Spring Broccoli and Radish Harvesting

Here it is!  Its not beautiful yet, but its going to be!  

I harvested broccoli and radishes from the Spring plot today.  I love these little red globes of heat and spice!

This broccoli is destined for a yummy Spring pasta salad! 

I also started on my Summer plots.  I am so excited!  Summer veggies are my favorite to grow and to eat! 

A couple weeks ago I started to really think hard about how smart it would be to build my raised beds with wood.  I am not sure how long I will be living in this house.  I am not sure how easy it is to move wood beds.  Plus, it would really suck to only use the beds for one year then move and have to build them all over again.  After realizing those beautiful raised wooden beds were not practical I had to come up with something else.  Tom told me that his Mom used to be friends with a guy who had prize winning tomatoes which he grew in giant bags of garden dirt from the store.  A quick search online and I found out that it works!

Its perfect!  A cheap, easy way to have raised beds without the expense of wood and lots and lots of dirt.  I found these 3 cubic foot bags of garden soil at OSH, made by Kellogg.  You cut out a square on the top and loosen up the dirt.  You will have to take some of it out to really loosen it up because it is jam packed in there.  I read online that you should only plant one tomato plant per bag, but I don't have that much space so I planted two.  I might get less yield, I might not.  It will probably be just fine.  There is a lot of space in these bags and I really don't think that they need all of it.  I also used another 2 cubic ft flat bag that I had laying around for the peppers and some herbs.  They do not need too much space plus I plan on re-potting all of the plants in this bag into pots for the winter.  I hear peppers can be a perennial if you pot them and bring them inside for the winter so I am going to try this year.  

There is also a tomato planted in the cardboard box next to the purple bag.  I needed one more planting spot and that was all I had.  I have read that a strong cardboard box makes a great single season bed.  Its another experiment for this year. 

So here is what I have planted so far for summer this year.  I added links to different places to see what they look like. 

Tomatoes

-Ace Tomato

-Omar's Lebanese

-Pineapple Heirloom

-Cherokee Purple Heirloom

-Lemon Boy

-Sun Sugar Red

-Sweet 100

Peppers

-Relleno Chilis

-Mucho Nacho Jalapeno

I still plan on planting beans, watermelon, squash and pumpkins in early April.  I cant wait!

This post is long enough!  I hope I have inspired you to start something growing in your own backyard. 

Comments

[Glenda]

Great idea for the tomatoes!!

We have tomatoes, jalepenos, yellow squash, swiss chard, lettuce mix, green beans, new potatoes, okra, carrots, and an assortment of herbs growing in our Spring garden this year. I can't wait til everything gets to the "ready to pick" point.