have a vegetable garden.

While the peas and potatoes went in ages ago, it’s time to finish planting for the year. What I plan to do this morning:

a. Sift compost out of the worm bin, and put into the garden
b. Plant the tomato starts, set up the tomato cages
c. Plant the basil starts (the previous basil starts I put in earlier died – it’s just too dang cold here in the spring for basil!!)
d. Form zucchini hills and plant the zucchini
e. Plant the chard

Also – I plan to plant nasturtiums – you can eat the leaves, so I’m going to count them as vegetables, too :-)!

This is something I have been wanting to do for a while… and my husband tells me that it will be a fad.. :) (like most things are).

I need to do some research, buy some books & then start.

I have the room & it is more often than not that I go to the local supermarket & they don’t have what I want.

This is definately on the list

I really love vegetables and am not very good at growing them. I want to be apart of a community garden so I can learn how to grown this year. Hopefully next year I can grow my own.

• I eat a lot of spinach and tomatoes and I’d like to grow it myself.
• I’m interested in knowing more about gardening for food.
• I like the idea of being more self-sufficient.
• I’m concerned about the safety of store-bought food.

I’ll have to shelf this one for a few years until I move out of New York and into the country (or at least the ‘burbs) where I’ll have room to grow.

I want to start cleaning up my goal list, and decided to start here. I still may get a few more tomatoes and basil and parsley leaves, but I’m basically done for this year.

What lessons have I learned?

1. Get those plants in earlier. I waited too long between buying the plants and getting them in the ground. If you wait too long here in Augusta, it gets too hot.

2. Just learned from someone yesterday about a spray that helps tomato blossoms set and not fall off the plant. I’ll have to look into that.

3. Consider a trellis of some kind to help stake the plants up.

I am growing small boy tomatoes, spearmint, and lavendar, and basil and rosemary. All very easy, though this is not a grood year for tomatoes where I live

Great article on maximizing on a foot x foot garden in your back yard kinda thing…

I’ve eaten THREE small cherry tomatoes in the past 2 days. They were awfully sweet and good. That’s almost HALF of my current crop of 7 cherry tomatoes! LOL. I still have 4 green cherry tomatoes left on the vine.

I also had fresh basil and parsley early on, but there isn’t much of that left, either.

And yet, I have some hope. My heirloom tomato plants are growing strong and still producing some flowers. Maybe I’ll get a couple more tomatoes by fall.

Q. What causes the flowers to drop off my tomato plants?

A. During unfavorable weather (night temperatures lower than 55°F, or day temperatures above 95°F with drying hot winds), tomatoes do not set and flowers drop. The problem usually disappears as the weather improves.

Uh oh…
I’m in trouble. The day temperatures are often above 95 degrees around here. :(