Garden update: It's been awhile...

Because there isn't much garden work that can be done in Iowa in the middle of winter. The first sign of Spring came on February 1st when my daffodils began pushing up through the mulch. Some of them are now in full bloom.

The best of the group

Angle 2

This afternoon I went out and planted seeds for several cool season crops: radishes, carrots, peas, and onions. I also planted onion sets for the first time. Those are in a separate section so we'll see how they turn out. I'm also going to try my hand at: broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, and kale. I had no success with those last year so I'm starting them indoors this year.

For warm season crops I'm planning on corn and sweet potatoes. I've saved three ears of corn from last season and am hoping at least some of the kernels will be viable. I really liked the sweet potatoes I grew two years ago and this time I'm going to try creating slips to overwinter indoors.

For non-food plants I've saved two heads of bee balm and planted seeds from those in about ten jiffy pots and planted those out in the garden. I hope these work out because bee balm smells wonderful and is right up there with lilac in my opinion. I also sowed seeds from cup plant last fall to try and kickstart a 'native' garden.

The biggest news is I finally got around to planting my year-old apple sapling outside on Friday. It looks a little worse than last summer but it still has green leaves. It was quite windy today and still gets chilly at night so I put a tomato cage wrapped in cloth around it to protect it. Hope it survives but if it doesn't I've got about twenty seeds chilling in the fridge that I could try.

Better times last summer

Photo of the Week: Harvest

It's been awhile since I've done a gardening update so I thought I'd post a picture of my first harvest. It was definitely a learning experience. For example, critters really love eating melon flowers so getting even one cantaloupe was a challenge. The first melon got gnawed on by presumably a chipmunk or ground squirrel and I didn't notice the second one until frost killed off the vines. There wasn't much flesh and it wasn't sweet or tasty but it produced a surprising amount of seeds for next spring.

I had better success with the root vegetables. Lessons were learned with the sweet potatoes, namely that they like their space. Each container is holding three plants. The three in the top container were grown surrounded by carrots, cantaloupe, and sunflowers. The three in the bottom container were grown in more isolation

The carrots were pretty simple to grow and their size seems determined by how early they were planted. The largest one is a little over 13 inches long. In total I had 15 carrots but 4 were small and not worth harvesting so I left them to see if they will go to seed next year.

Overall I planted 4 cantaloupe seeds and got 2 to sprout, although one was extremely stunted. The six sweet potatoes were store bought plants. I don't know how many carrot seeds I planted but it was more than double what I ended up with.

Next year I plan to add corn, peas, and strawberries to the mix.