Tomatoes Flowering and the Guard Dog

My plants have been doing well. Water every day, and some good rain has helped.

Here's potter 1:



Here's potter 2:



Here they are together on the balcony:



I believe the tomatoes are starting to flower:



I've got a guard dog (who just had a bath) to protect the garden from any small mammal/rodent raiders. She's vigilant.

Updates on Planting

Here's a picture of the plants on May 17. This would be 3 weeks after planting.

This is the planter closest to the door, planter 1:



This is the planter farthest from the door, planter 2:



Planter 2 has the most direct sunlight. It also has less tomatoes, since I decided to perform an experiment and "transplant" a single tomato by pulling it out by its root and planting it (it did fine).

Seedlings and Planting

Note: This is a long over-due post that spans April 11 - April 25. I'm back-dating it to make the blog easier to click through.

We decided not to plant on the lot outside our fenced in area.

The city came by and mowed over the entire area, and had I planted anything there, it would have been mowed down to nothing. I did however, plant outside on my balcony, and within our fence. Here's how I did it.

Once I decided to use the two big planters on my balcony, I had to plan accordingly to tone down the scope of the garden. I saw these little "urban planters" at Home Depot, and while I think they take the fun out of everything, were pretty clever ideas. However, they already had everything planted, and even some tomatoes already on the vine. I decided to emulate the idea.

I first needed to obtain some seeds and soil for my planters. Since this is a geeky, technology influenced garden, I made sure to get some pretty geeky seeds. This means that I bought all Hybrids and high yielding seeds. I almost decided to go organic, but I feel like once you decide to do "organic" you've got to keep going, if you ever use anything non-organic (like non-organic water (hah!)), you're no-longer organic.

Here's what I bought:
* Tomato Giant Hybrid
* Pepper
* Sweet Basil
* Oregeno
* ...

I then bought a seedling starter kit. It's nothing more than some mushroom compost pellets that are compacted down and dehydrated.



Once you fill them up with water they expand -- kind of like a straw wrapper compacted, using that trick you learned as a kid to make it grow like a worm.



I planted rows of each, and I am quite sure that I planted too many seeds in each one. The directions stated for each to plant one or two seeds, but I simply dumped a good quantity of each in each seedling starter. I planted each one successively deeper than the next, and had I recorded the "inches" that I planted, I probably could figured out the optimum planting depth for each one. Note to self: you should probably get a little notebook and record these kinds of details for the next time (and for the blog)!

The seedlings were planted on April 11, 2009.

A few days later, the seedlings were sprouting. The Peppers took the longest to sprout. The Basil shot up, even growing out of the side and on the bottom of the seedling starter!




After about two weeks, I decided to transplant my seedlings to the pots. This was on April 25, 2009.



As far as soil goes, the geekiest option available to me was to use a specialized Miracle-Gro Potting mix, made specifically for flowers, and vegetables. It's a mix of mushroom compost, composted soil, bark, and lots of Miracle-Gro Fertilizer.



The 2 planters are quite deep, so the first task was to fill up most of them with rocks. Luckily at my building, we have a rock garden, and plenty of left-over rocks that are perfect for this. It took several trips with a bucket down to fill them up. I then filled it up with soil.



I then removed the "netting" from each and planted them throughout.



There wasn't any rhyme or reason to my planting. I did plant the tomatoes on the right, center, and left of the pots, and then put everything else spaced around. If I had to do it again, I might re-arrange, based on the way each grows.

Plan of Attack for clearing the space

The wifey and I went out and cleared some of the bigger brush using a machete. It certainly wasn't the most useful device. We could have used a tractor, for sure.

I also bought a big black tarp and am going to spread it out over the space to block out the sun and hopefully start composting the current plants there so it'll be ready in a few months for planting.

I was out talking to my neighbor, and telling him about my plans, and he might help out. I'm sending him the link to this blog. It would be nice to have a few (actual) gardeners out there -- and would make it an actual community garden, too!

In typical fashion, I started cooking up another scheme. It happened this weekend, when I was up on the roof of our building installing an HDTV antenna (works fabulous BTW, all local HD channels, crystal clear). I saw that there are a lot of AC/Heating units, all on the roof, mounted on pieces of wood like this (picture grabbed from the googles):



I know this unit isn't installed correctly, though it gives you the general idea of where I'm going. I'm thinking that if installed correctly, mounted above the roof, with proper supports, and good drainage -- that a nice rooftop garden would be awesome. It'd have to be all in pots, or in smaller square areas of transplanted dirt, but the direct sunlight makes it a phenomenal location. And the access is easy....

Interestingly enough, the pic was stolen from this thread on bad HVAC installs, not to code -- which makes me curious what it takes to put something on a shared condo roof. If there's, for instance, coding in place for "something" like an AC unit, only it has plants in it. ;-)

I'm going to have to research this a little more.

Clearing out the Brush

I'm starting the process of clearing out all the brush and weeds in my garden plot. I bought some heavy duty plastic sheeting (essentially just black tarp) and some little garden stakes to cover the area and kill all the weeds until planting season.

I was hoping I could just simply tarp the area and call it a day, but there are too many little bushes and weeds. So, I've borrowed a neighbor's machete and I'm going to go at it again tomorrow.

If I were smart, I'd get a scythe and go to town on that brush.

What was dubya's enthrallment with all the brush clearing? Hmmm, he'll be out of a job soon, maybe I could get him to come do it for me.

Garden Plan Notes

I've found some excellent resources on the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at UGA, including this guide I've linked in the links section of this blog: Vegetable Garden Guide and this leaflet: Home Vegetable Garden.

Both are semi-specific to Georgia growing, and easy to read.

So, here's my first crack at the list of the things I'd like to grow:

Beans, bush
Carrots
Collards
Cucumber
Lettuce
Okra
Potatoes, Irish
Radish
Spinach
Squash
Tomato
Turnip

I don't think I want to grow any corn, as it's too tall for my guerrilla garden.

A lot of these plants have planting times starting Jan 15 for the Spring Planting. I better get cracking trying to determine how much and where these plants will all fit!

Picking the Right Spot

Here are couple of different spots I've found, and the upsides/downsides to each:

Here's my building on Google Maps (annotated):

On Patio
+ easy access
- need to use pots for everything, can't compost (will smell bad, I think)
- no direct sunlight - faces West and is covered
- small, not a lot of space

Outside Below Patio
+ semi-easy access (have to go around building to access, but can water from balcony)
- can plant easy, can also compost easy (just toss off the balcony into my compost pile?)
- better sunlight, but still not direct, might not be enough
- medium sized

On Abandoned Lot
- not easy to access (have go all the way around building and up hill)
+ direct sunlight
+ big, can plant lots
+ wild, untamed land, not owned by me or my building!

I'm leaning toward the abandoned lot, and I won't lie -- it seems more guerilla-garden like -- to use this lot for a useful purpose. Our building has had several complaints about the kudzu and weeds that grow there. That's good and bad news for me -- it means plants can grow there, but it also means that lots of plants already grow there.