This year has been crazy from the beginning, including us nearly selling our house and moving, so I didn't think I would be planting a garden this year. Things changed, though, and we decided to plant some things at the last minute over the weekend. I hope we haven't waited to late. We shall see!
Yesterday, I prepped our raised bed which previously held my straw bale garden. I broke up all the soil and added in several buckets of compost from the pile at the back of our yard which used to be a tree. (I'm still bitter about that!) It became clear as I started setting things out that we had bought too many plants, so we resorted to adding the spillover into containers, including some recycled kitty litter buckets after Brandon drilled drainage holes into the bottom. They look a little redneck, but I'm being green, right? :D
I planted a black beauty zucchini, 4 Roma tomatoes, 4 Celebrity Hybrid tomatoes (2 in the bed & 2 in the Tidy Cat buckets), 2 jalapenos, 2 Serrano chiles (1 in the bed & 1 the large green flower pot), 4 basil plants (divided between the terra cotta pot & the rectangular planter), and some thyme, which is in another flower pot. Here is our little garden after I was finished. (Click the photo for a larger version.) Hopefully at least some of it will live and I haven't crowded things too much!
I've never grown garlic before. I remember my mother keeping it when I was growing up, primarily for her homemade pickles. Unfortunately, I never had much of an interest in growing things or cooking while I lived at home, though, so I didn't get any tips there. I suppose I should've done some research, but I decided instead to just jump right in and plant it. It was in one large clump when we got it, so I'm sure I couldn't have put it too close together. I spaced it out 5-6" apart and planted the bulbs with 1-2" of soil over the top. Maybe that was deep enough. We shall see!
Something else I planted yesterday was a Grape Tami G Hybrid Tomato that we picked up at Wal-Mart while we were replacing our rosemary. I had run out of room in our raised bed, so I repurposed one of our many Tidy Cats buckets for the job. I put a few holes in the bottom of it to allow for drainage, so hopefully that will do OK. We haven't had much success with tomatoes in containers so far, but it was the best I could do without digging a hole in the yard.
The thyme from last year that turned green again this spring is still doing well! It's not as full as I'd like, but I'm hoping it will continue to fill out. I trimmed off some of the more sparse branches in the hopes of helping the others do better. Actually, I accidentally trimmed off one of the branches full of leaves in the process. I stuck it in a glass of water in the kitchen window, though, and it rooted. So I'll be planting that this evening, along with a "volunteer" tomato of some sort that has popped up in the raised bed next to one of our pepper plants.
Our garden is doing pretty well, with the exception of something which is eating our tomato plants. We picked up some Sevin Dust Sunday and will be using that ASAP. (It rained yesterday.) Hopefully that will take care of the culprits!
Considering I've pretty much neglected our garden, I'd say most of the plants in it have done great! Our sweet basil plant is huge and has yielded tons of fresh basil. We've made tomato pies, frozen some, and given some away. I need to try my hand at pesto; we certainly have enough to make some. Any other fresh basil recipes I need to try?
