LE found an old cart in her shed, and bought everything we needed to start our garden in the greenhouse. We spent a delightful afternoon, scooping soil, tenderly placing seeds, and labeling.
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| LE's perfect little garden cart. |
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| LE placing the labels and getting ready to mist the soil. |
LE had lots of things she wanted to start, but I only had one thing in mind: San Marzano tomatoes. Jay uses San Marzanos when he makes his marinara and I wanted to grow some. Over the summer of 2023, while we were building Whimsy, I had planted four of them, but they struggled and I got less than a quart bag of 'maters for the freezer. I was determined to do better in '24.
I did not do better.
Turns out, while I intended Whimsy to be a greenhouse, and she had lots of windows and happiness, she still wasn't warm enough over night to help our seeds germinate.
A day or two after we planted the seeds, LE ended up having to take them into her house and put them in a sunny window.
I decided right then and there that we needed a potting shed!
Even LE's life-saving measures of taking the trays of seed into the house weren't enough to salvage most of what we planted.
Nebalee wanted a San Marzano, so I planted one and gave it to her. It didn't have time to fail in Whimsy, and it ended up being an amazing plant for her - she got tons of tomatoes from it.
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| Nebalee's San Marzanos produced and produced! |
Ours? Never germinated.
We ended up having to buy plants - a huge failure in my eyes. I was determined to grow from seed. I mean, it's a necessary skill for the zombie apocalypse, right? How am I going to feed myself and have food to barter with if I have to buy seedlings from a store?
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| I found someone nearby who had managed to start some from seed. |
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| They loved living in Whimsy for a bit |
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| I got a few 'maters until Blossom End Rot got them. I guess I loved these guys a little too much, too. |
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| Welcome to LE's Enchanted Tomato Jungle! Her tomato seedlings grew like wildfire! |
Tomatoes weren't the only thing I wanted to grow from seed. I had some amazing corn and popcorn I wanted to grow, but that was a direct sow into the ground, and I waited until after Mother's Day to plant those.
I'd also decided that I wanted to grow sunflowers to pretty up our propane tank. There had been irises there, but they hadn't come up in the last couple of years, so I went ahead with the sunflowers.
I did okay with the direct sowing. I got a few ears of corn from the sweet corn I'd planted, and the sunflowers came up.
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| You can see the holes in the leaves from the plague of locusts (okay, they were grasshoppers, but same thing). |
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| Why grow yellow sweet corn when you can grow Blue Jade sweet corn? |
I even managed to keep the concord grapes alive, and planted some kiwi berries that managed to live through the summer. Only time will tell if the kiwi berries wintered well.
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| The Gremlin is the cutest garden helper |
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| Kiwi berries |
I wasn't a complete gardening failure.
Maybe my black thumb is trending toward brown.
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