The Socially Distanced Garden

 Well, because the summer garden went fairly well, I have decided to chronicle the progress of my progressive winter garden as it progresses. I am sum-what concerned, as maybe the reason it did so well is because I didn't write about it. Maybe the plants don't like the pressure that a large blog audience such as this one puts on them! I'm not sure, but we will try it anyway.

This year we decided to rethink the layout of the raised beds. Carla, Han, Luke and I took down the separate beds and rebuilt them into one big bed.

Here it is:

Hopefully the boards will keep the weeds out. 

Here is where the social distancing comes in. Most of the time I put my plants way to close together. They start out small and spaced out but then grow larger and crowd eachother. This is the way they look when they grow up:

   

Much too crowded!

Eric Clapton, the hack guitarist and famous gardener, once said: 

        "You should keep your vegetables spaced out properly or they will not produce fruit."

This is good advice.

So this year we are planting the garden with larger spaces between the rows. Here are some nice pics from after today's planting.

Hmm.. This one doesn't look to good. We will see if he survives.

Anyway, My wife Carla also painted some nice rocks to use as row markers. She is much more artistic than I am.

Here is one of hers:

Very artistic. That's butter by the way.

Here is mine: 

Thats spinach, not a palm tree.

So throughout the growing season, we will see how the seeds grow. Today is September 13th and next week I will post an update to see if the seeds have sprouted.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Safe Spaces For Seeds

Seeds are very fragile. They need a special environment in which to grow before letting them loose in the great outdoors.

Much like the millennials of today, seeds need safe spaces.

Safe spaces prevent them from being bullied by the other plants. Safe spaces protect their delicate ideas from being trampled by differing opinions. Safe spaces prevent the harsh realities of the outside world from affecting their open-mindedness.  Wait, are we talking about millennials or seeds? I can't remember.

Anyway, as stated in my last post, my plan was to plant from seed and compare my results to Mrs. Jedi Gardener's purchased plants.

In order to create those safe spaces for my seeds I used a common method involving plastic solo cups.


I cut a slit in one of the cups and placed it inside a second cup.

Finally dirt is placed in the cup and the seed is planted. This method, assuming the seeds grow, helps not to disturb the roots when finally moving the plants into the ground.

Here you can see one of the cups with the finished tomato, ready to plant. 

After the cup is removed, the root ball is nice and solid and ready to put in the ground.

Overall, the growing of seeds went pretty well. A few of my seeds sprouted, a few of them didn't. But now the garden is off to a good start. I have also revised the rules of the competition to include planting location. Mrs. Gardener planted all of her plants into pots and the plan was to roll them around to the perfect sunny location in the yard while I planted in the raised beds. Here are some pictures of the pots:

Thats a sad tomato in a pot. 

I'm pretty sure thats a maple tree.

Now lets take a look at my plants. Below is a picture of my raised beds with the plants grown from seeds. Take note how lush they are.

These are doing especially well.

And finally, a line of direct seeded lettuce.

As when watching CNN or MSNBC, you should watch out for fake news even when reading blogs. But, because its my blog, these are the facts as I see them.

The Seeds Awaken

Last year was a dark time for the galaxy. All of the Jedi Gardeners either went into hiding or starved for lack of organic tomatoes.

I had decided to grow everything from seed and while things started out well it became clear that I had chosen poorly.

As the picture to the left indicates, the seeds sprouted but really didn't produce fruit.  Below is a picture of a fruitless squash. It was very strange. Then all of my tomatoes fell down and I had a network of strings holding them up. What a mess. Unfortunately I was so disgusted, I didn't take any pictures.



I also used a soil called mushroom compost. This had the unusual side effect of growing many tiny mushrooms in the garden. Mushroom compost is essentially the soil disposed of from mushroom farms after it has been used to grow mushrooms. While this sounds like it would be terrific I think that all of the metaclorians have been sucked out of the soil by the mushrooms, making it a bad choice for Jedi Gardeners.

But this is a new year and with the spring comes the hope that a new wonderful garden will grow.

This year Mrs. Jedi Gardener and I have a friendly competition to see who can grow the best garden. I am growing all of my plants from seed because it went so well last year and she will buy mature plants from the garden store and grow them. This will be a fun to document on the blog.


I also have a totally new seeding method that I learned from my coworker, Kylo Ren, which I will cover in a later post. So stay tuned for an exciting year from a garden far far away.

Where do turtles come from?

Where do turtles come from?

A few days ago there was a commotion in the backyard. The dogs were barking and the boys ran out and immediately spotted something out of place.

It was a rather large striped turtle.

I was of course concerned that it might be a man eating turtle so I called my friend who is a turtle expert,  The Lizard King, primarily because he can do anything. He said that it was a harmless slider turtle probably looking for a quiet place to lay some eggs.  Indeed he was correct. The turtle did not eat us but instead shuffled over to a hole next to the raised beds and slept for a while.

I disturbed Mrs. Turtle only briefly to snap this photo.  She was there all day and I expected to wake up and find the turtle lumbering around the backyard.

But when I woke up the turtle was gone without a trace. So, this leads to my first question: Where do turtles come from and where do they go? I have a 6 ft tall fence around my yard. This turtle would have to travel across the street, through the yard and somehow crawl under my fence. The gates are locked so I am sure he wouldn't have unlocked the gate. The turtle's whereabouts are a mystery to this day.

In light of the turtle incident I decided to dedicate this post to the various animals around the garden.

Here are two nice dragon flies:

A bumble bee:

My wife does an excellent job keeping bees. Here are some of her hives:

I may write a post dedicated to the bees in the future. The bees are great for the garden as some plants, including squash, require cross pollination to produce fruit and the bees are perfect for the job.

There are also some bugs that are quite bad for the garden. I am having trouble with cabbage moths. Here is my cabbage and a moth:

If anyone has any ideas for getting rid of these cabbage pests I am looking for suggestions.

Regardless of these pests the garden is going well. 

Here are some Beans

The tomatoes and cucumbers are quite large

Here is the new garden. I have planted new squash and lettuce here.

And here is the exciting lettuce

Here are my cantaloupe. I am experimenting with ways to prevent them from rotting. I turn the regularly and have propped them up on boards to keep them off of the ground. 

Thank you for visiting.

Overall the garden is doing quite well but one issue I am having is with my sunflowers. I cannot get them to germinate.

Here is a sunflower seed after a few weeks:

There is nothing there.

So I talked to a friend who is a sunflower-ologist this weekend and she suggested soaking the seeds prior to planting them and then putting them in the ground. After my success with the seeds in the paper towel, which I highly recommend, I decided that this was a good idea.

Here they are:

This is a standard bowl. I have also added some other seeds to see what happens. I have spinach seeds, sunflower seeds and some new been seeds. We will see how they do.

Here are some updated pictures of the garden:

These are the beens that were previously in the paper towel.  I am excited to see how they do.

Here are some new trellises I am trying for the tomatoes. I put up some 2x4's vertically and the connected them with horizontal 2x4's at various elevations. I may buy some 1x1 square wood pieces to replace these down the road. I expect to be able to use these year after year and have better tomatoe access. I have standard wire trellises in another garden for comparison. 

Here is a nice looking cucumber:

And a row of carrots:

The carrots were started from seed so I am particularly proud of those. Here is a beet. You can see the little red top right under the soil (it may be a radish).

In this plot I have strawberries and cantaloupe. I always have issues with the melon varieties as they rot or never ripen. 

I asked R2 to take an aerial photo of the garden as well. This picture is dated May 23rd.

Here is a picture from April 27th for comparison.

Stay tuned for more pictures of the seed bowl and the exciting conclusion of the worm compost series of posts.

Wookie Compost

I now fully understand why Jabba the Hut chose to feed his enemies to the Sarlacc Pit. He surely used the Sarlacc compost in his vegetable gardens.

For those who are unaware, the Sarlacc is a plant like omnivore that embeds itself in the ground with only its mouth protruding. It preys on victims that are caught with its tentacles and digests them for thousands of years.

While normal composted material is great for a garden, a digested Chewbacca or Boba Fett must have provided excellent garden nutrients.

I now have much smaller versions of the Sarlacc living at my house and while they do not digest things for thousands of years, the things they do digest and provide as waste are solid gold for the garden.

Here is their home:

These little Sarlaccs are known as Eisenia fetida and they produce vermi compost. I received these little worms from an expert gardener that I know well.










Essentially I have a small Sarlacc pit in my garage and I feed it vegetables and newspaper. The worms digest it for many months and then produce compost that I can feed to the plants. I am very new to the world of worm compost but it doesn't sound too difficult.

Here is a close up picture of a worm:

He's a nice looking worm. And the dark matter is the compost ready to be harvested. I checked the worms today and they needed to be fed.

This is a bit of old salad and my worm stick.

I choose to use a stick to move the paper around instead of my hand because, well, essentially this is a large bucket of poo.

Here is the bin with the salad mixed in. I moved the paper to one side, put the salad underneath and then did the same to the other side.

In my last post I showed the burrito of seeds I was testing to see if they were still viable. Here are the seeds after a week. They ended up being pretty smelly.

I opened them up and here is the result:

A few of the bean seeds sprouted in the paper towel and a few didn't. The spinach seeds didn't sprout at all. At least I know which I should plant.

I have planted the seeds that germinated so hopefully they will continue to grow.

Please stay tuned for part 2 in the exciting worm composting series: harvesting the compost.