Up, Up, and Away!

Tonight, sitting on the floor in the upstairs hallway, across from our daughters bedroom (working on getting her to sleep), remembering that so much has happened with regards to the garden since my last post. It's kind of blowing my mind here.

The first Zucchini of the season. Yum!

Let's see...it was about Tuesday of last week, I finally decided it was time to bust out my new soil nutrient testing kit, I purchased during my

Budding Bell Peppers

outing to the local nursery with our daughter (Ah, what a great day that was!). Following the directions, I collected 1 part soil (from the center of our garden), and in a glass mason jar added 5 parts water, then shook the ever-love'n-bajeezus out of it. 24-hours later - ding - the liquid was clear enough to extract and test. The test results indicated the soil had a pH of about 6.5, and contained adequate amounts of phosphorous and potassium. Nitrogen levels, however were depleted. Luckily, I had picked up a box of organic fertilizer,

Roma Tomatoes Waiting to Turn

sprinkled that around the garden, and watered it into the soil. All I had to do left was wait, and oh yeah, continue day-dreaming about my plans for my fall/winter garden.

New Real-Estate

My day-dreaming about a fall/winter garden led me to visit a couple of seed supply company websites. I finally ended up at Burpee Seed and Plan Company, and ordered sugar peas, organics sugar pumpkins, Long Island heirloom brussels sprouts, multicolored cauliflower mix, organic goldetti spaghetti squash, and yellow dutch shallots.  Adding to my excitement of growing a fall/winter garden, I've been offered a new area to expand the garden into. This new real estate will at least double the current size of our garden. The only thing holding us up is the necessity of getting paid. So come next month, we will plan a trip to the nursery. COME ON AUGUST!

Finally, over the past week, I added a trellis to the garden in an attempt to grow our cucumber plants vertically. I thought about doing this last year, but never got around to it. The reality of it was that we had plenty of space to just let our cucumber plants grown along the ground. This years garden is thriving in a much small area, which I think it makes perfect sense to trying an grow any many of our plants vertically as possible. I'm an already thinking of employing the same design in the fall garden for the peas.