Roll Me Up and Box Me In

I decided to try building my own standing raised garden bed. The ones I've seen on-line and at garden stores around here are just insanely expensive—anywhere from $200 to $600, depending on size. If you want more than one, a quartet of beds could cost as much as $1000! One of the points of growing your own veggies and fruits is to save money at the grocery store. How does one expect to save any money paying that much for garden beds? Of course, those of you who live in areas where the soil isn't rock hard red clay haven't as much of a need for raised beds. Around here though, there are as many rocks in the soil as the dirt itself.

Northern Georgia is part of the Eastern U.S. piedmont—basically an ancient, decrepit mountain range. Embedded in the soil content are lots of decaying rocks from a once substantial chain of the Appalachian mountain range. Mostly mica, quartz, and feldspar, which is basically decomposing granite. Granite itself is rich in lots of minerals, such as iron oxide and maganese, and these are good, abundant sources of nutrients in the soil here. However, because the average home gardener is more or less digging in crumbling granite, the soil can be mighty tough to crack. Thus, the desire for raised garden beds.

So, rather than spend a gajillion dollars on pre-fabbed raised bed kits, I decided to see how much time, energy, and money it would take to build my own. It cost me roughly $30 and about three hours of time, although I think the construction time will be reduced since I was in experimentation/trial and error mode on the first one. It turned out well, I think, but I've yet to see how well it hold up after use, which is the next experiment. Really, this whole gardening thing is an experiment. I do that—experiment a lot, I mean. I get a lot of grandiose ideas and go at them gang-busters, then lose interest unless there's some kind of relatively quick, rewarding pay-off, and I think gardening requires a lot of patience and willingness to accept failure.

I mean think about it, unless one is in a completely pristine garden environment, free from all diseases, fungi, pests, and errant weather, there are a lot of odds against the home green gardener. I've definitely learned that cayenne pepper is a friend. Spidey mites and aphids have tried to take advantage of my veggies. Also, there are random "failure to thrive" issues that I just sometimes can't figure out. For example, why don't some seeds sprout? They all came from the same packet, got the same soil treatment, water, light exposure, etc.  While some seeds have a type of hyperactive disorder and spring up like a shot out of a canon, some peak out and amble up at a more leisurely pace, and some take a little nappy in a blanket of fluffy soil for a while and come out of hybernation when they damn well feel like it, way after the others. And then there are those seeds that either fall asleep in the dark dirt and never wake up, or they were just D.O.A. slackers to begin with. I guess you could say all seeds have unique "personalities," some personalities more a like than others, some more prone to ambition and success, some are just procrastinators, and some are just plain schizo—much like most things in nature.

Garden Update: Better Botanicals

On Monday I planted a good number of organic seeds packaged by "Botanical Interest." Those seeds have come up much more quickly than the Ferry Morse, and not all of the Ferry Morse seeds actually germinated. So, I am thinking that the Botanical brand of seed is the way to go.

Friday I spent a good bit of time transplanting the Ferry Morse started romaine and fingerling carrots I seeded three weeks ago. The carrots took forever to come up and get to the point I could move them to the large containers. But already the Botanical's beets, kale, Napa cabbage, carnival carrots, and red cabbage have sprouted, but the celery and artichokes have not. However, the packet said it could take up to a month for the celery to sprout and two weeks for the artichoke to emerge.

I've become a little worried about the peas I planted because I just today read that peas and beans are "nitrogen" correcting and don't need fertilizer. Although I didn't add fertilizer, I did add bone meal to an already enriched organic container soil. I read that the vines may go crazy if the soil is too fertile, but the fruit yield is curtailed, so I hope I didn't screw up by not using regular soil for the peas.
The damn aphids love the lettuces, despite the cayenne pepper and rosemary oil spray I made up. The spray does help, it just has to be done religiously, everyday. I haven't found that the diatometus earth does much good, personally.

I've now got the beets, cabbage, other carrot varieties, and kale to transplant, after they develop in the seed cubicles a little longer. I will definitely need more pots because the vegetables that are growing now won't be ready to rotate out of their containers by the time the new seedlings will need to be going in. I may have overplanted, but I guess that way I'll learn a bit more about what crops I seem to do OK producing—surely I'll end up being successful with at least one crop! Below are some pictures:

 Beet seedlings, about a week along

 Napa Cabbage seedlings

 First planting of Romaine Lettuce. I bought these as
seedlings at Pike Nursery a month ago.

 Green pea vines. I just staked these three-week old vines yesterday.

Brussel Sprouts. My kids' least favorite vegetable of all time. These I also planted about a month ago from started seedlings I got from Pike's. I tasted one of the young leaves yesterday— just like cabbage.

Vegetables in the Orchard?

 I am starting a new garden for the first time since I was a little kid. I'm excited but also nervous that things might not go well. Since I live in the Southeast and it's now Fall, I am just starting what we call "cool weather veggies:" romaine and red leaf lettuces, Italian spinach, red and Napa cabbages, beets, a few varieties of carrots, green peas, kale, snow ball, green, and purple cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts—and I'm even attempting artichoke for a late 2011 Spring harvest. I've planted "cool weather flowers" as well: nasturtiums, along with some bush variety flowering sweet peas. I already love fruit gardening and have Red Delicious Apple, Santa Rosa Plum, Asian Persimmon, and Brown Turkey Fig trees, and I have three varieties of blueberry bushes (the Rabbit Eye variety is my favorite), and blackberry and grape vines. The blueberry haul this year was so overwhelming that I had to give about half of them away. I wish I had just frozen them now, but I enjoyed sharing my bounty with others. I've had pretty good luck with the fruit husbandry, so I hope the same will extend to the vegetables.

 I've decided to document my winter garden on my blog —a Waldenesque adventure of my own. I do all this in the hope that my kids (13 and 10) will open their minds a little to the joys of green eating if they see vegetables grown in their own yard—or at least be more willing to try some new things. Before I had children, I was once a vegetarian, then vegan, then vegetarian, and now a "pescetarian," but society has turned my kids into chicken wing-chicken nugget-mac n' cheese addicts, and I'll admit I've been an enabler in an attempt to get anything into my persnickety kids' tummies.

Thus, expect to read about my garden successes and woes. I've already had to concoct a organic vegetable spray of cayenne pepper, rosemary oil, cloves, and peppermint soap to keep the pesky aphids off my romaine! I plan to take photographs of my maiden gardening journey over the next few months, too. So let's go play in the dirt! (Above photo: started-romaine in seed pots)

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