Making seed starters out of newspaper.

Mike Cunningham did a great job going through over all of the elements involved in starting successful seedlings. We covered seed, soil, amendments, temperature, light, humidity, and watering and I feel more prepared for this spring season than I ever had before! I have done a decent job at germination in the past, but my seedlings have never been happy.

Part of the talk included showing us a few different options for ensuring the seedlings receive enough light, including an overview of how to build an indoor light stand that is adjustable to your seedlings’ needs.

The indoor light rig for seedlings.

My flat of bok choy.

That weekend, Adam helped me make a light rig of our own so that we can raise the healthiest seedlings we can! We used PVC pipe, chain, a shop light, and daylight bulbs to make it, and my little bok choy seedlings have loved it. My indoor and overwintering plants have perked up as well!

Our light rig, with my light-starved plants getting some light therapy.

Baby bok choys.

In the next couple weeks I hope to continue to apply my learnings as I get things ready for The 2014 Allred Family Garden. I’ve bought all the supplies to make my own special seedling soil blend from Amazon and local sources, and I’ve dusted off the seed catalogues I’ve been getting in the mail, and the Garden Planner I use – I’m getting ready!

My first class with The Homestead Atlanta was everything I’d hoped for, and I can’t wait to attend some more. Plus, with my Georgia Organics membership, I get a discount. I’ve got my eye on Fermentation Fundamentals, and the Edible and Medicinal Plant Ramble.

The post Learning About Seed Starting From The Homestead Atlanta appeared first on spatialdrift.

Our first artichoke!

The good news is that I learned what plants can best survive neglect (carrots, serrano peppers, eggplants, asparagus, artichoke, bush beans), and had a whole year of sad-looking beds to motivate me to get my research done.

This year is different! I’ve evacuated the asparagus and artichoke from the raised beds, making a large asparagus bed for future use (it takes a couple of years to really get going, but then they last forever), and a planned line of artichokes to have different plants at different levels of maturity (they produce for 4-8 years). Moving these perennials leaves the raised beds free for a variety of annual vegetables and their companion plants.
 

Asparagus ferns in the asparagus bed

I have used Southern Exposure’s Garden Planner (which, as far as I can tell, is the same as every other main seed company’s garden planners) to plan out my two beds to a tee. I used a wide variety of sources to create prototypical Google calendar of gardening to-dos for my zone, including when to start seeds, transplant seedling, or direct sow. These items now show up in my calendar on my phone, which helps keep me on track.

This year I started tomatoes, patty squash, zucchini, bush beans, pole beans, sunflower, cucumbers, fish peppers, bell peppers, jalapeno, and serranos inside and transplanted them out ready to go at the last frost date. I used a commercially available mini “greenhouse” as well as everyone’s favorite Pinterest idea, using old toilet paper rolls. More on those experiments later.

Serrano seedling

They are a lot smaller than the greenhouse plants available now at big-box stores, but they were also a lot cheaper! I have purchased a few seedlings from these big box stores to compare and contrast growth and output over the season.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there is now an irrigation system in place! With some yard sale hosing, some Discover-cashback-same-as-cash-on-Amazon purchases, and a few fittings from the hardware store, we have a drip irrigation system in place. Now all I have to do is turn it on when I get home to start dinner, and off again when dinner is ready to serve. Hopefully this will be an easy habit to establish, and it should greatly improve the quantity and quality of my water-hungry crops like cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers.

The first raised bed.

The second raised bed.

An irrigated squash seedling.

I’ve also got some of the more drought-tolerant vegetables (radishes, carrots, beans) in containers elsewhere in the yard to save the bed space for the crops that appreciate the irrigation the most, as well as some of the extra, weaker seedlings of some of my other crops – might as well give them a chance to prove what they can do.

My porch setups with carrots, radishes, beans, and squash.

The sorta kinda on your own veggie containers. Good luck, guys and gals!

Hooray! Here’s hoping it all goes well. I’ll be sure to update with what I learn. Anyone else gardening this year? What are you excited about?

The post Grow, Garden, Grow appeared first on spatialdrift.

So many carrots lurking below! Definitely more than 15 lbs.

Columnar apple trees: one yellow, and one red, as I recall.

I successfully reared eight asparagus from seed, which I have transplanted from the garden bed to a permanent asparagus bed elsewhere, with about 20 new crowns from two additional varieties. With any luck, we’ll be rolling in asparagus in the coming years.

We also got a single artichoke plant to grow from seed, which is better than none, but I have not yet figured out where the artichoke hedge is going. Soon!

Last but not least, we did some work on the border around the garden area, putting in some pretties near the curb and some edibles down the side of the driveway. We started three baby prickly pears (we’ll see how they do), three blueberry plants (to be joined by three more if they do well), two varieties of rosemary, and two columnar apple trees.

Innoculated with Rhizobium bacteria.

Meanwhile, I’ve been discovered by the ranks of seed catalogs! I have gotten eight so far. It was a little overwhelming, but also fun to go through all of the catalogs. I even got one from Michigan Bulb Company, which is supposedly a terrible company. I ordered all my seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, a neat company that has a focus on heirlooms and plants that do best in the mid-atlantic and southern states.

 
Here’s the full list we’ll be growing in the spring, summer and early fall:

All the catalogs I received in a single day! There were more later. Also, kitty leg.

My haul, arranged by type.

Personally, I am pretty excited about the line-up, especially the Mortgage Lifter tomatoes, which are supposed to be between two and four pounds each! I used the free trials of the garden planning tool that Southern Exposure has (I’m pretty sure most of the seed/plant places sell the same one) to get both the garden beds planned out. It’s a really neat tool, because it identifies what families the various vegetables belong two, and indicates how many years you should avoid planting veggies from the same family in that spot.

So, everything is all set. This week is the time to direct sow carrots and radishes. Then in a week or two, it will be time to start the first of the seeds indoors. I can’t wait for spring!

The post Getting The Garden Ready For Spring appeared first on spatialdrift.

Forsythia in the foreground and azaleas in the back!

Hyacinth.

At work we just had a quarterly company review, which is always fun. We get together with beer and wine and look at everything we’ve accomplished in the past quarter. There’s all sorts of fun charts and amazing stats, with embarrassing pictures of people hidden throughout. It’s good times. But most importantly, it serves as reminder of exactly how far we’ve come in the past three months. You get reminded of old challenges that have faded from memory in the light of newer ones, which is pretty good fodder for a larger sense of achievement.

Anyway, this inspired me to do my own version of a Q1 review for the garden, since writing about every little thing is tedious for me and probably boring for anyone who decides to read it. So instead I’ll just do a wrap-up of what we’ve been up to. I’ve started with some obligatory spring flower pics that you may have seen if you follow me on Twitter.

A closer shot of the azaleas.

I already blogged in a fair amount of detail of the intense period of action that I dubbed Yard Explosion here, here, and here. That gave rise to an ongoing project to make the space between our house and our neighbors’ house the way we, collectively, want it to be. We ripped out the last of the shrubbery, put in four raised garden beds, and a new future hedge of Kanjiro camellias.

Here are the beds! I still need to put chips on my two.

Here’s an unintentionally “artsy” shot of our hedge of 17 Kanjiro camellias.

This is what the Kanjiros will look like when they bloom. Source: Gene Phillips

Along with our raised garden beds, we also have tomatoes going in containers – we did this last year and it worked fairly well.

Tomatoes, marigolds, and wood chips.

The wood chips came from our own trees – when we had them trimmed in January. Unfortunately, they’ve been sitting in the driveway ever since! But we finally got them shoveled up and hauled off to various places around the garden. Now we have somewhere to park again. And a prettier yard. Things look so much better with a layer of mulch!

In other food-crop related news, we have tons of blackberries and raspberries setting! Another thing I hope to accomplish this year to to plant blueberries. They are so expensive, so it would be great to have some of our own.

Even our serviceberry wedding tree is setting its berries! Hooray!

Independently of the inter-house vegetable gardening/landscaping project and the mulching chore, we received a huge amount of plants from our dear friends Susan and Richard. On a cold February day, we dug and transplanted a ton of plants – yellowroot, hearts a-bustin’, itea, clethra, trillium, cardinal flower, celandine poppy, fern-leaf phacelia, sea oats, and ferns. Out of all these plants, we lost two – a celandine poppy and the itea. We got more than one celandine, but only one itea – that slipped through the cracks in our busy March – so sad! I keep hoping it will revive.

Fern-leaf Phacelia

The celandine poppies in various stages of doing their thing.

My latest acquisition is a flowering maple. I have been wanting one of these guys for a while. They come in a variety of gorgeous, warm colors. I am interested to see how this one does – they are sold as annuals, but my neighbor overwinters his out in the yard and it seems to do fine.

The flowers droop very gracefully, but I wanted to show off its psuedo-hibiscus look.

That’s pretty much it for our almost-only-Q1 update. At the moment, everything is just growing as hard as it can, and it’s green, green, green.

The post Q1 2012 Yard & Garden Round-Up appeared first on spatialdrift.

This is fairly representative of three passes we made with the truck bed full. Also, there’s husband.

We carried things by hand, used wheelbarrows and the truck. There’s always something satisfying about driving the truck through the yard, especially when I get to ride in the bed. Re-rehabilitating the “lawn” is totally worth it, for both the novelty and work saved.

Another angle.

 These were the last pictures taken before we got the truck stuck in the mud and had to enlist our help from a neighbor (so lucky to live near such awesome folks). By this point we’d gotten all the heavy stuff, so we just did the rest of the work with a wheelbarrow.

Our toil was made easier by playing music over our outdoor speakers (still novel despite having installed them in September for our wedding) and the first bits of spring poking out.

Forsythia.

A white camellia whose blooms I completely missed last year.

And here is the fruit of our labor. A big ol’ pile o’ sticks and logs… the vast majority of what we chopped and hauled (a small amount was taken away two weeks ago). Needless to say, this is requiring a special pick up, which we will have to pay for, but it’s worth it not to have to make a dozen trips to and from the dump.

Street view.

Back view.

That’s it for now. We’re borrowing a tiller from my brother-in-law next weekend, so the saga will continue after that point.

The post Yard Explosion: Part Three appeared first on spatialdrift.

Mostly before, though we’d already taken down two trees. The men did an excellent job of keeping the trees off the wires.

In between our two properties, Craig/Zoe and Adam/I have had a big, overgrown, bushy mess. Cherry and rose of sharon saplings coming up everywhere, thorny vines, privet, english ivy, etc. So we decided to tear it down and start over. We’re also planning to put in some shared vegetable beds.

Cutting down some straggly trees in the way of our future beds.

You can see the gigantic privet.

Now you can’t. Because it’s DEAD.

Tree goes boom.

We got a fair amount of work done, and continued on Sunday, clearing the strip between our houses all the way back to the back of the houses. Then we went and finished the triangle.

There are at least a half a dozen of those big brush piles…. ugh.

A view of the property line… the neighbor behind us is elderly and the ground have clearly suffered as our did. Not yet sure what, if anything, we can do.

Razed ivy! And a view back to the house form the triangle!

Our most excellent view… we can now see into each others’ kitchens and have pledged to do all cooking and cleaning clothed until we have new bushes grown in.

Another view… we’re clearly going to need a stump grinder.

Here’s the brush we stacked at the curb Sunday. The pile is now much larger, but I don’t currently have any pics.

 You can see above that there are still some bushes there – those are some hybrid azaleas. They’re evergreen, fairly tall and have attractive lavender blooms in the spring, so we left those.

So now we’ve got to get it all hauled to the curb and assessed by the county to see how much it will cost to haul away. If it’s too much, we’ll pay to have a dumpster delivered and removed, but I’m hoping not to have to do that. I’ll be sure to snap a pic of the brush pile at its full glory!

I’m looking forward to getting to the business of putting in the vegetable beds and replanting some bushes for privacy. Not sure what we want to do yet. Could be more tea olives – ad favorite of Adam and I – or its native cousin devilwood. Camellias could also be nice due to their height, attractive foliage and showy blooms. Or perhaps we’ll buy more hybrid azaleas to continue what’s already there. If anyone has suggestions, feel free to pipe up – my goal would be to use Georgia natives, or at least woodland-esque plants (like the camellias, which aren’t native, but a common choice around here).

The post Yard Explosion: Part Two appeared first on spatialdrift.

Keep in mind this is it died back for the winter. Normally we can’t see any structures in this direction, excepting the play house.

By exploded, I mean we just brush-mowed it and tried to haul most of the junk out of the way. I think exploding it would have been easier. And quicker. Possibly cheaper. And then my lawn wouldn’t be covered in detritus that still needs dealing with. And all my joints wouldn’t ache, and I would have spent the weekend catching up on projects and playing Dungeon Defenders…

ANYWAY. Pictures have been requested, so here are pictures. We’ll start with some more before shots.

You can see ivy climbing on trees, choking groundcovers and some nandina in this shot. And the brush hog, of course!

Here’s what you were faced with trying to walk pretty much anywhere. Brambles and vines.

Another example shot.

We started in on the right (easy) side shortly after 8:30am. Here’s what we accomplished by 9am.

Ignore the privet still standing (center). We came back and chainsawed it later.

I don’t know how well photos can communicate the world of difference here.

Here you can see out two baby white oaks way down at the bottom of the yard. Now I can walk right up to them with ease!

A view probably not seen in many years: the house from the bottom of the yard, most of the way to the property line.

Then we started on the rest of the backyard, which could really be broken down into two sections, the left side and the Bremuda Triangle. Here’s Adam starting in on the left side.

Farewell, privet and rose of sharon! We’ll not be missing you.

The Bremuda Triangle is the center part of the yard. It is triangle-shaped due to gigantic fallen trees… let me try to explain: If you’re looking at a rectangle you’re imagining is the yard, draw a big V with the point at the bottom edge, the right arm extending all the way to the top of the rectangle, and the left arm extending more than half-way to the top. Now imagine the sloping topography of the rectangle – the front. left is the highest point, and the back left is the lowest point.

What does all this mean? Well, to get to the bulk of the triangle – the thickest, thorniest part of the yard – you have to go downhill and back uphill. Which isn’t really a big deal until you do it a couple dozen times, while hauling vines, saplings, and rotting logs. Or you’re rolling giant slices of rotten trunk up the slope. Or carrying most of a tree with two other people (our awesome neighbors Craig and Zoe helped us out, because they rock).

Long story short, this is the only pic I took during the first half of clearing the triangle (around 11am), because I was damn busy.

Then we had lunch at Goldberg’s (not too shabby, though I am still loyal by habit to the Bagel Palace). Then we decided we had better get started in the front yard, ‘cuz that’s what Criag and Zoe were here for after all. And we were tired of hauling logs.

But that’s enough yard explosion for one post – more on the front yard jazz in the next installment.

The post Yard Explosion: Part One appeared first on spatialdrift.

Various forms of swamp hibiscus are still blooming – I won’t photograph them all because you’ve seen them before.

Except this one – a new type of mallow/swamp hibiscus bloomed, but I was too busy to catch it in time. The leaves are furry.

Four o’clocks still going strong… four months later.

Even our very sickly Encore azalea is blooming.

Rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susan)

We’ve also had copious amounts of tomatoes, yay!

I actually just ate these three last night in my guacamole and on my tacos (they were ripe at that point, obviously).

The little plants we planted to beautify the containers where the dying tomato plants were are trucking along.

That’s it! It was a pretty light month, and I was super-busy to boot. I wonder what, if anything, will be blooming in September – when I have the time to enjoy them.

The post August Flora appeared first on spatialdrift.

July went by wicked fast, and I have way too much on my plate. Part of what helps is seeing pretty things in the yard as I rush off to work, side projects, errands or even if I’m just walking back and forth and back and forth (and back and forth) with lots of big heavy stones. Or sand. Or gravel.

And more of what I call swamp hibiscus.

Still more of what I call swamp hibiscus.

Trumpet vine still going, despite the antics of a particular bird that likes to drink the nectar and then rip off the flower.

Four o’clocks still going strong. I’m collecting all the seeds and throwing them in a different part of the yard for next year.

Little uncared for volunteer marigolds that survived the winter in an aboveground container. Hardy little things

Yellow gladiolus

Close-up of the yellow gladiolus.

Tons and tons of Rose of Sharon – in three different colors!

Darker shade of Rose of Sharon

White Rose of Sharon

I different kind of what I term Swamp Hibiscus

So exotic-looking!

White crape myrtle. By the way, it blew my mind when I learned it is “crape” and not “crepe”. Crepe makes so much more sense to me.

Deep pink crape myrtle.

Well, it was certainly a flowery July. I’m hoping there will be something out there that can beat the August heat!

The post July Flora appeared first on spatialdrift.

Some of my floral fireworks. *Click to view larger*

Additionally, I went to a couple parties and saw real fireworks (of course)! I hope everyone else had a great holiday weekend, too.

Shannon and I making our own version of the stars and stripes.

The post Fourth of July Fireworks! appeared first on spatialdrift.