Garden Update

Hey everyone! I can't believe I have only blogged once since classes started back in January. I was challenged in many ways, but it was a great first semester, and I finished my last final on May 5th. I decided not to take any classes over the summer, and will start back up in the fall. Since school has been out I have catered a wedding, worked a lot, and last week I had surgery. The surgery went really well, and I have just been resting and healing since then. 

Now, onto the purpose of this post. Besides all the working and resting, I have been gardening. I don't know a lot about gardening. My strategy has been to prepare myself as much as I can through research and reading gardening books, and then do it myself and learn from my failures and successes. This year I started everything from seed and some stuff has done better than others. 

Here are my pepper plants. I have had problems with little bugs on the undersides of the leaves and I am reading around to try and figure out how to fix it without pesticides. 

The tomatoes I started from seed are doing really well! On the left are the brandywine tomatoes, and the five plants on the right are the cherry tomatoes. My next task is to get them cages. 

Since the surgery, Chris has been a great help watering all the plants for me. Here he is watering the okra plants. As you can probably see, I need to weed.

In this bed I planted a bunch of carrot and swiss chard seeds and I only had one swiss chard seed sprout. But, it is doing really well, and I harvested most of the leaves today. 

Finally, this is the thai basil I planted. I also planted dill, parsley, and cilantro in other pots, but the basil is the only thing that survived. I am keeping the pot in an aluminum pan with 1/4 inch of water in the bottom to keep in moisture. The clay pots tend to dry out really quickly, especially in this 95 degree weather!

I hope you enjoyed the tour of my garden. It has been so much fun, and an incredible learning experience. I will do many things differently next year, but I am enjoying the process. Hopefully I will even get some good tomatoes, okra, and peppers out of my little garden plot in Homer. 

That would be nice.