Garden Update

I'm so excited to plant my garden this year. I'm still really new to this (last year is the first time I had a garden) so I'm trying to focus on learning and not the inevitable mistakes. Last years garden started off great, if a little late. Then about halfway through the summer, summer ended. Here in southern Ontario July and August stunk! Lots of rain and quite cool. I had a great bean harvest and the lettuce and radishes did really well too. But my poor tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers (which just happen to be the vegetables I actually was looking forward to eating!). They didn't make it. I only got about 12 tomatoes, maybe 3 cucumbers and no peppers before they were all blighted. I was pretty upset, but from what I hear, most people lost a lot.

This year I am hopeful for a better late summer harvest. I've also decided that I will start a lot of my vegetables from seed. It just makes sense economically. And then if everything dies I won't feel like I lost a lot of money too.

Here is a list of what I've started so far.


March 26
12 roma tomatoes
12 big beef tomatoes
6 cherry tomatoes
9 broccoli
8 cauliflower
9 peppers (5 mixed sweet peppers and 4 yellow peppers)
8 tomatillos

April 17
4 cantaloupe
4 watermelon
4 oregano
4 basil
4 brussels sprouts
4 red peppers
4 yellow tomatoes
4 ground cherry

April 20

5 more tomatillos

I'm hoping to be able to plant some jalapeno peppers in the next few days. I haven't been able to find the seeds anywhere. I guess they think Canadians don't eat jalapenos! So I'm trying to dry seeds out of the jalapeno peppers that I bought at the grocery store. Can't hurt to try, right?

So far the seedlings are doing pretty well.



My oldest helping fill the trays





Tomatoes







Peppers





Tomatillos





Broccoli and cauliflower





A few shots of last years garden







Last year, after we'd tilled our garden, I discovered square foot gardening. We still wanted to use the tilled garden so we decided to plant it in a grid like a square foot garden. Then we built one proper square foot garden. The only real difference was the weeds. The raised bed had maybe a dozen weeds all summer, where the in ground garden had enough weeds for me to spend a couple hours a week (at least) weeding until the plants grew tall enough to block most of the weeds. We might build a few more boxes this year.

That's all for now! Hopefully I have more to show soon!

Happy gardening,

Bethany