of wonderful food from our garden. Potatoes, squashes, beans,
onions, cucumbers, brussels sprouts, okra, eggplant, tomatoes,
tomatoes and more tomatoes. By expanding my garden, I had
a lot more space to experiment and I've decided trial and error is
one of the best teachers. I feel like I learned tons of things about
gardening this year. I even had someone ask me questions about
their problem tomatoes and I actually knew the answer!!! Maybe
I'm turning into a real gardener after all.
I'm also on first name basis with colorado potato beetles, squash
bugs and japanese beetles. These were the pests I fought with and
except for the fungicide that I used to fight the blight on my
tomatoes, I managed to grow everything organically. This
makes me really happy.
Other than a few tomato and zucchini plants and some basil and
dill that are hanging on, the summer garden has served it's purpose.
This week my beds were cleaned out and prepped. This cooler
weather is perfect for planting lettuce, collards and kale, peas,
broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. I'm ready to start again-
with a fall garden.
Before heading out the door to plant, I made seed strips.
I got the idea from my May/June issue of Hobby Farm Home.
I love that magazine!
You may have seen these plant strips in gardening centers.
They're kind of pricey to buy, but so easy to make yourself.
In fact, I actually enjoyed it.
I took old newspaper and cut it into strips.
Then I mixed up a simple glue of flour and water - 2 T. flour to 4 T.
water was what I started with and I added a little more flour until I had
it to the consistency of heavy cream.
I'm planting three different varieties of spinach
and all these lettuces. These seeds are so tiny, they can be hard to handle.
When I've taken the packages to the garden and tried to plant them directly
into the soil, I often end up spilling them. It's also hard to see the little things
once you drop them in the dirt. These are reasons I thought the seed strips
would work well.
I used a little dropper and put dots of glue on the strips of paper, referring
to the seed packages for spacing.
I used a Sharpie marker to label each strip,
then left them out to dry.
The next day, I took the seed strips and headed down to the freshly
prepared garden beds.
I measured off my rows and started planting.
I covered the strips lightly with soil and water.
And now I wait.......
I sure hope this works. This method of sowing small seeds was so much easier.
*MYOF Goal #43 - Expand my vegetable garden.
Thanks so much for this information. We will certainly use it in our garden. Those spinach seeds are the dickens to plant!
ReplyDeleteMelissa,
ReplyDeleteWhat do you do with all that lettuce? Does it keep well? Do you store it some how? I'm thinking about doing a fall garden but I'm not sure how I would keep lettuce...Glen doesn't really eat very much but I would.
Leslie, First of all - I didn't plant all the seeds in the packet. I wanted a variety, so I bought a number of different kinds and I will give some to a friend for her garden and put some in the freezer to use for spring planting. Having said all that - I still end up with tons of lettuce. We eat salads everyday as long as I have fresh lettuce. If you pick it, wash and dry it well and wrap it up in a paper towel and then put it in a plastic zip lock bag it will last all week. Some varieties keep better than others. Red leaf lettuce stores really well and so does romaine. And then I love to give it away to anyone who wants it. Lettuce and spinach are one of the easiest things to grow and I like growing things that require little effort and yield big results. Lettuce is like that. Good luck and lets get together and hike soon. Love you!!!
ReplyDeleteGreat idea! I will have to try it for my beets to get a better spacing. From what you told me about your fall garden while we were in Egypt - it sounds successful!
ReplyDelete