A garden of greens for St. Patrick's Day
A very happy St. Patty's Day to you! I hope you have a very lucky, very green day, and that you have a beer for me if you can find it within the goodness of your heart.
On to today's topic: my new vegetable garden! I've never had a vegetable garden before; in fact, before my current health and fitness kick, I've rarely had a vegetable. Really, it has historically seemed to me that all the oil and junk you have to add to vegetables to make them actually palatable negated any health benefits of them, so I haven't seen the need to bother. (I still do feel that way about chicken. I can't abide the slaughter of millions of those poor, idiot birds, to have to deep fry them to make them worth eating. A blander meat I've never tasted.) But since I began my health and fitness kick last month I've been making great efforts to cook more healthy foods, and it turns out there are a few things that grow in the ground that I don't mind ingesting. Fantastic!
(I'm going to start posting recipes and my cooking results here soon, too, but that's for another day.)
So as the weather has been warming here in suburban Chicago I've been thinking about my future few months working in the soil on my property, and I got this idea in my head that I could convert one of my garden beds to a vegetable patch. I hope to grow some often-used items, and either use or freeze my entire yield. I have yet to prepare the garden (it's 37F today ... not even all the snow has melted yet and we may still get more) but the area is about 15' x 5'. I may go wider and end up with closer to 20' to work with. This won't be a colossal garden, but it will be more than enough for me to manage. I tend to get really excited about an idea and then burn out on it as it is executed, and I don't want to bite off more than I can chew.
My current list of vegetables of interest is as follows: arugula, strawberries, cantaloupe, eggplant, yellow onions, green onions, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, cubanelle peppers, spinach, tomatoes, parsley. This is sure to change over time, depending on what I find.
Even though today the weather permitted me to do very little in the yard (I dragged out my compost tumbler, picked up some branches, and started pulling up some garden lights that I'm going to replace this year), I was able to take a huge step in preparation for the new garden:
I bought seeds and seed starter trays! Today I started eight veggie varieties in my dining room. I started with this:
Which after adding water, became this:
Then I added some of these:
And then I had this:
And now I have this:
With luck, the several hundred seeds I planted today will sprout soon, and most of those seed trays will live in my dining room for the next 6-8 weeks. After it's time to remove the lids, I need to devise a way to keep my cats from eating the seedlings.
The tomato seeds are my favorite of the bunch. They look like little white candies:
There are a couple more varieties of things that I also want to start indoors, so I need to find the seeds ASAP. (A lavender variety of eggplant and some golden cherry tomatoes, at least.)
Mmmmm ... now I have a craving for tomatoes. But I have to wait so, so long to harvest my own.
On to today's topic: my new vegetable garden! I've never had a vegetable garden before; in fact, before my current health and fitness kick, I've rarely had a vegetable. Really, it has historically seemed to me that all the oil and junk you have to add to vegetables to make them actually palatable negated any health benefits of them, so I haven't seen the need to bother. (I still do feel that way about chicken. I can't abide the slaughter of millions of those poor, idiot birds, to have to deep fry them to make them worth eating. A blander meat I've never tasted.) But since I began my health and fitness kick last month I've been making great efforts to cook more healthy foods, and it turns out there are a few things that grow in the ground that I don't mind ingesting. Fantastic!
(I'm going to start posting recipes and my cooking results here soon, too, but that's for another day.)
So as the weather has been warming here in suburban Chicago I've been thinking about my future few months working in the soil on my property, and I got this idea in my head that I could convert one of my garden beds to a vegetable patch. I hope to grow some often-used items, and either use or freeze my entire yield. I have yet to prepare the garden (it's 37F today ... not even all the snow has melted yet and we may still get more) but the area is about 15' x 5'. I may go wider and end up with closer to 20' to work with. This won't be a colossal garden, but it will be more than enough for me to manage. I tend to get really excited about an idea and then burn out on it as it is executed, and I don't want to bite off more than I can chew.
My current list of vegetables of interest is as follows: arugula, strawberries, cantaloupe, eggplant, yellow onions, green onions, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, cubanelle peppers, spinach, tomatoes, parsley. This is sure to change over time, depending on what I find.
Even though today the weather permitted me to do very little in the yard (I dragged out my compost tumbler, picked up some branches, and started pulling up some garden lights that I'm going to replace this year), I was able to take a huge step in preparation for the new garden:
I bought seeds and seed starter trays! Today I started eight veggie varieties in my dining room. I started with this:
Which after adding water, became this:
Then I added some of these:
And then I had this:
And now I have this:
With luck, the several hundred seeds I planted today will sprout soon, and most of those seed trays will live in my dining room for the next 6-8 weeks. After it's time to remove the lids, I need to devise a way to keep my cats from eating the seedlings.
The tomato seeds are my favorite of the bunch. They look like little white candies:
There are a couple more varieties of things that I also want to start indoors, so I need to find the seeds ASAP. (A lavender variety of eggplant and some golden cherry tomatoes, at least.)
Mmmmm ... now I have a craving for tomatoes. But I have to wait so, so long to harvest my own.
Labels: vegetable garden
posted by Jen S. at
9:16 AM
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