A few more days, a few more plants.

This has been a busy week! We’ve gotten a lot done on the garden and have a lot to do! Monday evening we made it out to continue our work. We started by planting the rest of our potatoes, 10 Superior White seed potatoes. We prepared this row longer that our other row, which is home to 10 Yukon Gold seed potatoes, so that we could plant garlic on the end. We planted a lot of garlic! Out of our four bulbs we planted more than 20 cloves.

With that row complete, we moved over to our corn patch. We tilled up a patch with enough space to plant three rows of corn about 20 feet long. Our plan is to plant three rows 12 feet long for now, and in a month or so plant the last little bit, staggering their harvest times. On this night we had plenty of seed and only enough soil amendments, such as manure, compost, and extra topsoil, to plant two rows 12 feet long.

On Wednesday morning I made my way to Home Depot to pick up a few items to finish our corn patch. I ended up buying a set of Texas Yellow onions. They were not part of the original plan, but onions add flavor to everything and repel rabbits (which we have a lot of). I made my way home, finished the third row of corn, and planted as many onion sprouts as I could. I managed to plant 20-25 with another 10 left over.

I have been doing a lot of research on starting tomatoes from seed. I’ve heard they are a little more difficult to start and transplant. I read all through my wonderful gardening bible and various pages on the internet, but it was YouTube that finally sold me on trying it. The reason I want try and start them by seed is cost. Buying seed is a lot cheaper than buying starter tomato plants! While at Home Depot I bought a few tomato seed varieties and basil. I bought two large tomato varieties, Beefsteak and Big Boy. The third is a variety of cherry tomato I don’t remember. I also picked up Sweet Basil seeds.

I started the tomato and basil seeds indoors on Wednesday. They take anywhere from a few days to 10 days to germinate and begin growing. Hopefully when we make it back from Kansas on Sunday we will have a couple little shoots pushing through the soil.

Here’s a picture of the garden so far.


It’s not very exciting right now, just a few rows of dirt.

Now it’s time to get into a little more detail about the garden. In the picture you see four parallel rows, and a big rectangle in the background. The two center rows are a little bit longer than the outer two rows. The first row, bottom right, is where we planted our Yukon Gold potatoes. It is approximately 3ft x 11ft. The second and next row, to its left, is about 3ft x 16ft. The end closest to the camera is home to all the garlic, the rest is our Superior White potatoes.

The third row is only partially planted. It is the same size as the second row. The few feet closest to the camera is where the onions are planted. We plan on planting a mixture of tomatoes and basil through the rest of the row. The fourth row, roughly the size of the first, will be home to some bell peppers, jalepenos, and assorted herbs.

The big rectangle in the back is the corn patch. It is about 11ft x 20ft. The right half is already planted, the left is what we’ll plant in a month or so. We have many fruit-bearing trees planted around are garden area. In the foreground you can see a couple new ones.

Hopefully, the next time I post we'll have more green in those rows!