Veggie Garden Plot Phase 1

Over the last few months, I have been working on several new flower beds. One of those flower beds was originally setup for in ground plantings for Tomatoes and Peppers. But due the heat and other factors I lost most of the seedlings. So this year we purchased our veggies from several different places and planted in three and five gallon buckets. Because of the heat some of the younger tomatoes are not doing so well. A couple of them were hidden and did not get water for a couple of days. But they will come back and should produce some tomatoes in a few months.

This bed is a 20ft x 8ft bed. Half this bed is setup for in ground close proximity plantings and the other is setup for five to eight gallon container veggie gardening. The container section can be converted to in ground planting if we decide we want to commit to a veggie plot.

As for the soil conditioning, I mixed in homemade compost, worm compost, donkey manure, leaf mulch and landscaping mix.Then weed screen was layed across the entire bed followed by hardwood mulch.

Phase 1 Almost complete - Need to organize and tie everything up

Tomato Pot - That brown stick is a blackberry cane I haven't gotten around to removing.

Candy Striped Tomatoes - Can't wait till theire ready to eat!

What a productive weekend...

This weekend was one of the most fun weekends I have had in a while. This weekend I attended the Fort Worth Garden Forums Plant Swap! Even though I am new to gardening and I have a very limited amount of inventory that I can trade for, I still got a lot of the plants I was looking for! After the swap I followed a fellow gardener back to her place in Copper Canyon to get some donkey compost from her.

Going to the Swap was a bit out of the way for me. Its about 50 miles away one way. Add in the trip to CopperCanyon and heading home I probably put a 150 miles on the truck this past weekend. But it was well worth it. Met a lot of great people, got a lot of new plants and eat some good food.

As you can tell I have been busy! About 3 hours before I took a picture, my yard was a lot worse. At about 2PM on a windy, cool Sunday afternoon I started my plantings.

I took a small section of yard where it was nothing but weeds and other yard trash and cleaned it up and dug out about 8 inches of top soil and mixed in a mix of EarthGro Topsoil, Donkey Poo, humus and landscapers mix to build a raised border less bed. I did my best to to keep the new organic soil off the the rotting fence. Eventually I will create some sort of border for this bed, I just have to find some recycled bricks or yard borders in order to complete this bed. I topped off the bed with a thick layer of hardwood mulch from the city recycling center. Before adding the Mulch I planted 5 large cannas that will reach about 10 feet tall and 2 rows of smaller red cannas. Now I have no Idea what these guys will look like. If it looks funny or does not go will I will move them next year. Once I see what they look like I will research and figure out more about these guys. Once the plants come, I will complete the layer of mulch and take a bag of decortive mulch and cover the decomposing stuff up if needed.

The bed is another small bed of canns. Now the cannas are a little close to my weeping crepe myrtle but I will deal with that when the time comes. I just do not have the room for both. I l figure I will be digging up some extra cannas when they get to large!

In this part of the bed I planted a Turk's Cap and several different types of red and orange daylilies
All the small 4 inch pots are new seedlings, I traded for. There are some Turk's Cap, Flame Acanthus, and several types of Salvia, that I can not wait to pot up!

In this group I received a Red Bud Seedling, Mock Orange, Purple Lantana, Salvia Greggii, and Salvia Guarenitica.
I also received 2 coral honeysuckles. I plan to let 1 run up the unused chain length gate for privacy and the other I am going to put it near my Cape Honeysuckle and let it climb and drap over a fence or a trellis.

And of course I planted a small amount of wood ferns. I plan to let this take of over this empty mud hole under my big tree. I will sprinkle some shade flower seeds and other types of seed that can handle more sun as it gets to the end of the shade areas. I will also let the vinca and ivy take over but keep both vines thin and trim.

I also received Blackeyed Susans and Giant Coneflower both are not ready for the camera.

Over the next few weeks I will be potting up the rest of my plants in the seed starting closest, prepping the last two beds and planting them. I have a very limited time, money and days left before it gets to hot work out here. I will post more updates as I work on the garden...

Thanks for reading...

I have my first vistor of the year.

I found this little guy sitting on a patch of weeds I was about to pull.

I moved the ladybug over to an infected Hibiscus with spider mites and aphids.

She is hiding from me. She is just a little camera shy. At least there is some food in there for her!

First Rose Bloom Of The Season!

Today my light Pink Knockout Rose Bloomed. Such a pretty sight!

This is What Happens When You Do NOT Have Enough Pots Part 2

Today I had to replant my Tiny Tim Tomatoes and Sweet Peppers. Of course I still have not recovered from my transplanted Beef Steak Tomatoes that I re-potted last week. I sat down and started making small transplant pots from the jobs section of the Dallas Newspaper. I finally found something I could use that section for! I then used the seedling pot to plant my Sweet Banna Peppers and jalapeno Peppers I picked up from Roach Feed and Seed a couple of weeks ago.

This is What Happens When You Do NOT Have Enough Pots

This weekend I found it was time to move my tomato Beef Steaks from the seedling pot to a bigger home. When I looked closer I did not have 6 plants but I had 12 plants and I only had 4 pots for the transplant.

If it was a month from now I would just plant them outside in the yard and get a head start. But here in Dallas we could still have another freeze before the end of April. In fact, tonight we will have a low of 37 degrees. That is just a tad to cold for my tomatoes that are used to 75 to 85 degrees in my seed closest.

So I went to my recycle bin and grabbed six Sunny D 1 gallon jugs. I cut the tops off just as the pot turns inward. I then took a screw driver and a rubber mallet and punch a bunch of holes in the bottom for drainage. I then mixed my own personal seed starting/cutting mix and transplantted my tomatoes into any container big enough to hold them for another month.

Here are the results. What do you think?

So Happy, Park Seed is Sending Part of My Order

After eying Park Seed's Online catalog for what seemed like years, we ordered some new plants! We ordered a Blueberry Sunshine Blue (Vaccinium corymbosum Sunshine Blue Dwarf) and Dwarf Pomegranate Nana (Punica granatum Nana). Today I received word that my Vaccinium corymbosum Sunshine Blue Dwarf was shipped out this morning! We should be receiving our new blue berry bush shortly. They have not shipped my Punica granatum Nana yet, but it may not be the right time a year for them to ship it.

I will post again about this once my new plants arrive.

Container Soil

Since last summer I have been experimenting with different mixes of soil for containers. I have tried Miracle-Gro® Moisture Control® Potting Mix. This works well, but the price was a little more than I wanted to spend for the amount of soil we need in our garden. Toward the end of the summer I found Sta-Green's Potting Soil with Mositur Control.

Using this potting mix is great. The soil has a lot dark and rich organic material. The soil will stay moist longer and there is a small amount of fertilizer to kick start the plants. The price is great. I can usually find a 40lb bag for about 7 bucks.

As the months went on I started mixing different types of mixes to save money and see if I can make a better mix. I started mixing cheap $2 potting mixes with the Sta-Green mix. I added extra perlite for my coco hanging basket and humus to add extra organic matter. This mix works great, the roses that I potting in just Sta-Green do not have a lot of growth on them. But my new potted roses with my mix has a lot of new growth and are doing great.

In the next few weeks I will be changing my potting mix recipe to a mix I found on the fourms of Garden Forums. Under the container garden forum do a search for Al's Mix. Everyone says this one of the best mixes around. Below you can see Al's Mix.

My Basic Soil

I'll give two recipes. I usually make big batches. I also frequently add agricultural sulfur to some soils for acid-lovers or to soils I use dolomitic lime in.

5 parts pine bark fines
1 part sphagnum peat (not reed or sedge peat please)
1-2 parts perlite
garden lime or gypsum
controlled release fertilizer
micronutrient powder (or other continued source of micronutrients)

Big batch:

3 cu ft pine bark fines (1 big bag)
5 gallons peat
5 gallons perlite
2 cups lime or gypsum (you can add more to small portion if needed)
2 cups CRF
1/2 cup micronutrient powder (or other)

Small batch:

3 gallons pine bark 1/2 gallon peat 1/2 gallon perlite small handful lime or gypsum 1/4 cup CRF 1 tbsp micro-nutrient powder

I will be modifying this recipe just a little. I will be adding several large handfuls of humus.

Please leave a commit about this. I await your ideas.

So Happy! My Camellia is Blooming!

I bought a camellia about two years ago. It was in a 1 gallon container and very small. I put it into a small pot and set it on my wife's (girlfriend at the time) porch. The first winter and spring nothing came up. I then re-potted last fall into a 16 inch pot with a lot of high quality potting soil and a seaweed drink almost every week.

I know most of people would say my pot size is to small, but we live in a rental house and do not wish to leave my plants behind when we move. But because I love Camellias so much I had to get several and pot them. Once we are settled I will build a proper bed for them where they will be happy.

About November, I noticed a bud that started to form. I got really excited but nothing ever came of it. Only about 2 weeks ago it opened for me. Now it has a ton of buds and more blooms are opening daily.

My Favorite Gardening Product

Since last fall I start using seaweed emulsion, and I love it. I use this product as a 2 to 1 solution for soaking bulbs, Cuttings, soaking roots, and a weekly misting on my house plants and weekly waterings for all my plants on a 1 to 1 ratio. So far the best organic product I have found is Maxicrop. The only place local I have found the product at a reasonable price is Lowe's. They carry the 1 quart and the 1 gallon concentrate.

I bought the 1 quart to test and use during the winter months. I have about 20 indoor plants and several more plants I am over wintering on my screened in plastic covered porch. I used the solution every other week when watering. I would mist the plants every week with a spray bottle.

All my plants that were summer bloomers that should have stopped flowering kept flowering and are still flowering even though I stopped adding seaweed to my weekly routine.

I just bought the 1 gallon bottle last week and I hope this will last me through the summer. In about a month I will try Maxicrop's fish emulsion productions for my roses and the rest of my garden.

What I did this weekend...

This weekend I spent most of the weekend running around getting supplies and researching what I was going to need to plant 4 peony roots I got for my wife for Valentine's day last week. We went to Wal-mart to get some nice looking pots for a great price. After pricing out four 15 inch pots at 20 bucks we realized that they were just to small and we really did not going to need anymore 15 inch pots. We started looking at what large pots we could recycle and repot plants that needed to be re potted. I then remembered I had at least four roses that needed to be re potted. We looked around for a little while and we came across the prefect pot. We found 21 inch slate colored pots for $10.52 each. We bought 4 of them! Of course we lost $40 now instead of the $20 in pots we had planned to spend on them and still have to spend another $40 in a few weeks.

During that same trip we bought 15 strawberry roots, one small Pineapple Sage, and a small pot of sweet basil to replace one of our basils that is dieing out.

Sunday afternoon before the rains started I went out to buy potting soil. I spent about $18 on potting soil and hummus for the roses. In total I bought about 300+ lbs of soil. My poor little Kia was riding low today!

This is what my roses look like now. They did not handle last summer very well, I lost 3 roses and 1 was almost killed by bag worms, that kept coming back for seconds and thirds. Most of these roses I have had since college days and never re potted them. So today came the day I had to re pot them in large 21 inch pots!

After mixing up my soil and prepping the plants I moved them to their new home. As you can tell, the pots I move them to is a lot larger than their previous home. In the future I would not put a rose in anything smaller than a 16 inch wide with a deep base. The roots were so tight I almost could not get them out of the pot. I then removed some suckers from some small trees that started growing in there that I did not notice until I started working on them. Once I got all the plants in the pots and they were seated firmly I then trimmed about half an inch of old growth and removed any black spot I could find.

As I was finishing up it started to rain. I then moved all four plants back to their spot. I could not find my dolley and had to move all that weight by hand. I now hurt in places I have never hurt before. By the time I got them all moved into place and my supplies and cuttings removed to their proper places.

Below is the completed re potting of my roses.