0 Backyard Garden: Part 3

It is amazing how fast our garden has grown, and how many lessons we've learned so far. It surprises me how plants can grow so fast from seed to jungle in the course of just a few months. In early March we planted seeds indoors, which you can read more about in this post. After the seedlings grew a bit more and the last frost ended, we decided to move them out into the backyard.

Beautiful little pepper plants

The squirrels really loved these...

The squash as of May 8...

About two weeks after we planted them in the backyard, the plants were already starting to explode in size, best reflected in the squash. One thing I was concerned about with the squash was the possibility of overcrowding, but halfway through May I figured my worries would end up being waisted.

AMAZINGLY HUGE SQUASH as of late May.

...And by the end of May overcrowding was a HUGE problem. Thanks to the squash. Beautiful squash, but monstrous and huge plants. Needless to say we ended up placing the squash way to close together. After getting this far into the backyard garden my largest advice to those starting a garden is make sure that you give plants plenty of room. This especially applies to wide plants such as squash. We don't even have any produce yet and we already had overcrowding.

Because of this, one of my roommates thinned out some of the smaller plants this weekend in order to reduce the crowding and give all the vegetables a chance. 

We've had beans already this season, I'm excited to see what we get next!

0 Backyard Garden: Part 2

Continuing from my post last month, my roommates and I continued to develop our backyard garden and our appreciate for local, organic foods.

Back in late March our tomato seeds grew into seedlings. We started gestating (the phase where the seeds turn into seedlings) in mid-March under the assumption that we would be able to plant them outside in early April. However, after a trip to our local farmer's market we grew to realize that the end of the danger of frost in Virginia is really around the first week of May. Oops....

Since we started gestation in March, the tomato and squash seedlings were rapidly outgrowing their little pods by the first weekend in April. We decided to transplant them to larger troughs for the duration of April so they could continue to grow, and began gestating some bell pepper plants as well. As an experiment to see how the plants would fair outdoors, we planted our bean plants and two of our tomato seedlings in the backyard to discover what would happen. 

Thus, April was a relatively tame month for the garden, except for this past weekend when we planted everything outside! But more on that later next week...

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

1 Backyard Garden: Part 1

Over the past year, my roommates and I have grown to appreciate organic and local food and markets. A month or two ago we were at our favorite market and saw a display for organic seeds. The display, along with the rather dead backyard, motivated us to buy a few varieties of seed. With the weather becoming warmer over the past week or two, we decided to begin growing them for the spring and summer.

So I wanted to chronicle our stumbles and fumbles through this adventure to help anyone else who's contemplating the same thing. Hopefully by the end of this we'll have something edible...

We purchased some small tabletop greenhouses to grow the seedlings inside under a controlled environment. For the first batch we decided to grow some flowers and tomatoes. The tomato seeds require 70 degree heat to grow properly, so we placed a heat pack underneath the greenhouse to incubate the seeds. After a few days, when the tomatoes sprouted, we removed them from the greenhouse and placed them by the window for sun.

Until they grow larger, the only attention needed is some water when the soil becomes dry, so I will post again once our tomatoes begin to grow larger. Happy Monday everyone!