Morning in the Garden

I love the mornings before I go to work. I get up early enough to have coffee and breakfast and spend time with our flock. It's a very peaceful time for me and ones of the few times I am alone. Well, except for the birds. Now I have added one new treat to my mornings - checking out my vegetable garden.

Every morning when I unzip the enclosure I am treated to new little sprouts and the one from before have gotten bigger. It's only been ten days, but almost my entire garden has sprouted.

My radishes, onions, carrots, zucchini, cucumber,lettuce, spinach, even my cauliflower, are growing up a storm. My eggplant hasn't done anything yet nor have my peppers. I read that peppers take about six weeks to germinate so I will be patient with them.

The beans are all growing, well, like a beanstalk. Before long I am going to be able to chase a giant for a golden egg. The one thing I was worried about was my Italian parsley. It was just this vacant square. I was beginning to think that maybe I had forgotten to plant seeds there but this morning there was a little, tiny sprout saying, "We're here!"

I am really digging this vegetable garden thing. I know it's early in the game but I think I might have a knack for this.

How Does My Garden Grow?

Once I had planted all my seeds I carefully put my enclosures on. I wasn't going to use them at first, but I figured they would offer protection and maybe my little garden would sprout more quickly. How quickly was a mystery to me. I really had no idea how long it took for plants to sprout. Imagine how thrilled I was when went down to feed Ellen three days later and saw this:

Okay, that's just Ellen waiting for me. I see that every morning, but she sure is cute, isn't she? I am so lucky to see her every morning.

This is what I also saw:

Yep, little tiny sprouts! These are my radishes! I was so excited I texted Joey right away with the news. He was pretty excited, too.  Both my radish and my daikon, which is a Japanese radish, have begun to grow in the neat little rows I place them in.  A few days later they looked like this:

Look at that! I have a vegetable garden. It's so exciting. Every day I go down more of my little vegetables have spouted! Almost my entire garden has sprouted except my eggplant, which apparently takes a bit longer. I can't wait to go down tomorrow and see what's next! Before I know it we will be eating our own produce! Won't that be something?!!!

Sowing Seeds

Sowing seeds was one thing I was really excited about. I wanted to jump right it with that, but knew better. It does take a little planning. As I have written, I am following the Square Food Gardening technique, which will help me with planning. In this method you place a grid in your garden and divide it up into 1'x1' squares.

I got my grids at the Square Food Gardening Shop for $14.99 each.  I am sure you could make them rather cheaply but I wanted to see how they made theirs. I actually really like them. They fit in my garden perfectly and wood will be sturdier than string, but you could totally do it with string for probably about $5 total for both gardens. Hmmm, that's sure a money saver! Maybe I will do that when these wear out.  They should last for a long time, though.

The whole idea about square foot gardening is placing one crop into each square.  How many seeds you put in a square depends on the crop.  It ranges from just one plant for things like cauliflower to 16 plants for things like radishes. Things like lettuce are four plants, etc. I had 32 squares at my disposal so I went online to see if I could find something to help me organize this. Luckily I did at GrowVeg.com.

GrowVeg.com has this fantastic program for organizing your garden whether a traditional row garden or a square foot garden. It comes with a 30-day free trail which is ample time to plan your garden.  You can also join the site for only $25 per year. That's a great price.  The garden planner has all you need to plan your garden. You select your crop, drag it to your grid and it tells you exactly how many plants go in each square. That's just the beginning as the garden planner has many features that I haven't even tried yet. For this time, I just wanted to plan my garden and get planting remembering that this year is my experiment year. If I get too caught up in planning I am never going to plant.  It took me a couple of nights to get my garden organized the way I wanted it. Once I did that I was almost ready to plant. Just one more thing. I needed markers.

Having plant markers in my garden was Joey's idea and a good one at that. In everything I have read online, strangely that never came up!  With 32 squares I want to know what's planted where. To get my markers I went to eBay and got just the right ones.  These hard oak markers were $4.66 for a set of 12.  They are sturdy and really easy to write on. The seller got them right out to me in a flash and packaged them really well which is always appreciated.

Before I headed down to my garden I wrote out each plant name on a marker. I also wrote the corresponding square number on the top left corner of the packet and the number of plants per square in the top right. While this may seem super anal, it really saved time when I got to the garden. I knew exactly what was going where without having to flip through pages. I also have to say that this little exercise got me more familiar with what I was planting before I planted it. It was a very enjoyable part of the process.

Planting the seeds took me about 30 - 45 minutes. One planted I gave my garden a good watering. That's really important when you first plant your seeds. In fact I will be gardening it every day to keep the soil moist.  The great thing about square foot gardening soil is that you can't overwater apparently. That's good news for me!

My garden is planted! Now I just need to wait for my beans to sprout!

Seed Money

Now that I have my gardens all set up and ready to go it's time to start planting seeds, right?  Well, not so fast. There is lots of preparation to be done before we reach that point.  First off I need seeds.

Knowing what to plant is a pretty tough choice. I honestly have never grown a vegetable in my life and have no idea what will grow here in Daly City. Most places have seasons, we have SEASON as in one.  The weather doesn't really change here. It's about 65°F all the time and it gets down to about 45° - 50°F at night.  In addition the Bay Area is full of micro climates, so half of Daly City is usually covered with fog, but it's pretty sunny near the mountain where I live. All of this makes deciding what to grow tough. What works at my friend's house in the city might not work for me here, despite being only ten minutes away. The only thing I know for sure is that tomatoes don't grow well.  So now I know what not to plant! I was looking at seed catalogs both at home and online and started to feel overwhelmed. There were just too many choices. I began to think maybe I would just garden next year.  Luckily the Universe stepped in and prodded me along.

A couple weekends ago Joey and I went to the San Francisco Flower and Garden show for my birthday.  Among all the beautiful plants and exhibits we came across The Living Seed Company booth. It was a godsend.  Not only are they local so they know what works in my area, they sell only open-pollenated, non-gentically engineered seeds.  I wasn't hunting for this in particular, but it is something I am starting to become more aware of.  The man there was really helpful and we went away with a large collection of seeds as you can see below.

Joey and I decided that since square foot gardening is all about planting a different crop in each square, we would do just that. We are going to plant a lot of different vegetables this year and see what works and what doesn't. This year is going to be our little experiment.  Gardening should be like that - an experiment. At least that's what I think. We also decided that one planter was going to be dedicated to seeds exclusively from The Living Seed Company and the other garden was going to be from seeds we got elsewhere.  That elsewhere turned out to be Target.

I know what you are thinking, from one extreme to the other.  Here were are worrying about "open-polinated heirloom seeds" and now we are buying seeds along with dish soap and toilet paper. Well, I think that makes this little experiment all that more interesting. As a first time gardener I am curious to see what works and what doesn't including the seed source. Target carries Burpee seeds. I really haven't heard anything bad about them so I figured this was as good as anywhere else. As you can see, once again we bought a lot of different seeds, but we weren't done yet.  Now we are off to Amazon to finish up!

Target didn't have any cauliflower and were out of eggplant. I am fully aware that neither are supposed to grow very well in Daly City, especially the cauliflower, but I want to try it anyway. Perhaps I have magical growing powers. You never know.  Rounding things out were daikon. They just sound fun to grow.

So, I've got my seeds and now I can plant them. I wish! Now I have to decide where to put everything. For that I need a planner. I think I know just where to find one.

Setting Up My Raised Garden

One thing I have always wanted was a vegetable garden. Last year we saw some great raised gardens on sale at Costco and Joey bought me not one but two!  There they sat for sulking under our rickety stairs. When we had our deck put in they were moved in their boxes to the middle of the yard and I decided it was time to do something about it. Well, I had a little help. Joey was eager for me to try gardening so he hinted (strongly) that I should put them up.  Two weekends ago I did just that.

These Lifetime Raised Garden Bed Kits are fantastic.  Each kit comes with two 48"x48"x9" beds that you can use separately or you can stack on top of each other to make an 18" high bed. I chose to stack mine because, as you can see, I put them on cement. Also, Grandpa here doesn't want to have to bend so low!  Besides, Joey got me two kits so I should make the most of them.  They were super easy to put together and stacked right on top of each other. Another cool feature of these is that they have a clear plastic dome you can put over them to protect your plants.  We got a great deal as Costco on these last year, so if you see them there snatch them up.

Before filling my bed with soil I wanted to line them with some good quality landscape fabric that we bought at Home Depot.  This will all the beds to drain, but prevent the soil from running all over the place. The roll is 4' wide and I cut two cloths about 5' long so they went up the sides a bit.

I decided long ago that I wanted to try Square Foot Gardening and this requires a slightly different soil than what one usually uses called "Mel's Mix" after the man that invented the technique.  Mel's Mix consists of 1/3 Compost, 1/3 Peat Moss, and 1/3 Vermiculite. This combination of supposedly keeps in the moisture while allowing the plants to breath.  My gardens each required six cubic feet of each. That worked out to two bags of peat moss, two compost and three vermiculite.

To mix the soil, I first put in the vermiculite and the compost and mixed them together by hand.

I then added the peat moss and mixed....

and mixed.....

and mixed....

Finally, I was done! 

The gardens look beautiful! 

I am ready to plant my seeds, but first I have some planning to do.

Our First Meal

When you stop a cleanse like this you really should ease into eating solid food again. Most people take two or three days of drinking juice before they jump into it. Not us, we wanted food and we wanted it now!  The first day after the cleanse, we have a feast! A fruity feast!

I went to Whole Foods and bought every kind of fruit they had - apples, mangos, grape, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, kiwi, melon and pineapple. the only thing I didn't buy was citrus. I think I have had enough citrus for awhile.

Our feast was amazing! I never knew fruit could taste so good! Afterwards, we felt just fine. I don't think we rushed into it too quickly. It was one of the best meals I have ever had.

39, 78, 13, 4, 7 - 17

No those aren't the winning lottery numbers. That's what what we each consumed during our cleanse.  39 lemons, 78 ounces of maple syrup, 13 teaspoons of cayenne pepper, 4 gallons of salt water and 7 pints of tea.  What's the last number? That's how much weight I lost - 17 pounds! That's a lot of everything all the way around.

So, was it worth it?  Yes, it sure was. I feel better than I have in years.  I have more energy, better concentration and I sleep like a baby. Losing the weight isn't so bad, either.  The best thing is, though, that this gave us a kickstart to a healthier lifestyle. I'm glad it's over, but don't be surprised is we do it again next year. You can count on it.