Culantro After Some Chilly Nights

The culantro plants that made it through the frost OK, did not make it through the chilly nights so well. We recently had a string of nights in the 40s and I never once thought that any of the plants were in danger.  Note to self - bring in the culantro next time it goes below 50.  

Though these fellas look pretty beat up, I think they'll make it, at least the big one will. I clipped off the damaged leaves and gave them a little water. The bigger one cleaned up just fine, jury's still out on the little one.

Free Plant With Purchase of a Pineapple

Did you know that a pineapple plant at a garden store costs $8.99?  Do you wanna know how to get a free pineapple plant? Of course you do! Well, each  and every pineapple purchased in it's whole form comes with a free pineapple plant. You heard that right, the pineapple you're looking at has both a delicious yellow edible center and the beginnings of a beautiful pineapple plant. All you do is pull the top off like this:

Now, go ahead and eat that yummy bottom part, I like mine in a blender with some rum, but you do what feels right for you :)  So, on to the free plant!  We're talking about the spiky green topper laying there.This guy:

You take hold of it any which way you can and start pulling off the very bottom leaves. You'll see that they overlap so just start pulling off row and after row, and you get:

ROOTS! Isn't that fantastic!  I still can't believe it, I had no idea that hidden under a few rows of leaves are honest to goodness roots, roots, roots!  Now that you have the roots exposed you plunk the topper into a pot of soil (or the ground) and water it in well. It's not necessary, but if you're not going to plant it right away, you can park it in a glass of water like so:

Go ahead and try it. It's so cool to see that first row of roots appear.   Now I'm itching to get my hands on another pineapple.....

Garden Gear Review - Spyderco Tenacious

This is one of my buddies in the field, so to say.  Let's meet the Spyderco Tenacious, a folding knife with a 3.375 inch blade, a total length of 7.75 inches and a closed length of 4.438 inches. The Hubby is a well prepared fella and thinks everyone should be too. He gifted this knife to me and it has come in handy on plenty of occasions.

This exact one is partially serrated but it can also b e purchased with a fully serrated or completely non-serrated blade. The blade locks open with a nice secure lock that doesn't slip or close on it's own. You really do have to unlock it to close it which is a good thing in my mind, the last thing I want is a knife to surprise me by closing on my fingers.

 It has a good weight to it and a great size which is nice for finding it easily on a ledge or in a pocket. I've used it to cut through the irrigation tubing, harvest veggies, cut vines, score root bound plants and open bags of compost. Each time the knife has performed very well. Hubby says it sharpens very well and very easily.

Beckie's Bottom Line: The Tenacious costs around $30.00 and is a great knife at an excellent price point. 

First Strawberry

We planted the strawberry plants about 2 weeks behind the other plants in the garden because we couldn't  find any at the time.  The agricultural center for our area says they're a fall crop but the stores and nurseries must not be on the same schedule. So they were a bit of  a late bloomer, we had lots and lots of green foliage with dark green leaves and healthy runners going in all directions. So we just enjoyed watching the runners root and figured we would get berries next year. And then......a bunch of flowers started popping up which meant taking 199,678 pictures because I love how cute and cheery the white blooms are.

We never really got into the habit of  checking the strawberries too often because it seemed like nothing was happening, then the big frost fiasco came and we were preoccupied with keeping the tomato plants alive.  So we were totally surprised by the white berry that was peeking out when we were uncovering the plants. The missed the pink stages and the berry quickly turned reddish. Oh well.  We were all about the final product anyway. And it was a goodie!

So pretty! It had much more flavor compared with the store bought berries.  The texture was different too, alot softer whereas the store ones have an unripe crunchiness that I always dislike.  It's not all that perfectly shaped but I'm still pretty proud of it!

Harvest Time!

Marigold Update

These are the marigolds that I started from seeds. And not just any seeds....from seeds that I saved myself. How 'bout that! Pretty advanced stuff, huh?  I know from my Dad's garden that marigolds are pretty hardy, so I figured they would be a good plant to start out with. The flat was $10.00 last year, so I'm excited to save that money by doing it myself this time around. I saved the black plastic flat from when I bought the marigolds for the current garden and planted a bunch of seeds willy nilly style. I was happy to see that most of the seeds sprouted, then they got a little cramped, so I separated the little seedlings into their own cells. Look at their pretty little leaves!

How to Make Free Seed Starting Pots

I've been enjoying my seed starting experience immensely. Since I'm only doing a few, I'm using the pre-made Jiffy 2" peat pots that I purchased from Home Depot. They're $1.99 for 26 peat pots which makes them about 8 cents each. I saw a handy tutorial online about making your own seedling pots which may come in handy if I ever decide to start more than a handful of plants from seed. This is a cool crafty type project that has a useful purpose and could actually reduce your gardening expenses. It's a win - win- win situation!

You start out with a toilet paper or paper towel tube. This here is a paper towel tube:

Since I'm using the 2" peat pot, I was looking to see of a decent alternative could be made.  In order to get the most similar size to the Jiffy 2" peat pot, you cut the tube into 2 and 3/4 inch sections like this:

Now you need to close one of the ends so that it actually holds in the soil. You squish the tube in one direction then the other to make the circular tube into a square shaped tube. At each corner of your new square-ish shape, you cut a slit 3/4 inches in length.  Below is a picture showing the 4 slits which in turn make the four flaps used for folding:

The next step is to fold over the flaps to create the bottom of the seed pot.  Fold the flaps just like you would fold the flaps of a cardboard box:

Here is how your tube section looks in the very beginning and how it looks after folding all the flaps to create the bottom:

Here is the pretty little Jiffy peat pot on the left and the homemade version on the right. They are nearly the same height but the peat pot flares out at the top and is a bit wider overall:

I thought I'd try to cut a toilet paper roll in half and see what I got, they're on the small side and measure 1 and 1/2 inches tall when finished:

Here are all of the pots lined up for comparison. The two on the left are what the toilet paper roll looks like if you just cut it in half to make 2 pots. They're much smaller than the store bought pot as you can see. The one that was measured out and made from the paper towel roll is a good substitute and looks quite similar in the line up below:

Growing Seeds - Ground Cherry

I first head about the ground cherry through one of my favorite youtube channels called Growing Your Greens. It's a gardening channel hosted by John Kohler and it is utterly fantastic. He has an episode where he shows his ground cherries in his home garden in California and I was amazed, partly because the fruit is so neat and partly because I had never heard of it before.   These seeds are from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and are the seeds that I am the most excited about!  We'll get to see a golden cherry grow inside a thin husk shaped lantern.  Can't wait!

Above is a picture of the seeds at about a week or two old, very delicate and tender. Yikes! I'm not an experienced seed grower so these little tiny things scare me. I actually killed a few by putting a grow light too close to them. From the picture, it looks like around 7-8 seeds sprouted. Below are the seeds at about a month old, somewhat more hardy looking but soooo delicate still. The packet says to grow them just like tomatoes, so that's what I'm doing. I planted them with some room to add soil as they grow since tomatoes grow roots from the buried stems. The pictures side by side like this really show how far they've come but every time I look at them in real life, it's clear that they have a long way to go.

Unprepared For Success

With the utter failure of our very first Florida veggie garden and the doom and gloom stories of how hard it is to grow down here, I had slim hopes that we would be able to grow much of anything at all. To my amazement, the plants grew! And grew and grew. And grew some more. Before I knew it, the tomatoes had overgrown their cages. At the time, I thought it was no big deal. The plants would just be tall, no biggie. Right? Then the tomatoes came in and they grew too! And grew and grew. And grew some more.  The weight of those green globes along with a lack of support resulted in the bent and cracked stems in these pictures.

Some of the branches couldn't be saved, like the one that turned brown here. Some had just started to crack so I put some flexi garden tape around the damaged area in hopes that it would heal over like in the picture below. Effective but not too pretty.

Here is a shot of the towering tomato plant with some repair work:

The hot mess below was an attempt on my part to support the cherry tomato that was growing out of control. I just started to wrap it around the neighboring tomato plant. In hind site, not one of my finer ideas. Since I really didn't expect anything to grow very well or for very long, it seeded like a gem of an idea at the time. Well, it just grew into a big tangle.

Here's a closer look.  That long skinny branch at the bottom of the picture is the cherry tomato beginning to wrap around another caged tomato.

This here is a big old floppy branch that I'm holding up. I ended up draping it over some nearby trellis. It's still going strong.

After a few more weeks, I couldn't stand letting the tomato plants fend for themselves so I tried to separate the hot mess I mentioned above. Boy was that an adventure, and not in a good way! I had the Hubby holding up one part of the plant while I had the other, all while trying not to break anything and thread it through an extra upside down tomato cage.  Here 's how it looked afterwards:

That is indeed an upside down heavy duty tomato cage that is zip-tied to the top of another heavy duty cage.  You can very clearly see this over our 6 foot privacy fence, the neighbors must think we've lost it.

Growing Seeds - White Tomato

About a week old

For Christmas I asked for and received (Thanks Mom and Sis #1!) some seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (rareseeds.com). This place has all sorts of cool things to grow. The company story is amazing too, think 18 year old starts his own company.  In each order so far, there has been a "free gift", a packet of seeds to try out. Amazingly cool. One of the free gifts were these White Tomosol Tomatoes. I'm enjoying watching them grow from seed. It's one of my favorite things to do, I love watching things grow. Dad didn't do too much seed sowing other than direct sowing of things like peas, so I'm on my own here.

About two weeks old

I'm trying to be optimistic, but these little guys have a long way to go. I'd consider it a success if I can get even 1 plant to actually produce a white tomato. I can't wait to see if they grow green then turn white, or if they are white right from the beginning. Stay tuned.....

Growing Seeds- Marigolds

You can barely see the little sprouts

Just starting to sprout.

 

A few weeks later

Getting little leaves we can actually identify!

Let's Go Shopping - Garden Apron Addition

Hmm, I need my scissors...where did I leave them?  Hmm, I need that flexi garden tape to tie up this plant....where did I leave that?  Hmm, I need my gloves.....where did those go?  Hmm, I just picked this tomato.....where do I put it until I go in the house?

This happens over and over in the garden, I put things down then walk away and need it in another spot later. Or, I pick a ripe veggie and have no where to put it.  I try to jam things in my pockets but alot of my pants don't have them or I'm in my work clothes and would prefer not to jam tomatoes in there. So I figure that I need a garden apron, someplace to keep my tools handy and a place to stash the fresh picked veggies.  Now which one to get? Let's go shopping!

I found that there are 2 general types, a full apron with a section that covers your chest and then a smaller apron covering only the waist area. These are my favorite full length aprons:

Esschert Design Canvas Tool Apron

Plow & Hearth Embroidered Logo Duck Apron

Look at all of those pockets, I could tuck all sorts of little things in there! Oh yeah.  One of my favorite things to do is tuck items away, just ask my poor hubby, he can never find anything!  Which I fear would be my downfall with these types of aprons. By the time I fill these little beauties up, the apron would weigh a ton and then I wouldn't use it :(  So, lets see the second category of aprons, the smaller options:

Laura Ashley Garden Apron

Dramm ColorWear Garden Apron

These definitely don't have the same amount of pockety goodness, but they're probably more practical for my needs.  The main things I need are a kangaroo pouch to carry the veggies I pick, then a few spaces to put scissors, folding knife, seed packets, gloves and garden tape.  It's funny to see all of the cell phone pockets, isn't it? I guess gardening has gone towards the trendy set. The Laura Ashley one is pretty but the Dramm has a few more functional pluses so that's the one I'm leaning towards.   In the back of my mind, I'm also taking into consideration which one would make a less comfy home for the multitude of lizards in the yard. Anytime you set down an item for more than a few minutes, the lizards are setting up a cozy hideaway. I hate that! It scares me and makes me scream every time! Every. single. time.