Garden E042009

There was one row of space left in our garden because we couldn’t decide what to put in it. We finally settled on broccoli and cauliflower, two vegetable I’m not exactly crazy about but know that if I grow them myself I’ll be excited to eat them. We went to Young’s Nursery near our house to get the broccoli and cauliflower. Young’s has a greenhouse behind the store and one down the street where they grow all the plants they sell. Can’t get much more local than that! We picked up four young broccoli plants. The cauliflower was mixed in with Brussels sprouts and at their young stage they didn’t look very different from one another. I made sure to ask the sales clerk for help because Brussels sprouts are pretty much the only vegetable my mom doesn’t like. I found the cauliflower and picked out a pot with four healthy plants. I also found very young beets and grabbed a pot of four tiny plants.

The store had chives and leeks but no scallions. We’ve tried to plant scallions twice from seeds with no luck. I decided to get the leeks instead of the chives as I think there are more cooking options with leeks than with chives. I don’t want to give up on growing scallions so I got a seed packet along with a spinach seed pouch. This time I’m going to sprout the seeds before I plant them.

We needed some cages for our rapidly growing tomato plants. We stopped by Aco Hardware after leaving Young’s. We bought six cages but neither of us could remember how many tomato plants we had in the garden. We also got a small bag of potting soil for the flowers my mom picked up from Young’s and the extra basil plant we got to compensate for the under performing one we already had in the garden. We’re going to have a little competition between the garden basil and the potted basil. Which ever one survives the summer wins!


garden basil


potted basil

The cauliflower and the broccoli had to be planted 18 inches apart. The 8 plants we took up the extra row. We put the leeks in the empty spot next the garlic where the scallions never grew. Hopefully the leeks will fair better. The beets we put near the bare spots in the lettuce row. It seems that only patches of the seeds we planted came up. The ones that did are strong. We’ve already harvested from them.

It turned out that we have eight tomato plants. We used five of the cages on the tomatoes. We staked the remaining three and tied them with old panty hose as not to damage the plants. The last cage we used for our sweet peas. The plant seemed to slip through everything else we tried to hang it on. It seems that one of our bush bean plants is actually a pole been disguised itself. We used the small trellis that the sweet peas refused to climb to instead support the masquerading pole beans. It was a much happier fit for both plants.






sweet peas