Epic Gardening Fail
Yesterday while getting a new dishwasher installed (yay! Thank goodness we have amazing landlords) I wanted to show off my growing garden. My landlord is a bit of a gardener himself and I knew he'd appreciate seeing how well things were doing. Sadly, he told me more or less what I knew myself: everything is crazy overcrowded. We'd replaced the dead seeds with seedlings in more or less the same spaces/spacing. So while we followed the instructions on planting the seeds correctly it's implied that once your seeds take off to seedlings you thin out and transplant to other places. Well that memo was basically lost on me. I had seen that the plants were growing rather large and I could only imagine how big they'd eventually get. So that afternoon while Zoë's Dad slept (and then so did Zoë) I took it upon myself to "fix" our rows or what I thought was "thinning them out". There's a space perpendicular from the veggie garden/rows that I'd observed in full sun one morning. At the time I'd thought to myself "that's where we could put tomato plants in the ground next year if we wanted to try that." Well I decided it'd be a great area to transplant the extra plants. So I tore out weeds/grass, chopped the roots of the poisonous looking weed growing against the fence where the garden wold be, softened the dirt, enriched the soil with compost (that I had to manhandle to get out of the composter), dig holes in the new area, dig up the plants from their previous homes, and transplant them to their new spaces. Two hours later, I was sweaty and exhausted, but my new garden area was almost done. I worked so hard on this space/project. I don't know the last time I sweat so much or so hard. (And I didn't complain! I just took a mini break, got some water, and braced myself for more work.) It was a sight to be seen: old sports shorts, a tank top, sports bra, AND my new rain boots. I'll tell you what, I didn't worry at all about bugs getting on my feet! Now dirt everywhere else ... that I wasn't able to control or stop.
When Zoë's Dad woke up I proudly showed off the new area (that he'd previously said wasn't needed and didn't want to create). It was about 2 and the fence shaded the ENTIRE area. That's right, my new veggie garden was in complete shade at 2pm and there was nothing I could do about it! I realized instantaneously that all of that work was for nothing. Apparently that space gets sun in the morning and shade (from the fence) in the afternoon. I can't test this theory just yet because I can't even see the sun today. *sigh*
Tomato Updates
While outside taking photos of my epic fail of a secondary veggie garden I figured I'd take photos to have updates for the rest of the garden. Every day (unless the forecast includes rain) I water the plants and I've started fertilizing them with organic fertilizer. Okay I've fertilized the tomatoes twice and the veggies once, but I plan on continuing to fertilize them once or twice a month, as the package instructs). Well the Ciudad Victoria currant tomatoes are growing like gangbusters!
