Our Garden

So here it is, the final product! We now have seeds planted in our two Square Foot Gardens. You can see in the picture that we finished and put up the Carrot High Rises.

I found out that you have to get special potato seeds in order to plant potatoes, otherwise you risk infectious diseases in all your plants since potatoes are prone to blight (think Irish Potato Famine of the 19th century!). Bad. So we planted extra carrots instead of potatoes.

We also discovered last night that due to the height of the Carrot High Rises, we miscalculated the dimensions of the protective covers made out of chicken wire...we're going to have to get longer pieces of wood for those, so we haven't been able to make them yet. But since we just planted seeds last night, we have lots of time to get those ready before we even have plants!

So what did we plant, you may ask? Here's our list:

Carrots
Green Beans
Lima Beans (Bill's favorite!)
Spinach
Lettuce
Corn (a total experiment...I do not expect this one to work!)
Chives
Onions
Dill
Okra

Actually, the truth is, they are ALL experimental---it will be a total joy if ANY of them grow, since we're behind the game in fall planting dates. Last night Bill planted the seeds in one box and I did the other. He was much more careful about measuring how many seeds to plant and making little holes. I just kind of randomly scattered bits of seeds, because I am impatient and impulsive and wanted to be through. It will be interesting to see the differences in seed growth between the two boxes! I expect his will do much better than mine. It will take a few days or maybe weeks for the seeds to start to sprout....I will definitely be posting updates and pictures!

In other gardening news, our pepper plants are doing extraordinarily well! They stopped making peppers during the heat but I knew that once the temps dropped even a little bit they would start up again. Sure enough two weeks ago we had a "cold spell" with temps in the 80's, and all of a sudden I have more than 50 baby jalapenos growing! The Santiago Hybrids are doing well too, and keep producing babies. The Sweet Cayennes and Hot Portugals seem to have run their course and are done making new peppers, but we have a large load of jalapenos to look forward to in a few weeks!