I'm a Cheater

Apologies for the blog hiatus. Rest assured, I have tons of backlogged pictures to post.  But first I'll start with a confession. I'm a basil cheater. There, I said it. The past two years we have tried to grow basil from seed and both times we got abysmal success rates and very slow growing seedlings. So, one day when we were at Lowes, I spotted....basil plants! I picked up four, and took them home to the garden and no one was the wiser. Well, until now.

Any lingering guilt I felt over adulterating our garden with store-bought plants quickly evaporated as these basil plants flourished and started producing tons of sweet, sweet basil leaves.

Basil leaves that can be made into pesto:

I usually go with a super simple Food Network pesto recipe.  Just basil, pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, and parm, with salt and pepper to taste. 

And...so good I forgot to take the finished picture.  I'll include it later - basil is almost ready for a second batch:

Garden progress: kale, kale, kale

The garden is coming right along!  Here's the overhead view:

Garden overhead view May 1

Garden overhead view May 31

After traveling for work for a week and a half, it seemed like I returned to a new back yard. There were actually some vegetables ready to eat! Radishes are a new gardening experience for me. I had to look up the harvesting instructions for them. I had no idea they helpfully pop out of the ground so you can check if they're about one inch in diameter and ready to eat.

Kale, spinach, and arugula are also making a strong appearance.  There is so much kale I made a salad from a recipe I learned from my friend Stephanie and took it to a neighborhood BBQ. The salad is appropriately called "crack kale salad" and it is amazing. 

Cabin Fever

According to the schedule, last week we should have planted spinach, peas and radishes outside. Last year at this time, we had already started spinach and peas outdoors.  Good lesson for gardening (and life, I suppose): every year is different.  The weather has been wildly uncooperative this winter for both gardening and bike commuting.  Here is a picture of our garden as of this morning:

Snow-covered backyard and garden - March 1, 2015

The good news is that we will probably have a shorter wait for peas once we get them outdoors, since this year we started them inside:

Peas: one is already blooming

Last year the peas took 90 days from planting outdoors February 21 until the first harvest. This year, since we planted indoors in January, we should expect to start harvesting about a month earlier or possibly more, since we've given our peas a head start with the artificial lighting and heating pad.

As we wait for the snow to melt and the soil to thaw, we've been busy planting and replanting inside. We moved tomatoes, kale, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers from the small tray to individual pots:

We've planted basil, peppers (cayenne, jalepeño, bell), and eggplant in the small tray over the last few weeks. Once we can move the hardier plants outside we'll transfer the new batch to individual pots and wait for the last frost (around April 10 with 90% likelihood according to the University of Virginia Climatology Office). 

The outlook from the National Weather Service looks promising for above freezing temperatures, if not ideal for biking.  Maybe we'll be able to update next week on outdoor planting.

Alexandria, VA forecast for the week of March 1

Back in Business

It's cold, wet, and windy outside, which means one thing: it must be time to start our 2015 garden!

Peas seven days post-planting

The beginning of this planting season is all about acting on lessons learned from last year. For example, some of our plants didn't hit their stride until too late in the growing season, resulting in low yields.  So this year we started kale and eggplant in the first round and plan to harvest them in late April and July, respectively. 

Organizing the seeds so we can remember what we planted

All the tools - bucket of home grown dirt on the right

Seeds in - ready to put under the light

Another difficulty we have growing inside is a lack of natural light and cool temperatures - it is usually around 62 F in the back room where the plants are, but seeds like to germinate at temperatures between 70 and 80 F.  Without turning up the heat and doubling the gas bill, we decided to get a heating pad for the plants and an industrial size LED light on a timer.  Roger's dad was in the process of retrofitting his farm with LED lighting - something that will result in huge energy savings for his business - and was nice enough to send us one of the 4-foot LED lights for our little experiment.  

Putting old textbooks to good use

Heating mat

The heating mat gets the soil temperature up in the 70-80 F range, ideal for most seeds (if we wanted to be precise, we would move peppers to separate pots and heat them up to 85 F, but we'll see how this works for now).  The light is timed to turn on at 5:30 AM and off at 8:30 PM, simulating a longer growing day.

Anecdotally, these measures seem to be making a difference already, although I don't have measurements to back that up.  These are pictures taken 7 days after planting:

From front to back: 2 rows kale, 2 rows tomatoes, 2 rows cucumbers, eggplant/peppers, broccoli, 8 rows peas

Left to right: peas, broccoli, cucumbers

The 2015 Garden Plan

New year, new plan for the garden!  We've changed up what we're planting this year, and where everything's going.  Last year we learned some key lessons the hard way:

• You reaaallly only need 2 or 3 jalapeño plants, or else you'll be force feeding jalapeños to your friends, neighbors, and random people you pass on the street.  Seriously we had about 10 lbs of jalapeños from the 4 plants we grew last year.
• Last year we got a little over-excited and planted too much stuff, resulting in a jungle of tomatoes and beans that we couldn't hack through.  We ended up not picking a lot of veggies because we couldn't reach them, and they smothered other things we tried to grow, like swiss chard
• We could have planted a lot more spinach and other early spring veggies.  This year we're going nuts with the spring veggies, and starting them a lot earlier

So without further ado (drumroll), here's the Official 2015 Garden Plan!!



The biggest change this year is that we're going to try and do two major plantings: an early spring crop and late summer crop.  The spring layout shows a lot of peas, spinach, kale, and other cold weather crops.  Then around early/mid-May, we'll switch to the Summer layout!

Just like last year's layout, each square is one square foot of our garden.  The brown squares is the footpath.  The dark green squares are where the trellises will go.

Spring Layout

Once summer rolls around, we get to the good stuff: tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, etc all growing on the trellises!  A lot of the non-trellis plants (carrots, kale, cabbage) stay the same year round.

Summer/Fall Layout

One last thing - here's our predicted yields.  They seem wildly high to me, but we'll see what happens!  Anyone know what to do with 70 lbs of beets??

* Yield estimates are from here: http://commongroundkalamazoo.com/images/YieldCalc.pdf and a few other sources I found on google.