The Best-Laid Plans

As you may know, I have plans for this garden. 

BIG plans.

432 square feet of raised beds and pots utilized.  465 pounds of produce... produced.  7 varieties of tomatoes, 4 types of squash, 18 herbs and greens.

Exotic and fun varieties like dragon's egg cucumbers, black Spanish radishes, mammoth sunflowers, Lakota squash.  And, get this - a zucchini plant that actually gives me zucchini!

This garden is gonna be awesome!!

Plans A, B, and C went really well.  I still have a photo of plan C's success.

The aftermath.  :(

This is plan D. 

These might do a bit better in the garden.

I found some gems at the local nursery and OSH, including:

• Yellow pear tomato (last year this one died... not this year!)
• Lemon boy tomato (last year's bland yet ridiculously abundant producer)
• Sunsugar tomato (a cherry, last year's delicious daily producer)
• Cheroke purple tomato
• Green zebra tomato (one that I tried to grow from seed)
• Arkansas traveler tomato (I hear this one does great in the Bay Area)
• Sweet 100 tomato (a red cherry)
• Roma tomato (maybe a little boring, but hey)
• Peppermint (I have a really healthy chocolate mint going on, but sometimes you just need a regular mint)
• Lemon cucumber (also tried to grow from seed)
• Dark green zucchini
• Cozozelle squash 
• Organic veggie/tomato fertilizer, organic compost
• Ladybugs ('cause damn, we have aphids up the wazoo already)

At least there'll be something out there to harvest, and some variety.  Mostly this year with tomatoes I wanted a variety of colors, and it looks like I've found some:  purple, red, pink, green, yellow, orange.  A cucumber and 2 types of squash should help get me started too. 


Plan E is in progress.

I'll still be sprouting more seed, and planting things directly in the soil.  I'd love to have the variety of tomatoes and plants for which I bought seed... still gonna try!  If they still don't work, I'll take an early cutting off of the existing tomato plants to get enough seedlings for my gardeny needs.

It is kind of funny that I used to keep plants and organisms alive, healthy, and reproducing for a living, and I was darn good at it.   But take me away from the science of perfectly controlled lighting and temperature and specific nutrient mixes and sterile glassware, and you'd think I'd intentionally tortured and murdered my fledgeling garden.  No wonder people prayed to the gods for their crops to survive... nature is a tricky thing.  Maybe the missing ingredient to my garden is goat blood.

Anyway, we've had 3 days of temps over 80 so it feels like summer already, and last night was the last risk of frost, so I'm finishing the soil prep today and potting up the radish and mustard that I want to keep for seed.  Maybe I'll have time to put some plants in.  And then, after dusk, it's time to release the ladybugs.