Gardening

The Beginning of an Experiment

 A month and a half ago while I was surfing the Internet I ran across CBQ\'s blog that was talking about doing a gorilla garden.  During the past two years I have been doing the whole deck thing with a reasonable amount of success.  The problem is that I am on a mid floor and only get a limited amound of light.  As a result of that I the types of plants I can grow are limited and the results are not always as good as they could be.  Though my little feline daughter enjoys the atmosphere and has found it to be very conducive to catching birds.

 When I was beginning to plan this years deck garden I bought the normal culprits from a seed perspective.....tomatoes,  thyme,  oregano,  basil,  dill weed,  cayenne peppers, cilantro and some nice deck flowers.  Then as I was looking out from the deck I realised that there is a bunch of unused land just beyond the fence.

 Making the connection between CBQ\'s idea,  the unused land and a desire to grow more stuff I decided that it was time to take some bold moves.  So I went to home depot and bought a cultivator,  small branch cutter,  machete,  small shovel and some extra seeds....in fact I ended up going a bit crazy with them and ended up with:

• 3 types of tomatoes
• corn
• melons
• cantelope
• cucumbers
• summer squash
• peas
• beans
• oregano
• dill weed
• two types of chives
• two varieties of sweet onions
• two types of lettuce
• carrots
• cayenne peppers
• 3 varieties of basil
• cilantro
• watermelon

 and for good measure I bought some wildflower and morning glory seeds to plant around the perimeter of the garden.  Since I had a lot of seeds I decided to hedge my bets by both doing starter planters and planting seeds directly in the ground.  So after hours of work I ended up with this.

If you look closer you can see that the peas have begun to come up

And the lettuce and onions are slowly coming along.

Some details that are worthy or mention

• Kudzu is a pain in the ass to remove......and I will probably be fighting it all season.
• Since this used to be a rail line I found random pieces of coal and lots of stones in the soil....hopefully that won\'t cause any problems.
• I didn\'t bother with adjusting the ph of the soil but did fertilise it.
• I definitely do not plan to use any pesticides.
• This will be a great place to put my used up coffee grounds.

 2009-04-12 04:53:28

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