A Green-er Thumb

I've never had a lot of success when it comes to gardening.  I love pretty gardens and like the way they look but never have been able to grow plants that live longer than a few weeks.  We tried a veggie garden a few years ago and did OK but I would be lying if I said I provided the proper attention to it and we got one tiny squash and one tiny green bean. Ultimately those too died off.

If you're a pro gardner and you want to start some seeds so you can have veggies and/or fruit for by summer you know to plant "after the last frost", which in our case would have been February-ish.  So true to amateur form I started in mid April.

Deciding not to actively kill my plants this year I started studying "gardening 101 stuff" regularly and daily, several times a day work on my plants.  I now know why its called a nursery!

I started with several seedlings have only a few survivors.  Just my luck I decided to start to learn to garden properly the year we have a severe drought and months of 100+ degree temps.  Don't get me wrong, I love a challenge, but really?!

My dreams of bountiful fruit and veggie harvest are, well, gone but I am hopeful that I might be getting A tomato this month and even if I don't, if my plants live I will call it a small success!  At this point I'll take what I can get!

I've started a few winter harvest plants in hopes that those will go better.

Since this is something I've spent some serious time on this summer,  I thought I'd share a few things I've learned over the past few months...more like a few FYI's!

To anyone, well, not me I'm sure it is all a big "duh!" but for giggles here ya go...

1. Store bought potting soil usually has small time release capsules called osmocote.  If you use Miracle Grow potting soil, it will most likely be in there.  Osmocote in the soil looks like small round yellowish balls.  I thought (until I finally did a search for it) that these were tiny egg sacks of some pesky bug.  You can "crack" them open and they will have a clear or sometimes milky liquid in them.  Long story short, if you are working with garden soil and come across these tiny round egg looking balls.  Don't fret, it is a fertilizer.  There is no need to dig them out and crush them to ensure that the bugs inside die like someone I know.


2.  A really good fertilizer is Miracle Grow Tomato and Garden Veggie fertilizer.  It is inexpensive and lasts a while for small gardens.  Also good fertilizers are egg shells (calcium bicarbonate), coffee (rich in nitrogen), banana peels (potassium), rabbit poo (a little bit of everything), and fish emulsion/seaweed blends.  Egg shells, coffee, and banana peels are obviously easy to come by.  Rabbit poo can be too if you know someone who has a rabbit or has wild rabbits that like to poo on all of the cut tree stumps around their new country home.  Stump fresh rabbit poo will be my option!  For fish emulsion/seaweed blends I've read that Neptune's Harvest is as good as gold to plants.  I actually have some in route my house right now so if I have some one-pounder's in a few weeks, I'll let ya know!

3.  Pests are a just that.  Pests!  For melons and squash plants beware of spider mites and mildew (usually noted as powdery mildew).  For tomatoes (and I'm seeing on several plants too) beware of leafminers.  Insecticide and fungicide are supposed to be easy solutions for these problems but by far my biggest problem is the leafminers.  It took me a while to figure out what they even were.  They leave these long winding white lines on the leaves, much like slug lines, but there is obvious deterioration of the leaf anywhere near those lines.  I did searches on common pests, "white lines on plants", everything I could think of the figure out what was causing those lines.  Finally I found it.  Insecticide is supposed to work but so far I can't get rid of them.  They are even attacking my baby butternut squash and baby heirloom tomato plants.  I will be continuing my search on a solution but for now I just keep hosing down my plants with spray.  I am trying to grow things "organic" so I am using insecticidal soap.  It might be that it is not strong enough.  Darn bugs!

If I can manage not to kill (or at least keep alive) the plants I have, I'll transition to updating the flower beds in the front of the house.  They need a lot of work!

Red Currant Tomato Blossom

Baby Heirloom Tomatoes.  I planted eight different kinds.  You can see where the leafminers have been chowing down on the leaves.

Leafminer lines.

Baby Butternut Squash.  Eight planted, but I'll be happy if one survives!