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This weekend I got about half of my Spring/Summer garden planted. I still have some work to do, but I thought I would share a progress report.

To start, because of the unprecedented winter storm Texas had a few weeks ago my seedlings were pretty pathetic, stunted and/or leggy. The grow lights I had ordered off eBay.com finally arrived and I am hoping they get big enough for a late Summer/Autumn garden.

In the meantime, I bought properly sized starter plants to get the garden going. This weekend I got tomato plants in the freshly tilled up ground, and I planted some onions between the onion cages.  Based on my research onions are a good companion to be planted with tomatoes. After those were all in, I added a line of tall flowers (Sunflowers and Marigolds) in an alternating pattern between the fence and the tomato cages. The idea behind this was to attract more pollinators (bees, butterflies, etc.) to the garden. The sunflowers will hopefully get big enough I can harvest the seeds – if not enough to eat hopefully enough to fill the bird feeder – and marigolds are reportedly excellent mosquito repelling flowers.

On to the containers:

I have a pallet table full of carrots in various containers. Those white cubes are recycled coolers that come with occasional specialty meat orders (before dartagnan.com switched to the kind of insulation that dissolves in water); if you have these laying around, they make excellent planters * just make sure to poke some drainage holes in the bottom. *

The other veggies I got planted this weekend include: broccoli, cabbage, celery, and beets.

I also planted new sweet basil plants, along with clipping I cut from my plant last year and rooted in water indoors over the winter, sage, Greek oregano, Italian oregano, thyme, chamomile, and lavender. All those get to keep my new blackberry bushes (Navajo and Ouachita) and the old one (which is on life support – like my orange trees) company.

My largest experiment this spring/summer is my potato tower. Last year I tried growing potatoes in these green felt bag things I got from Walmart. The biggest spud from that harvest was about the size of my thumbs together. After getting lost looking at gardening tips and ideas on Pinterest I came across the idea of growing potatoes in a tower. I had the wooden dowels but I had to buy the fencing wire, straw (NOT hay) and dirt. Luckily I had a bunch of potatoes sprouting in the back of the pantry – I cut them up so that each sprout had about a golf ball sized chunk of potato still attached. I marked out the dimensions I wanted (3’ diameter) and drove the stakes in at four points. Then I cut the fencing (which is 4’ high) to a length of 9.5’ [a bit over the circumference of a 3’ diameter circle – C = 2(pi)r (9.4247 = 2[pi](1.5))]. After sliding the fencing over the dowels I bent the wire around to hold the circle’s shape.
the next step(s) were simply: layer of dirt, straw around the perimeter, plant potatoes, repeat. Voila!

I will post updates when the greens come in and then I’ll do a post on the (fingers crossed) bountiful harvest!

I still have garlic, peas, beans, and greens to get planted this week. I will update my Instagram when I get those planted.

Happy gardening y’all!

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