I started a vegetable garden. The previous owners of the house did a pretty nice job landscaping, but that didn't stop me from tearing it up to make room for cucumber trellises tomato cages.
I made some rookie mistakes. Don't do any of these:
1. Spacing the seeds too close together and refusing to thin them out (i.e. murder the weak seedlings by cutting them off at ground level). As a side note, in most climates 100% of the seeds don't germinate, so it makes sense to plant too many. Houston isn't one of these climates.
2. Planting vegetables that need full sun (eggplant, tomatoes, squash) in the shade.
3. Using the existing soil in garden beds instead of replacing it with potting soil or amending it with compost, perlite, and sand.
I fixed most of my mistakes by relocating the plants to a freshly dug bed at side of the house filled with potting soil and using giant Smart Pot containers for the rest. Next year we'll build proper raised beds. For now the makeshift beds are lined with pink bricks. At least I'm not using my old box springs as a trellis. Though that is something I kind of wanted to do. What? It looks charmingly rustic.
box springs as a cucumber trellis (not mine) |
Hunter convinced me to use the Home Depot gift certificates his sister & Angel gave us (thank you!), and the previous owners of the house left us these trellis:
pretty trellises I found on the side of our house |
The current roster is:
Tomatoes (Sweet 100, Yellow Pear, Juliet Hybrid, Celebrity, Rutgers, Husky Cherry Red, Big Boy)
Butternut squash
Spaghetti squash
Crookneck squash
Small Sugar pumpkin (good for baking)
Jakc o' lantern pumpkin
Japanese Ichiban eggplant (long fruit with thin skin and a mild flavor)
White eggplant
Pickling cucumbers (a vining variety and a bush variety)
Hot banana peppers
Lunchbox peppers (mini Bell peppers in bright colors, my new favorite snack)
King of the North pepper (obviously for the Game of Thrones reference)
Herbs: basil, mint, oregano, thyme, rosemary, sage
I have a few cucumbers ripening and a couple of baby squash. I don't have many bees, so I've been pollinating with a paintbrush to ensure fruit develops. Oh and I spray the leaves with milk every day. Yeah, milk. I had some problems with powdery mildew, which is a white-gray fungus that dots plants' leaves. You can't really get rid of it, but you can prevent it from spreading by spraying milk. I used 2% at first and oh god the smell when the sun beat down. Do not use 2%. Use skim milk mixed with water (30% and 70% of each respectively). You can use it to prevent viruses and fungus on all kinds of plants, including ornamentals.
None of the tomatoes are doing well. Most of their blossoms fall off before forming fruit despite their conditions being near perfect: full sun, 15-gallon Smart Pots to prevent the roots from getting root-bound, Lady Bug Natural Brand soil, deep watering once per week unless it rains or the soil feels moist, 3" mulch, fertilizing on schedule with a diluted all-natural fish emulsion fertilizer that reeks worse than the milk, etc. They're just jerk plants. It could be the high temperatures. Maybe they'll produce in September or something. I'm tired of trying to please them. And I'm really tired of other gardeners telling me everything I could be doing wrong. I know they're trying to help. But don't you think I've already googled nitrogen deficiency and tested the soil? Because I have. I almost got $100 shade cloths for them to put up from the hours of 5 - 7 p.m. But I've never even bought myself $100 shades, so I refrained. I did, however, once have a pair of RayBans that someone left in La Grange professionally fitted to my face. Sorry if those were yours.