good 'n planty

I scheduled this article for the homepage next week, and I had to share this website that I've purchased containers from. If you love containers- especially of the miniature variety, you need to be careful on this site because you may end up with a large box of tiny brown glass bottles* and an assortment of round tins** that sit in your closet collecting dust. I will find uses for them! I just haven't yet. But if you're a gardener who stores seeds, you need these sweet little tins... lots of them.

 

*I originally bought quite a few brown glass bottles so I could make and bottle my own vanilla as gifts for Christmas. It didn't turn out exactly as I'd hope, but I've learned a few lessons from that experience and I think I'll try again this year- I'll tell you more about that soon.

**The tins are so cute! So I didn't have a reason to buy them, but just look at them!!

I was finally able to get back into the garden this morning...lately all the "work" Pam has for me to do lately is harvest- which is, to me, the best part. Today I got to dig up potatoes- something I've never done before. I was really worried I would stab them with the fork, so after I carefully loosened the soil around the base of the plant, I basically just dug around with my hands. It was fun to dig around and pull up round hard lumps that turned out to be clumps of soil. It reminded me of this real tacky tourist-y place in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee where I visited with my aunt when I was a kid. You got a bag of dirt and a sieve and got to dig around for "diamonds" and "gold." I thought it was pretty great- even better, believe it or not, than Dollywood itself.

I found three potatoes almost on top of the surface, and three that were buried. When I asked Pam about this, she explained that to be part of her method- plant the potatoes on top of the surface and keep piling cover over them (in this case hay) and then you can harvest from the top of the soil and also down near the roots.

 While I was digging for white gold (ha, I made a gardener joke), Pam was picking tomatoes and stacking them in front of their source so she could see how well each variety was producing. So far, Tormento plum tomatoes seem to be one of the most productive, I think the Pineapple variety is one of the prettiest, and Aunt Gertie's Gold win's the taste test for a sweet cherry.

The bucket of rotten tomatoes in the slideshow was going to the chickens at the Working Tree Center. I just thought it was neat that Pam thought of that because my natural reaction to a gross tomato is to see how far I can throw it.

Also, the onions that are shown drying weren't grown by Pam, they were grown by Lisa, who tends the other gardens at the farm (including the Children's Garden that borders ours). I just thought it was pretty to see them all drying.  

It's been two weeks since I visited the garden and it looks completely different. The peppers are huge, almost every tomato plant has at least a few red tomatoes and from what I hear, a few ears of corn have been harvested. It was drizzly this morning, hence the umbrella, so I didn't stick around real long, but I wanted to show what was going on. I picked a bouquet of flowers for a friend at work, and I wanted to stick with a yellow color scheme to counteract the weather, but I couldn't resist adding the lovely purple gauras, cosmos, apricot cock's comb, etc... It turned out to be quite colorful.

I will have to congratulate Pam the next time I see her, the row covers over the soybeans seems to be working really well. After the first two rows hit various difficulties (spotty growth, beetles, deer...), I think we finally have a row of soy beans that will hold out. Remember that baby watermelon from two weeks ago? Look how big he's gotten!  

Coordinated color scheme or not, my friend loved the flowers, and I reaped one of the nicest benefits of working in a garden: sharing your harvest.

Check out this article:

"Woman Finds God... in her eggplant"

I found something brown and nasty when I sliced my tomato the other day.  Not quite the same.

how much sun my refrigerator gets?

I love this instructable