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Hi Everyone,
Im new to this site. Was looking for a site of my own to read and maybe post on. (Hubby already has several that he uses). I still consider myself a novice to gardening even though this will be my 4th year at setting up a garden. I feel really embarrassed to say I've been gardening for 4 years and still dont know what I am really doing. I find myself spending too much time studying and planning and not enough time just doing it. My first year I started with the "Square Foot" gardening technique. Went okay until the bugs got into the zucchini plant and infested the boxes. We also planted tomato seeds and pepper seeds of all kinds and had plants coming out of our ears. So many that we just couldn't maintain them in the big garden and by mid summer they started to dry up. Learned the hard way not to grow more than you can handle (a problem I have is that hubby always goes to the extreme-never known to start small).
My second year I called my "POTS" garden. I didn't want to go through the problem with bugs invading the dirt so I thought it would be a good idea to plant using only pots. It went fairly well with all my pepper plants and some of the tomato plants (they got too tall for the pots and I couldn't support them very well. Unfortunately, vegetables like carrots and spinach and celery and others...didn't grow very well.
Last year I had some plants in POTS and some in the ground (small plots easy to handle and in the back of my house - closer to our water source. It made maintaning them alot easier and I was able to grow romaine lettuce like crazy and radishes. Along with our regular tomatoe and pepper plants. I also had some success growing potatoes and onions...though they came out small. We also tried corn...the stalks were beautiful and I was soooo happy to see the ears sprout....unfortunately the happiness was short lived when I discovered the ears had very few to nothing of kernals.
This year I thought I had a better handle on things. We started seeds indoors (I used regular store bought seed starting soil and my hubby used a mix he got off the internet to start his tomato seeds. My seeds took off quickly and after 6 weeks I had these beautiful little plants...until I forgot to take them in the house after the sun shifted and they were no longer under the shade and instead got fried with the direct sun light. As for my hubbys seeds...the seeds would sprout but after the second set of leaves sproutted...they died. I told him the mixture he was using did not retain water and when the dirt dried it was compressing the plant stem. I managed to salvage some of them but they eventually died with the other seeds by sun light
Needless to say, our track record "together" as gardeners has really sucked...he follows "new trends"...I follow what my green thumb mother tells me...which comes from years of exceptional gardening experience. When I lived with my folks, I was my Moms "gopher"....I told her I wish I had paid more attention when she was trying to show me how to grow stuff. Now Im thousands of miles away and rely on the cell phone and computer to show her what my problem is and if she can help....most times she has been able to. And most times, as she kindly puts it, it's not the plants fault...it's the gardeners fault. It's a hard lesson to learn but she is right about that. After I burned my seedlings, hubby and I bought some tomato and bell-pepper plants that were a foot tall in 2inch seed containers. Unfortunately, we bought them when the weather in our area had not settled yet so we could not transplant them in the ground yet. I spent the first week after we got them transplanting them all into larger seed pots hoping to buy time while we waited for the weather to improve. I finally couldn't wait...the lower leaves of the tomato plants were starting to turn yellow. So I panicked and told my hubby, they are going into the ground now. We managed to plant half the group. But they called for thunderstorms and morning frost for the next few days...so we had to cover them and post-pone planting the others. Right now Im looking out my window as I type and they don't look dead but they sure dont look happy either. But I AM NOT GIVING UP! I will have some sort of garden this year with the Good Lord's help! Thank you for allowing me to share my adventure at becoming "self-reliant".
Im new to this site. Was looking for a site of my own to read and maybe post on. (Hubby already has several that he uses). I still consider myself a novice to gardening even though this will be my 4th year at setting up a garden. I feel really embarrassed to say I've been gardening for 4 years and still dont know what I am really doing. I find myself spending too much time studying and planning and not enough time just doing it. My first year I started with the "Square Foot" gardening technique. Went okay until the bugs got into the zucchini plant and infested the boxes. We also planted tomato seeds and pepper seeds of all kinds and had plants coming out of our ears. So many that we just couldn't maintain them in the big garden and by mid summer they started to dry up. Learned the hard way not to grow more than you can handle (a problem I have is that hubby always goes to the extreme-never known to start small).
My second year I called my "POTS" garden. I didn't want to go through the problem with bugs invading the dirt so I thought it would be a good idea to plant using only pots. It went fairly well with all my pepper plants and some of the tomato plants (they got too tall for the pots and I couldn't support them very well. Unfortunately, vegetables like carrots and spinach and celery and others...didn't grow very well.
Last year I had some plants in POTS and some in the ground (small plots easy to handle and in the back of my house - closer to our water source. It made maintaning them alot easier and I was able to grow romaine lettuce like crazy and radishes. Along with our regular tomatoe and pepper plants. I also had some success growing potatoes and onions...though they came out small. We also tried corn...the stalks were beautiful and I was soooo happy to see the ears sprout....unfortunately the happiness was short lived when I discovered the ears had very few to nothing of kernals.
This year I thought I had a better handle on things. We started seeds indoors (I used regular store bought seed starting soil and my hubby used a mix he got off the internet to start his tomato seeds. My seeds took off quickly and after 6 weeks I had these beautiful little plants...until I forgot to take them in the house after the sun shifted and they were no longer under the shade and instead got fried with the direct sun light. As for my hubbys seeds...the seeds would sprout but after the second set of leaves sproutted...they died. I told him the mixture he was using did not retain water and when the dirt dried it was compressing the plant stem. I managed to salvage some of them but they eventually died with the other seeds by sun light
Needless to say, our track record "together" as gardeners has really sucked...he follows "new trends"...I follow what my green thumb mother tells me...which comes from years of exceptional gardening experience. When I lived with my folks, I was my Moms "gopher"....I told her I wish I had paid more attention when she was trying to show me how to grow stuff. Now Im thousands of miles away and rely on the cell phone and computer to show her what my problem is and if she can help....most times she has been able to. And most times, as she kindly puts it, it's not the plants fault...it's the gardeners fault.
It's a hard lesson to learn but she is right about that. After I burned my seedlings, hubby and I bought some tomato and bell-pepper plants that were a foot tall in 2inch seed containers. Unfortunately, we bought them when the weather in our area had not settled yet so we could not transplant them in the ground yet. I spent the first week after we got them transplanting them all into larger seed pots hoping to buy time while we waited for the weather to improve. I finally couldn't wait...the lower leaves of the tomato plants were starting to turn yellow. So I panicked and told my hubby, they are going into the ground now. We managed to plant half the group. But they called for thunderstorms and morning frost for the next few days...so we had to cover them and post-pone planting the others. Right now Im looking out my window as I type and they don't look dead but they sure dont look happy either. But I AM NOT GIVING UP! I will have some sort of garden this year with the Good Lord's help! Thank you for allowing me to share my adventure at becoming "self-reliant".
