More pictures of the garden

First of all, here's my mystery plant.  I have no idea what this is.  I don't know if this is weed, or a volunteer of something worth keeping.  If anyone out there in the blogosphere knows what this is, please let me know!

AAANNNNNDDDD..... Here's the garden.  On the left are cauliflower plants and baby beet plants.  Next is kale and red romaine, interspersed with onions.  The second picture has broccoli in front and tennisball lettuce and baby carrot plants. The third picture has my Winter Marvel butter crunch and the mystery plant/weed.  The open space to the right of the Winter Marvel will be Giant Caesar lettuce -- one of my favorites.  The fouth and final picture shows my bean/tomato tower which will have pole beans on two sides and cherry tomatoes on the other two.  Behind the tower are 2 squash plants (two stils protect by cut out milk jugs), and there are baby radishes around the milk jug furthest away from you in the pictures.

Those are grass clippings around the broccoli and in the base of the tower.  Great mulch/weed barrier.

A close-up of the rasdish seedlings around the squash plant.  They'll be harvested well before the squash takes over the space.

I've been a bit frustrated with the bell peppers I've started from seed.  All germinated, but keeping the seedlings alive long enough to grow a few more pairs of leaves has not been easy for some reason.  I don't remember having this trouble in the past, but.....   Here's one of the Purple Belle pepper plants that is doing well.

Here's my new project -- a new bed for tomatoes!  18 cinder blocks loaded on to a cart, then into the car, then out of the car and around the back of the house.  I broke down one of the compost piles and partially filled the bed.  I need to get some composted cow manure, and then I'm building my tomato frame out of bamboo poles a la Kevin Lee Jacob's technique.

I'm not a big tomato fan -- there's a mild allergy which runs in the family, and I suspect that's part of it.  But my husband and my youngest like tomatoes.  I'm going to plant Pink Brandywine heirlooms, and Hungarian Heart.  I already have the cherry tomatoes on the tower, so I haven't decided what other varieties I'm going to plant  I'll have room for 8 plants.

I'm also going to put in a smaller bed for one raspberry and one blackberry plant.  I'll let you know how that goes!

How much longer till I can pick lettuce?

Winter Buttercrunch Lettuce

Lettuce is coming along just fine.  I'm hoping in just a couple more weeks I can start picking some!


Everything else is coming along reasonably well.  This kale, and if you look closely, you can see that the onions have sprouted.

This is Red Romain and onions. 

More kale.

I planted the squash today.  I put some open-topped plastic jugs around them for some wind protection until they complete harden off.

I also brought out the tomato seedlings to harden off.  I want to get them planted next week.

And here are the winter sowing jugs.  Some sprouted, and some didn't.  I'm keeping track of which ones didn't sprout, and I'll adjust accordingly next year.

The poor cucumbers did indeed not survive, so I replanted seeds.  I had lemon cucumber seeds on hand.  I ordered some more Brown Russian cucumber seeds from Cook's Garden, and I'll get those planted this week.

I also ordered TunLCovers.   I'm very disappointed with the hoops and fabric arrangement I was trying to use.  Everything just pulls out of the soil, in part because the soil in my raised beds is so friable. I even tried Earth Staples, but.....nothing held them in.  We'll see if the TunLCovers work any better.

Is that a covered wagon in your backyard?

Another gorgeous day in East Central IL -- aren't we lucky it fell on a weekend?

So....I had big plans for today:

1. find a way to mark the grid in the garden
2. plant whatever I am scheduled to plant
3. set up the tall hoops and put the heavier garden fabric on it.
4. set up the cucumber frame

I started the day at our local Menard's.  For those of you who don't know what Menard's is, it's a regional everything-you-could-possibly-need-for-your-home kind of place.  One of the biggest Menard's stores on the planet is 10 minutes from my house.

I went looking primarily for two things:  figure out some way to mark the square foot grid on my garden, and see if I could find what I wanted/needed for my dad's birthday present.  Not much luck on Dad's present, so I suspect I'll be placing an order with Gardener's Supply Company this evening.  I was more successful with my grid.

If you are not familiar with the Square Foot Gardening system, I highly recommend it.  Once I learned about it, I found out that a lot of people I know have used this system for years.  If you have a minimum amount of space, and want to maximize what you can produce from it, SFG is the way to.  But the key is to have a grid demarcating all your 1 foot squares, and I have struggled to find a good yet cost-effective way to do that for the last 3 years.  

I tried paracord.  The birds attacked, and harvested strands for their nests.  I swear they even untied my knots.  I priced plastic strips, wood strips, etc., but most of what I could find that was not cost-prohibitive didn't come in 8 foot lengths.

On a mission I was, and with an open mind about ANY possibility.  I looked at the cutting line for weed wackers.  Inexpensive, but not easy to work with.  After all, I was going to have to tie it around the screws I already had in the frame of my bed, and I just didn't see that being pleasant.  

What I eventually found was clear tubing, about 1/2 inch in diameter.  Based on everything else around it on the shelves, it was obviously intended for a number of uses, all of which involved water.  It reminded me of surgical tubing.  And I found zip ties of every size.

The end result:

 

Side note here:  You probably noticed my lovely green water-filled cloche-thingys.  One of my ideas that I suspect is not going to work.  I've used these before, but always after the weather was warmer.  The daytime sun and warmth warms up the water, and then the heat radiates all night as temperatures cool, therefore keeping a warmer microclimate inside the cloche.  As I have learned already, that is NOT what happens when the temperature is still getting below freezing on a regular basis.  You get the OPPOSITE effect -- the microclimate stays colder.  So I may just lift those out and set them to the side to use later when it's more appropriate.

Once I had my grid in place, I could do a little planting.  In the squares next to my green tube things, I have planted Spanish onions, Red Romaine lettuce, and a dwarf curly variety of kale.  Each square has an onions interspersed with greens.  The top square is onions and Red Romaine, the next is onions and kale, and so on.  Onions take a lot longer to mature, so by the time they are starting to really get big, the greens will have been harvested already.  

I have this cool tool that makes evenly spaced holes for planting:

I also planted 2 squares of EZ Cut green lettuce from The Cook's Garden on the opposite end of the bed.  We'll see how it does.

I spent the rest of the time setting up my hoops and garden fabric.  I learned the hard way last year that squash and cucumber plants which don't have any protection early on get infested with beetles.  Unfortunately, one doesn't find out they are infested until after the vines stop producing and die.

Here are the hoops:

I added a length of the tubing along the top, and attached it to each hoop with zip ties just to add a bit more structure and stabilization.

Then it was time for the fabric.  I tried to just use spring clothespins to hold the fabric on the hoops, but they weren't strong enough to hold the fabric in place against the wind.  HMM.....what to do, what to do.  I scavenged the garage to see if there was anything useful, and then I had a brilliant idea -- binder clips!  I had an entire box of binder clips in my office, and they'd been sitting on a shelf for several years.  Obviously they were not needed for anything else.

There isn't much that can't be fixed with binder clips and zip ties:

Last thing for the day:  set up the cucumber trellis.  The lemon cukes can be planted in another couple weeks, so might as well get it set up.

I guess it does it look like a covered wagon...

And....we're done for the day!!