The garden: May 2006 Archives
Three weeks after starting, the garden is done and in and nothing has died yet though the cinnamon and oriental basil are struggling. Nothing is really growing yet but I can tell things have rooted and are finding their new home with mondo compost suitable.
That being said, everything but the impatients are in. The deck is litered with pots and while it doesn't look like much now, give it a month and it'll be a jungle. I also moved some extra tomato plants into containers for the deck in my first attempt to do some container gardening. I threw in some basil and cilantro to the pots for a full-out italian mix. I have no idea how I'm going to stake those tomatoes but I've got about two weeks to figure it out.
Things are thriving. Green and moist and verdant and things I'd feared dead are pushing up and starting to live again. I noted in my gardening journal but it's worth repeating: nature is amazing. I'm having a ball.
Ironically, or not so much, the english to french translation of "the beautiful garden" is le beau jardin. Since Beau is my name, how could I pass up that kind of a translation? And the garden, while many might argue isn't quite beautiful yet, is beautiful to me.
I've been waiting almost three years to have a place where I could dig around in the dirt. Lack of a fence then two years of graduate school put me off for a bit, but I'm roaring back to my green-thumb life and my amateur gardener hat is back in place.
What's particular about my garden is that I'm following the Square-foot gardening method, made famous through this book which was recommended to me be a great friend of Jeff's. She encouraged and inspired me to make my own soil, raise the beds, and really take the book to heart. I built the raised beds last fall and had them half filled with a compost/top soil/peat moss mixture. Last week, I had a fresh load of compost delivered and finished them off yesterday. Having a bug up my ass today, I hauled Jeff down to the farm and garden center just to look. A butt load of cheddar later, I have just under half the garden in, focusing on tomatoes and herbs with a few plots of lettus today. I think I'm about four weeks too late on the lettus as it likes the cooler weather but I thought I'd try to sneak in a batch and see what happens. I think I should have the rest of the garden out next weekend and then concentrate on the flowers for the porch and deck.
