look closely you’ll see a lot of berries on it

Back of the bed – the larger plants are tomatoes, front left and right is onion and the lots of small plants are spinach (we’ve harvested it a couple of times now!); the lone plant is pepper.

Strawberry plant in a container of it’s own – look at all those little berries!

Mint – we harvested a lot of this and probably not too frequently which kind of stunted the growth of this plant. Lesson learned – harvest mint frequently!

Both the plants above are blueberries – can you see the little berries?

Only the raised bed is done using SFG. All the others are using regular soil.

So what do I think of SFG? It’s hard to say right now since we' haven’t had much fruit except spinach but I can say that all plants look quite healthy. It is a lot of hard work to put up a SFG bed so I hope the harvest is equally good. We did put a weed fabric and a chicken wire to prevent gophers and other rodents – so that was good. I’ll update as and when we get fruits on our plants.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

From the little ones to the big ones

Its been so long since I posted that what I initially wanted to post was my little baby tomatoes and peppers and by the time I’m posting, we’ve already eaten the fruits (or peppers!) of our labor!

We planted tomatoes, banana peppers and green peppers in our pots when the summer started. Since then we rarely miss a day when we don’t check how they’re progressing. When my mom was here, she used to take good care of them. In fact, they (the plants) missed her when she was gone. I would say it was under her care that they started bearing fruits.

Here are some pictures that I took of our little ones…

Banana peppers