Saturday, June 29, 2013

Fixins for Greek salad!

Yes, apparently we can get all the ingredients for Greek salad to ripen at the same time!  Well, our garden doesn't supply ALL the ingredients - no olives for olive oil or milk for feta cheese, but otherwise we're good!


It was delicious.

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Yes, but will everything be ready at the same time so we can make a Greek salad?

We've got some great progress going on....  It's amazing how quickly some stuff grows. Here's the latest:



Sun sugar tomatoes:

Pickling cucumber (left; he's a pretty fat guy) and regular cucumber (right):

Snap peas:

Green pepper:

Broccoli
 


Monday, May 20, 2013

Ta daa! The watering system is FINALLY in place

It has taken a long time, but the plumbing is finally done!  It is a work of art, though. Dave is pretty proud of his workmanship:




Still need to do some covering of tubing along the trench, but otherwise it's done! Yay! Here's a close-up example of our drip system setup around the tomatoes (the rest of the beds have drip tubing in straight lines):


Saturday, May 18, 2013

Growing, growing, growing

Our tomato plants are getting pretty big in the raised bed:

The ones in the pots are a lot smaller, but our very first ripe tomato will come from a potted plant.  Here we check back with our famous first tomato:

And a few more up-and-comers:

Now, we've got some baby green peppers, too:

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Our "protector"

We hired a gnome to protect our plants from pests and animals.... 


He has dropped the ball on occasion (note the little chew holes on the right-hand leaf of our raspberry plant).... but he's good friends with the birdies.



Saturday, April 20, 2013

Seeds become seedlings, first tomatoes emerge

We've been watering and watering (alas, no automated watering system quite yet), and have some progress!

We discovered that one of the smallest tomato plants (Enchantment) is already producing a tomato:


And then I found another one (on the potted Stupice plant):

Come onnnnnnnn.... blueberries!

Good start, little pea seedlings!


Saturday, April 6, 2013

The tiny lettuce-ettes show up

I have no idea whether these lettuces will make it to adulthood before the hellish heat of a San Fernando Valley summer vaporizes them, but for the time being they are very cute!


Here are some current shots of the beds, too:


Sunday, March 31, 2013

Lots to plant!

We made a trip to the beautiful Sperling Nursery to get everything besides tomatoes (which we had already gotten at the Tomatomania sale):

We got herb and pepper and berry and veggie plants, as well as a bunch of seeds (carrots and lettuce and beets....).  Time to go-a-planting! 



Faced with a lot of planting space but also a lot of different types of plants and seeds, we decided to go the SFG (square foot gardening) route:

 



Dave built some pretty serious tomato cages out of concrete reinforcing grid - those tomatoes are not escaping this year!

Our 4x4 bed (bottom of this post) was converted into our herb garden, and we also made a berry bed for our blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and boysenberries (after a rather involved soil amendment to lower the pH).




Take a good look!  They look beautiful now....  hopefully they continue to look that way (just bigger....).

Saturday, March 23, 2013

First things first: tomatoes!

The dirt is in the beds, so now it's time to buy plants and plant stuff! We first attended the Tomatomania show, held at the Tapia Brothers Farm Stand. We forgot to take pics, but I borrowed these photos from the LA Farm Girl blog:



It was a great event!  So great, in fact, that we were inspired to buy twelve tomato varieties and a ridiculous number of basil plants (bruschetta, yum)! Here they are, at their new home; all that's left is the planting:
 


Friday, March 15, 2013

Dirt, dirt everywhere....

We ordered a delivery of dirt and mulch to fill the raised beds and the walkway around them...  once it was in the driveway, though, we realized we may have gotten in over our heads! This stuff needed to be transported to the exact opposite corner of our back yard....

So we hired a couple of guys to do the heavy lifting - whew! It may not seem like a lot, but by the end of the day they'd managed to fill up the beds and spread the mulch:

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Building and positioning the raised beds

Dave has spent a couple of weekends now planning and building our new raised beds. I helped move them into place - very heavy-duty and heavy to move around!  We're relieved that we've got them in place now:



A little bit of varnish (applied over a week), a big varnish-induced headache, some preparatory tubing for plumbing work, and voila:

Saturday, March 2, 2013

It starts with a removed swing set and a class about tomatoes...

When we bought our house in May 2011,  this part of the yard contained a swing set:

We gave the set away to a nice family from Orange County, then proceeded to store extra soil and rocks from the atrium re-do, which became Matilda's favorite digging spot....

Tomatoes
And now our epic journey has begun: this weekend we attended a "CSUN-al" gardening class which covered tomatoes - different varieties, how to plant them, etc. Scott Daigre from Tomatomania got the crowd all excited, and this became the starting point of our planning to create a raised bed garden in the back corner of our yard.