2012 Garden Log
There is some garlic left from last year. I will leave that and harvest next August or September.
Plan
- 40 Buckets on the roof
- 4 4x4 beds on the ground
I need to get tomato cages for all the tomato plants.
A big problem I had with the onions last year is that they were overpowered by weeds. Apparently this is a common problem with onions, I want to try countering it by inter cropping with the soybeans. Hopefully this will also keep more of the bugs away from the soybeans.
Research inter-cropping. Try planting basil and oregano in with the tomatoes.
Notes
Started tomatoes and celery indoor. They started slow because I didn't keep them wet enough. Of the 60ish tomato seeds I planted only about 30 sprouted. I picked up a few more with the paper towel/plastic bag method, but I need more work on this next year. I lost a few celery sprouts because I wasn't keeping the soil moist enough, missed one day of watering and they couldn't take it. After I started using a lot more water, a few of the tomato seeds sprouted (weeks after being planted). Lesson - use more water than you think you need.
Got the new garden beds set up on 5/5 and planted the potatoes. 5/7 moved celery outside, planted half the carrots (direct sow). 5/11 Planted the rest of the carrots and planted the rutabaga both were direct sow.
6/19 - I lost a lot (17) of tomato plants to slugs and caterpillars (cutworms), as well as a few rutabaga. It seems that the best way to deal with this problem is simply to go out at night and pick them off the bushes. While they did a lot of damage, there didn't seem to be that many of them, less than 100 and I was able to get most of them over the course of a few nights. In the future I will need to do this a few times early in the season and particularly at the first sign of damage. To replace some of the plants I lost, I bought some bell pepper plants from the store. We will see how they do.
Plants
- Roma Tomatoes 40 on roof
- Soybeans 16 on ground (64)
- Carrots 16 on ground (144)
- Potatoes have their own container
- Celery 8 on ground (32)
- Rutabaga 8 on ground
- Basil 8 on ground
- Oregano 8 on ground