That’s some of the squash we’ve picked already. We’ve also had some interesting varieties of lettuce, and the tomatoes are making excellent progress.

I think a lot of the difference is just a better soil balance. We made up some compost through the fall and winter, and the soil from last year had some time to break down a little too. All that seems to have combined for a much better garden this year.

Technorati Tags: gardening, produce

There’s a feeling I understand. I had it last year when my garden was a complete flop. But this year things have changed. My garden is flourishing. We’re seeing results already. Everything is coming up, umm, maybe not roses, we have lots of other plants growing, but coming up beautifully.

We’ve even picked our first squash of the year. It was delicious.

Sometimes things just aren’t right for your garden right away. I suspect last year’s failure was due to a combination of factors. Soil that wasn’t quite right. A heat wave we weren’t home for that killed a lot of our plants. Other factors that were beyond our control.

But that didn’t keep us from trying again.

The difference this year has been amazing. We did a lot of composting through the fall and winter. We changed the containers we use, and allow the roots to leave the container and go into soil. And the weather has quite frankly just been cooperating.

Sometimes it really can be just the most basic things that are keeping you from succeeding with your garden. That doesn’t mean you have a brown thumb, just that you need to figure out what went wrong.

Look at where you plant your garden. Is it really the best place in the yard for it? My husband and I were able to change the location of our garden this year because several highly unusual for our area freezes killed off plants in other parts of the yard. Rather than replace the flowers, we moved our vegetable garden there. It has been a huge help.

Think about how you water. We grow several varieties of squash and cucumbers, and they really do not like water on their leaves. We use a soaker hose rather than a sprinkler, so that the water goes just to the ground and roots, where it is needed. This is highly efficient and better for your water bill in many cases.

Watch out for heat waves. I really think this is what did us in worst of all last year, as many plants died shortly before the vegetables had ripened. It was hugely frustrating. If we had watered enough we probably could have kept more plants alive.

Think about how you are fertilizing your plants. Chemicals are easy, but I really love using compost. No worries about what you’re putting on your food. It’s cheap. But a poor soil may not improve fast enough sometimes, which can cause your garden to fail. Don’t give up. Odds are it will have improved by the following planting season.

Make sure you understand the needs of the plants you are trying to grow. Read up on specific plants, even before they give you trouble. Some like more sun, some like more shade, more water, need slightly different soil, you get the idea.

A beautiful garden won’t happen every year for every gardener, but you can improve your own chances for success. Buying resources such as the Home Vegetable Gardening ebook can help too.

I love it! My garden is off to a simply gorgeous start this year. The weather has been cool and sunny, and the plants have just really taken off.

I credit some of this to how my husband changed things around this year. Since this past winter we had a couple freezes kill off basically all the decorative plants in the yard (San Diego area – no one plants freeze resistant plants here!), he changed the containers around and now the plants start from containers, but can get their roots into the actual soil. The containers have a mesh at the bottom now, and are on top of where the decorative plants once grew.

The difference has been simply amazing. Everything just took off after we planted. Lost our seedlings to the last freeze, but when we bought young plants and put them in the ground – wow! Everything is growing beautifully.

I’ve been watching the bee situation in my area carefully, though. For those of you not familiar with it, there’s something called colony collapse disorder that has killed off about a quarter of all the commercial behives in the United States. Pretty scary stuff when you think about it, especially since no one knows the cause. It’s being worked on, and the problem is being narrowed down bit by bit.

Here are some more garden pictures. The tomatoes are looking especially promising this year.

Technorati Tags: gardening, my garden, garden growth

Sprouting seeds indoors is certainly working well this year. We’ve had quite a few sprout already. Just have to hope that none of them get gnawed by a mystery bug again this year. Last year we lost a few to that.

I’m just delighted to see things growing already. The weather here is riduculously warm just now, although if we’re lucky we’ll get some rain this weekend. But in the meantime I’m taking advantage of not needing to heat the room the seeds are in to warm the soil. Air temperatures in that room are at about 80 degrees during the day with the window open right now. It’s pretty nice.

But I do know we need the rain. Even more, the mountains that supply much of our water need snow.

I’m starting out very hopeful that this year we will have a better garden than last year. That won’t take much, since last year so many plants just plain failed to thrive. But just take a look at this picture and say I should do anything other than enjoy!

Technorati Tags: seeds, sprouting, garden growing, warm weather

I’ve been neglecting this site for a while now. Just kind of lost interest for a time while we weren’t actively gardening, especially after such a disappointing year.

It’s been an interesting winter. We’ve had freezing weather, which is highly unusual for our area. I’m talking half inch of ice on the kids’s sandbox, which we had filled with water once we realized how much freezing we were getting. It was pretty amazing.

We also started throwing kitchen waste into the blender for quick compost. Hopefully our soil will be better this year. We’re also going to have to be more careful whenever a heat wave hits, so that maybe we won’t lose so many plants this year to it.

We’ve started planting seeds already. No, not outside; that wouldn’t be productive yet. Just like last year, we’re starting them inside, in a heated room. Not the most energy efficient way (I wish we had a greenhouse), but it should give us a nice head start on planting once the weather is sufficiently warm.

My husband started planting seeds last weeked. Today I took a look and one had sprouted already. Nice to see things off to a prompt start.

We’ll be keeping these guys indoors for at least a month to month and a half, depending on how fast the rest sprout and how the weather outside goes. We think a part of the problem last year was a slightly late start, so this should have us just a bit ahead of the game this time.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how it goes this year.

Technorati Tags: starting seeds, garden preparation

I’m not Italian, but I am married to one. But even before then I was a major fan of cooking with garlic. I keep a lot of it in my kitchen and I think it’s the perfect thing to grow in my garden.

To get started just head out to the store and buy some heads of garlic. Break them up into individual cloves and plant. They’ll start sprouting in a few weeks. You can even plant garlic in the fall before the ground freezes (if you live in a place where that’s an issue) and it will grow for you come spring.

Plant the cloves about six inches apart with the pointy end up about an inch underground. Fertilize and water.

As your garlic grows, break off any flowers that appear. You want your plants to focus on growing the garlic bulb, not flowers. Keep taking care of them until the leaves yellow, then dig up and rinse. Cure them in a shady, well ventilated place for at least two weeks. Then you can store them someplace cool, dry and dark until you want to use them. No, not your refrigerator, which is colder than necessary for storing garlic. They’ll last around two months.

I’m thinking that I’ll try growing elephant garlic this year, as it’s my husband’s favorite variety. The bulbs are quite a bit larger than the usual garlic and the flavor is excellent. I hope it works.

Technorati Tags: garlic

In his frustration with our recent failure of a garden, my husband is trying to figure out how to improve the soil for next year. His current idea, which we haven’t yet tried, is to save up veggie scraps and throw them in the blender with some water to pour into the planters.

I understand why he wants to do it – the nutrients should break down much easier in that form and improve the soil pretty quickly, but yuck! I’m trying not to think about what that could do to the blender, which we regularly use to make smoothies.

It’s a good blender… better be considering the price he paid for it back in college. One of the ones you see at fairs. Yes, good old VitaMix.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that a new carafe would cost at least $100. Yes, I just went and priced them over at Amazon.

I’m thinking that I’m going to have to keep the scraps in the fridge for this one. No way I’m going to let disgusting, moldy scraps go into that blender. But if we keep things fresh it might not be too bad.

My other thought is to buy some cheap blender and let him use that. The current budget really doesn’t have room for unnecessary purchases, but I’d rather buy a cheap blender than effectively destroy the one we’ve got.

However, I do understand this can be quite effective. Takes something like a month for things to be ready for planting, so if we keep this up during the winter we might actually have some good soil by spring. Sounds good to me.

For those of you wondering how to make green soup for your garden, take one part compostable foods to four parts water and blend. Just make sure you think about how you’re cleaning up after.

Technorati Tags: compost, blender, vitamix, green soup

Just for fun (actually because it began to rot so soon), my husband took our uncut Halloween pumpkin to the back yard and cut the top off. He gave our daughter a choice – fill the top with a few seeds and some dirt or plant the seeds in the ground.

Of course she chose both. What did you expect? She’s 4!

It will be interesting to see how they grow, if they grow and so forth. This is more of a whim than an actual attempt at growing pumpkins. If they grow, great, if not that’s fine too.

My daughter loves planting seeds just about at random. Obviously most don’t sprout. She has planted apple seeds, a nectarine seed and a few others I can’t think of right now.

Since this is the time of year when we take a break from serious gardening, especially after as poor a growing season as we had past summer, it’s fun to give control over to my daughter. She imagines she will grow all this stuff, and most of it won’t do anything at all. Fortunately, kids just love trying and failure doesn’t really matter.

However, many people have trouble attracting butterflies into their gardens. They may occasionally flutter by, but they won’t stay.

The trick to getting butterflies in your garden is to plant a garden that will attract them. You want plants that they will lay their eggs on and plants with nectar they love.

Which plants you use varies by the kind of butterfly you want. I’ve had success attracting Anise Swallowtails with my fennel bush. One year we had caterpillars all over it, which led to cocoons, and my daughter got to see the butterflies hatch from the cocoons. It was very exciting for her.

Flowers in general will encourage butterflies to appear. A large patch of flowers will help to encourage butterflies to hang around, as there will be abundant nectar for them.

Flowers that butterflies tend to prefer include:

Asters, Butterfly plant, Cosmos, Gaillardia, Lilac, Marigold, Sweet pea, Verbena and Zinnias.

Most of these flowers are quite attractive and you will enjoy having them in your garden anyhow. Some weeds, however, also attract butterflies. You may not like having them around, but dandelions attract some species of butterfly.

Of course, you want to consider whether or not you want to encourage butterflies sometimes. My fennel was big enough to support butterflies and caterpillars without losing too much of the plant. There are times that you will think of butterflies as pests if they happen to eat some of your preferred plants.

Even if you haven’t had butterflies in your garden before, you’ll find that they locate you fairly quickly. They move around quite a bit, but with a good butterfly garden you and your family will be able to enjoy their entire life cycle.

Technorati Tags: butterfly garden, butterflies, flowers, anise swallowtails, kids

All in all, though, the carrots did well. We grew some odd varieties, and in all honesty most of them made me not want to grow them again. Poor taste.

My daughter was quite excited about one carrot in particular that had grown out in three ways.

This has been a very frustrating year for vegetable gardening for us. We’ve had much more success in the past than we have had this year. I think the unusual heat wave did a lot of the plants in, even though we tried to keep them well watered.

We did leave a few carrots in the ground, just to see how they flower. I like the idea of letting the kids see the entire life cycle. I’m not sure that we’ll manage to keep them going long enough for that, as my understanding is that they flower in their second year, but only in some climates. I guess it will depend in part on how our winter goes.