Busy day!

I did a lot in the garden today! Scott helped. :)

• Planted another round of seeds: tomato, pepper, eggplant, lavender and basil
• Majorly thinned the existing seedlings
• Laid cardboard around the perimeter of the new beds and weeded
• Dumped a bag of some natural gardener compost in the rear raised bed
• Watered the cardboard and beds
• Went to the nursery down the road for onions, wandered around admiring and testing* plants for at least a half hour, came home with shallots, 4 strawberry plants, a russian red kale, a lemon thyme, and a lettuce (no onions)
• Went to Home Depot for mulch, found onion sets! Also finally found the soil testing kits!  (Last time I asked, they acted like they had no clue what I was talking about.)
• Mulched over most of the area (need more mulch, plus some good black mulch for on top of the beds)
• Planted everything mentioned above (minus the shallots, need to research!) in the way we were shown in class; gently massaged the roots, made a few pricks with a sharp point where necessary (the thyme plant had some pretty serious roots, but I wanted it too much to not buy it!)
• Watered some more
• Admired the work!

* testing plants:  Paige taught us, while we were planting the bed, how to look for good transplant candidates. If the plant roots are coming out of the bottom, or look like they have completely overtaken the bottom, that's generally a bad sign; the plant will probably take a bit longer to establish itself than one that isn't so root bound. There were a lot of plants like that at the nursery!

The coming weeks should be busy, busy, busy. I plan to get a rainwater collection set up soon, hopefully a DIY/cheap solution. We will be learning about it in class, thankfully! I am also keeping a very close eye on all my plant babies. It's been so nice and warm during the day that they get a lot of time outside. I've moved a few (a tomato, a pepper, a cucumber, and an onion; plus the new strawberry planter) to pots and am keeping them in the greenhouse, sort of as an experiment (but mostly because I have no room for them otherwise!) So far they're still alive, and we're going on day 4 or 5.

I will post photos soon! I just downloaded the Blogger app to my phone; hope it doesn't suck. ;)

Citizen Gardener: class one

My first of 3 citizen gardener classes was this morning. I enjoyed it!  We built (and planted) a raised bed garden which will serve as the kids' garden at In.gredients -- the USA's first package-free grocery store, coming soon!  We also built a compost pile out of wood palettes (why didn't I think of that?!)

I already have a compost pile and a couple 4'x4' raised beds, but I still managed to learn a lot today! I learned about what kind of soil is best here in Austin (sandy! no mel's mix!), how to best utilize the space in square feet, how tying string around upholstery tacks is WAAAY easier than the retarded looking grid I made for my first bed (and how to better assemble the bed, for that matter: my first bed is pretty retarded looking, so the second was purchased premade!) I am looking forward to trellis building next week!

On top of that, I learned a lot about plants and their relation to the sun here in Austin.  I learned how to plan according to the sun angle (just googled this site), how the sun moves in this area and changes with the seasons, and how plants are affected by its position.  I was happy to start to understand this stuff and I really need to study it more! I also learned a little more about companion planting and placing plants so that some can shade others. This is something I have been studying a lot lately as I plan my Spring beds, a process that seems to be taking WAY too long, but the perfectionist in me is showing!

One other thing I learned about plants is that, in Austin, our Spring season is short, so we should be using veggie varieties that have "70 days or less" to maturity.  I hadn't paid much attention to this! I also learned how to best transplant and plant seeds. I can read as much as I want, but nothing beats seeing it in real time. :)

We got a nice sized packet of information upon leaving that I have been looking through as I have had time throughout the day/night.  There's a list of vegetable varieties for Travis County that I wish I'd looked at before I started buying seed! ;)  It will come in handy if I end up needing to buy transplants.  I can tell this part, in particular, is going to go a long ways toward helping me finally get that Spring plan done:

Plants that are OK in Partial Shade
beets
brussels sprouts
cabbage
carrot
collards
kale
lettuce
mustard
parsley
radish
spinach
turnips

Plants that are OK in Alkaline soil (most of Austin)
beets
broccoli
cabbage
cauliflower
leeks
lettuce
okra
onions
spinach
swiss chard
watercress
new zealand spinach

plotting and planning

#gardening

Now sprouting: lettuce and carrots that I planted outside last weekend and the cucumber I planted in the seedling trays inside.  The outdoor spinach has not made an appearance yet, strangely.

This weekend I plan to move some more of my tomato seedlings into individual containers because they're getting crowded!

I just got the Mother Earth News garden planner (iPad app too!) and have been playing with that. Hoping it makes succession planting a bit easier to figure out.