Growing Challenge Update — A Photo Essay

The activity going on lately for my Growing Challenge involves getting the garden ready — digging beds, mixing in some composted horse manure, and putting up the fence to keep deer, bunnies, and dogs out of the garden.  I’m making good progress on that front, inbetween rain showers, but in terms of the plants themselves, not much is happening — they’re growing, inside in their pots.  There’s not much I can write about them — um, “they’re slightly bigger than last time I reported”…?

So I thought a photo essay was in order:

This photo shows the top shelf of my “baker’s shelf” that I have sitting in the bedroom, looking out to the west through the sliding glass door.  What you can see there, from the top of the photo to the bottom, is cilantro, buttercup squash (which I don’t remember if I ever listed, but is something new to me, so it counts for the Growing Challenge), and 5-color silverbeet chard.  I’ve not grown that before either, but I’ve grown regular chard.

Okay, here is a “back” view of the middle shelf of the baker’s rack, with (left to right):  cayenne peppers and mesclun mix.  On the bottom shelf is onion from seed, Thai lettuce, bell pepper, the no-show simpson black-seeded lettuce, and catnip from seed.  Nearby on the floor, not shown in the photo, is transplanted catnip from a friend’s yard, eggplant, and onion sets (well, one set is all that sprouted).

Now on to the kitchen counter.  Here we have the dipper gourd sprout, with a second sprout that appeared just a few days ago but is almost the size of the one that sprouted weeks ago.

Next are the rhubarb seedlings.  Just barely hanging on, they don’t seem to be getting any bigger.  I’m about to put them into a bigger pot, but I’m not sure why.  I’ve heard that rhubarb is difficult to grow from seed, and perhaps I’m seeing some of that difficulty here.  But I’ll keep them alive if I can!

Now this might look like an empty pot, but there are actually five tiny lemon balm sprouts here.  They’ve been up for a few weeks now, but not getting much bigger.  However, I did notice they’re about to put up their second set of leaves, even though the first set is still so tiny!

Here you see the turnip sprouts.  I had expected them to get big fast, like the squashes did, but no, they’re staying tiny as well.

Then there is the honeydew melon sprout, with a couple of recent popper-uppers that I think are actually dipper gourd (they started out in the same pot) but I’m not sure about that.

Here we have my banana pepper sprouts.  They are new to me as well.

No photo for the ground cherry as none ever sprouted.  I have other things sprouted indoors: four kinds of tomatoes (cherry, principe borghese, ping pong and marvel stripe), brussels sprouts, cauliflower, onion (some from seed, some from replanting the tip of spring onions), more catnip,  a few snow peas, a second round of cilantro, and a tray of beets.  Plus a mystery herb a friend gave me that hasn’t been identified yet.  Oh, and the starts I got from the co-op, butternut squash and delicata squash.

Out in the yard, so far, there is a bed of strawberries, a row of peas, and comfrey, valerian, catnip, stinging nettle.  Adding the dozen or so fruit trees at this rental house, there are apple and apricot trees for sure, and a few unidentified trees that I’m hoping are pear or (dare I hope?) cherry.  The weather this spring has been, shall we say, odd, with heat and then freezing, mixed with random winds, and I’m not assuming that any of the trees will actually produce fruit until I see it for myself.  There are/were some flowers, and what appear to be fruit buds, but as I said, I’ll wait for the results before I’m sure.  We still have at least one snowstorm before summer, I’d bet…

And while I’m running around with the camera, here’s what the partly dug, mostly unfenced garden looks like at the moment. 

 

For this year I will probably only plant in the lower terrace, but because it only takes two fence lengths to double the area fenced, I’m going to go ahead and include the upper terrace in the fenced area.   I figure that someone (whether it’s me or not) will want to be growing a big garden at this house in coming years, and will appreciate the bigger fenced area.

You can see the pickets lying roughly where they’ll go once I get the fenceposts in the co-op order tomorrow.  Eh?  What’s that you say?  Why, yes, I *am* aware that the gate, which if you click the photo you will see is standing proudly by itself, will not actually keep out the deer unless some sort of fence is attached to it.  :)  Thanks for mentioning it though!  :)

I’m going to experiment with a double row of low fencing instead of one high fence.  I hear that deer can’t or won’t go over two fences that are pretty close together, like maybe 3-4 feet apart.  I also have a bunch of branches saved from the fruit trees I pruned, that I will use to extend the apparent height of the fence.  It’s hard to describe — I’ll post more photos once it’s in place, and you can see what I mean then.