Our Growing Garden

Unfortunately Blogger is having problems uploading photos currently (or at least it is having trouble uploading my photos) :( I hoped to post some photos along with an update about our vegetable garden but I'll have to add the photos later. 

About 2 weeks ago I actually got around to planting our garden. Woodley and I put together the planter boxes about a month ago following directions in the book, "All New Square Foot Gardening." I then collected a variety of seeds packets from the local nurseries and also from Bountiful Gardens. I ended up with quite a collection of seeds! 

It took me a couple of weeks to sort through the seeds. (I made many spreadsheets using google docs to keep track of their various germination times, companion planting preferences, days until harvest, and other details.) Finally, I decided that I had better actually get the seeds into the soil if were were going to have anything to harvest before we head north to Washington for the summer. 

We created 3 4x4 foot square garden spaces so altogether we have 48 square feet of garden space. Here's what I planted in each of the garden boxes. I've put a * next to the ones that already germinated.  

Box 1: 

Summer Squash - 1 crooked neck*, 1 lebanese light green*

Zucchini - 1 cocozelle zucchini* 

Chard - 3 bright lights chard*, 3 erbette chard*, 3 rainbow chard*

Basil - 4 genovese basil, 4 lemon basil*, 4 bail mix* 

Cauliflower - 2 all year round cauliflower 

Cucumbers - 1 chelsea prize cucumbers*

Beets - 19 of a variety* 

Melon - 1 halogen*, 1 charentais 

Pepper - 1 jimmy nardello's sweet Italian frying pepper, 1 yolo wonder pepper 

Box 2: 

Lettuce - 3 leaf mix*, 3 nouvelle-cuisine mix*, 3 bolt-resistant mix*, 3 garden babies butterhead*, a bunch of baby mesclun mix*, 3 heirloom lettuce mix*, 3 como-savoy*, 3 emerald oak* 

Agretti - 4 plants

Cabbage - 2 

Broccoli - 1 all-season broccoli, 1 di cicco* 

Spinach - 3 plants

French Sorrel - 4 plants 

Box 3: 

Cucumbers - 1 persian baby*, 1 cucumber mix, 1 space master, 1 snow's fancy pickling

Bush Beans - 4 dragon langerie*, 8 bush bean mix*

Soy Beans - 8 Envy* (for Edamame) 

Sugar Snap Peas - 8 bushes* 

Corn - 4 Argent*, 1 country gentleman*, 4 bodacious, 4 sweet early casino*, 1 golden bantam* 

It is so exciting to go down to the garden each day and see the progress the little plants are making! I can't wait to post pictures once the blogger bug is taken care of! 

One other great addition to our garden is a sprinkler with an automatic timer. Woodley helped set it up the other day and I love it because I know that the plants will get watered whether or not I remember to get up in the morning in time for the daily watering! It was also pretty easy to set up, which I appreciated. 

Tonight we're off to see Carmen at the opera. I'm so excited to see it! I've seen a performance of it once before in the Boston Commons while I was in the area for college. There were tens of thousands of people in the park for the free public performance and my group was very very far away from the stage. We could actually see the stage from where we sat, but we watched most of the performance on big video screens that had been set up closer to our location. It was a fun night out in the park with our picnic blanket. Tonight's show will be in a real opera house so I'm expecting a very different feel. :) Now I'd better go pick out a dress to wear! 

~ElizabethRose