Time to Garden?
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The last 2 days have been beautiful here in Southern Indiana. It’s been a balmy 70 degrees with bright sunny skies. It makes the best time for people to sort their gardens out. In other areas they may be more focused on saving their furniture and decks from termites or other pests. Probably a job for termite control, but I am focused on other matters. I’m sure it will get chilly again. After all, the middle of March is a little early for this weather. But it does have me thinking about my garden. Well… gardens, really. I’d like to do a little more floral planting this year, because flowers are pretty, and I’m definitely planning on investing in a teak garden set – but I have to have my vegetable garden. It’s a project I’ve been working on for a while now, although I wanted to make it a little bigger with the help of a service similar to gardenstone.co.uk. However, I’ve been really busy with my plants.
Cucumbers
This year I’m planning on a few basics for the garden. We’ll have cucumbers. Matt and I don’t eat them, but we make lots of pickles. And actually… I don’t eat pickles myself. I do have a lot of friends and family that do though. So each summer, Matt and I grow cucumbers and make pickles from them. We’ve used different breeds in the past, depending on what was available at the local grower. My favorite cucumber for pickling is actually a standard garden cucumber called a Burpless. If you want to start your own seeds, Burpee makes a great one – and I think this is what our local nursery.
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Tomatoes
Of course, we’ll also have to have some tomatoes. My favorite red tomatoes for the garden are Big Boy and Early Girl. The Big Boy is a beefsteak variety, while the Early Girl is a slicer variety. I like to eat them straight out of the garden, but Matt just hates raw tomatoes. He thinks they should all be pulverized and turned into sauces and ketchup. I’ve made sauces before, from packet mixes, but never been happy with the results so most of our tomatoes (that I don’t eat) get canned in quarters for use in soups and stews. If you have any recommendations for good sauce or ketchup recipes, I’d love to try them – we’ve got plenty of canned tomato quarters.
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
I also like my yellow tomatoes, but I’ve not had much luck at home. The first year, I planted them next to my red tomatoes and got some strange combination of the two. Not good. Last year I put my yellows in pots and moved them to the front of the house… and it rained and rained and rained- and the pots didn’t drain. Drowned tomato plants don’t produce. So this year, I guess I’ll have to try somewhere else. I’m also thinking about planting some heirloom yellows this year called Yellow Pear tomatoes. My friend Marybeth, from Alarm Clock Wars, plants these in her garden and they are amazing.
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Peppers
I try to plant a few bell peppers each year. I normally plant a basic red/green bell pepper, and maybe some orange sickles, but I’ve got tons of them stored in the freezer, so I’m thinking of upgrading this year to something a bit different. Burpee packages as Carnival Mix that looks intriguing.
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Lettuce
In our garden we always plant a loose leaf lettuce. A friend and fellow gardener, “Ozzy,” gave us a packet of Black-Seeded Simpson for our first garden, and it’s all we’ve ever used. I can walk out to the garden and cut it fresh for dinner, and it keeps coming back all summer long.
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Corn
I love sweet corn, and so does Matt… the only problem? We don’t like the same kind. Matt grew up on white and I grew up on yellow. He wants to plant Silver Queen and I want Incredible or Bodacious – so last year we (and by we, I mean I) decided to split the difference and plant a bi-color corn called Peaches and Cream. It’s too bad we never got to try any. Darned racoons destroyed the entire crop! Fortunately for us, both my dad and his old boss plant their sweet corn by the field. They took care of us, and we ended up with some white from his boss and some yellow from my dad.
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Source: parkseed.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Beans
The only kind of beans in my garden are green… or at least they’re supposed to be. The last two years in our garden we’ve planted blue lake green beans. The first year we planted the pole variety and the last we planted the bush variety. Matt and I have decided that we prefer the pole variety because they are easier to pick. We just run ours up cattle panel – we do the same with our cucumbers and any other vine plants we have. The only issue we seemed to have was that they were a bit stringy. Though I think this was caused more by being left too long in the garden than by the variety. Someone should find a way to pause the garden during fair week. If you come up with one, let me know.
Last year we didn’t seem to have much luck at all with our beans. They grew and grew and never produced any beans. Matt said that meant there was too much nitrogen in the soil. The manure our landlord has been nice enough to spread for us from his horses seems to have over enriched the soil – so this winter, no manure. Hopefully things will be back to normal this summer.
Source: burpee.com via Andrea on Pinterest
Any other ideas?
New to our garden this year will be some old-fashioned crook neck squash. Apparently you can’t buy the seeds anywhere – so our friend that grows them saves the seeds out of his, and he will hopefully be giving us a few. And just a few would be fine. As you may remember from last summer’s canning adventures, these are large enough to process one at a time.
I’ve also thought about some simple zucchini and summer squash for frying and making breads but ours always seem to cross breed. If you have a solution to that, I’d love to know. Or maybe you just have an idea for a type of fruit or vegetable we should put in the garden that I haven’t thought of yet. I’d love to know. I will be adding some more teak furniture to our garden soon so we’re able to enjoy the outside space as well as just eat from it.
Didn’t I give you some Crook Neck Squash seeds in your Christmas presents? If not or they got lost I have plenty more. Let me know when your ready to plant.
I don’t remember seeing any in there…. I’ll look thru some stuff in the kitchen, but I don’t think you did… Not that I want to plant too many. I’m told my 12 lb. squash was one of the baby ones.
I must have forgot, anyway I have a package for you.
I always plant my zucchini and yellow squash right next to each other and have never had a problem w/ the cross pollinating/breeding. You should try some onions and potatoes, nothing better than having them fresh from the garden!!! Give me a call if you need any help. In my 32 years of life, I’ve only missed 1 yr. of having a garden and that was the year we built the new garage…it sits where our garden had been here and the garden is now where the old barn sat.
I might just try some onions and potatoes – But my Matt thinks we should plant potatoes in a bathtub, so that we could find them easy. I just think he doesn’t want to do the digging. 🙂
I don’t know about any plans, but I built some elevated beds by tainkg a piece of 5/8 treated plywood and building a stand for it out of 4 4 s. The stand has to be pretty stout, it will be holding a lot of weight. Build the frame first then set it on the legs, It has six legs. I have a full frame around the outside with two cross pieces evenly spaced from end to end. I cut sides and ends out of another piece of plywood 16 tall and then attached them to the floor by running a 2 2 around the edge , set back far enough so that the outside of the sides and ends are even with the edge of the floor. I ran another wall across four feet from each end and stiffened that with 2 4 s. I used screws throughout that are rated for use in treated lumber.I have three of the beds that are three years old and still going great. Don’t forget to drill holes in the floor for drainage.