Garden Box #1

Here are two photos taken around a month apart. The same garden box is in both the photos. The first photo was taken the day I planted the plants. Growing in the box is four tomato plants, spicy globe basil, and carrots. I ended up moving the marigolds from inside the box to around the sides. I had a sweet basil plant in it for a day or two, then something came one night and ate through the stems near the soil. The prime suspect is snails, who also seem to really enjoy my mint and sunflowers.

I built the garden box. It costed around $20 and took a little over an hour to build, including the time it took to prep the location and move dirt into it. I now have three of them, the one in the photo is the first one that I built.

March 22, 2010

April 26, 2010

Near-Death Experience

It's about time I post a garden update, it's been awhile. I've been neglecting this blog, but I promise that I have not been neglecting the garden. Some plants are going great and others are having a bit of a struggle.

The last I posted I had Septoria Leaf Spot on my tomatoes. Originally I tried some copper/sulfur leaf powder, but it didn't do any good. It was time for a new strategy. I purchased some liquid copper spray and showered them with it once a week for a few weeks. All my tomato plants were saved, in some form or another.

The plant that had it the worse ended up tall with only two leaf clusters at the top and one tomato. The riper the fruit got the more the plant slowly died, until one day it was nothing but a twig sticking out of the ground. And something stole the almost ripe tomato.

But I couldn't bring myself to remove the plant, so I just trimmed the brown stem almost to the soil. I continued to water it, in denial that the plant was really dead. And guess what, it paid off! Suddenly there were leaves sprouting up at the base of the stem, and new stems shooting up. It lives again!

No current garden pictures for this update, but I went ahead and threw in a irrelevant houseplant photo.