How Does Your Garden Grow?

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The snow is finally almost gone. The ground is starting the thaw. All this has me thinking one thing. Garden!

We have a small to medium sized vegetable garden. We grow green beans, peas, tomatoes, one pepper plant, a few beets for Matt, and we try cucumbers. Last year our cucumbers never made it. We have a different plan for them this year so hopefully they will do well.

I also have a flower bed behind the house. Last year my daisies didn’t come up and my phlox all died. The little flower bed by the deck had zinnas that were beautiful! The flower bed behind the house will be getting torn up in a couple weeks to get leveled back out and get new edging. We had a washing machine leaking issue last spring which involved tearing up the lawn. My flower bed never got leveled back out. Look how sad it looks? Once it is fixed I will be doing daisies again as well as rosemary, mint, and some perennials other than the daisies.

But I’m getting sidetracked. Back the to vegetable garden. I usually try to start my seeds inside but fail. Especially tomatoes. I don’t really have a good, safe place inside away from a curious two year old and mischievous cat to put the seed starting stuff while still having sun. Tomatoes don’t seem to like to be started by seed so I always end up buying plants. We do 6-8 tomato plants at $4 a plant….that’s $24-32. One of the main reasons we garden is to save money. That doesn’t seem like saving money to me. So this year I am trying something new.

I read online how you can make little mini-greenhouses out of milk jugs (tutorial can be found here). I collected six milk jugs, washed them very well, then got to work. I planted them towards the end of March. I take them outside on sunny days as soon as it hits 40 degrees then I bring them in after dinner as their inside home is on my kitchen table.

Here you can see them from a couple weeks ago.

So far these are working great. I have to water them every few days but other than that, very little care. The milk jugs make perfect greenhouses to help the tomatoes grow. I hope that the containers allow enough space for the plants to get big before they need to be planted. Tomatoes tend to transplant better when they are a little bit bigger than small seedlings.

The garden tends to get planted Memorial Day weekend of the first week of June. That seems to be when everything warms up enough to support a garden. Check back after that to see how my tomatoes are doing.