The Results Are In!

We wanted to see which of three added fertilizers would result in more growth for our basil plants; a commercial powder, our own compost, and our own worm castings, with an a fourth basil plant with nothing added as a control.

Here is the ‘Nothing Added’ plant

The commercial powdered fertilizer.

The worm castings plant.

And above is the added compost one.

Hmm… Can’t tell the difference?

Well I figured out that the problem with my experiment was that as basil plants get bigger, you can’t help but want to make some pesto.

So the photos above are after I cut off the best leaves to use in my pesto. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the one with the added compost wins. All for the advancement of Science!

Volunteer pumpkin

All of our vegetables in the garden are doing great this year. The only thing that has not worked out so far are our pumpkins. We grew six pumpkins from seed, they were all hardened carefully, transplanted to the garden, and then they all died in about a week. Pumpkins need warm weather, and unfortunately we had a couple of cool nights in late June that probably killed them.

However, we do have a volunteer pumpkin in our side yard which is doing great. Is the term ‘volunteer’ used outside New England? It means that we did not plant this one, it just started growing. Most likely from a composted pumpkin from last year. It stretches across two sections of fence, each about eight feet long. Every few days I have to check to see if it is growing into my neighbors yard, I’ve already had to move the huge vines out of the neighbor’s yard twice.

There’s also a small tomato plant squeezed in there too.

I hope we get some pumpkins from this one!

July 19, 2014 by Peter S

Weekly Photo Challenge: Containers

Every spring I lug this huge ficus tree outside so it can get much needed sun in our garden. Then, in the fall I somehow manage to get it back into the house. It spends the Winter months inside, in the sunniest room in the house, one with windows on three sides, even still it does seem to thrive while outside and wilt a little bit while indoors.

Every year it gets a little bit bigger. Every year I get a little bit older. Someday I won’t be able to bring it back in after it’s Summer break outside!

Somewhat less photogenic are the containers that we’re using to grow tomatoes in this year. Kitty litter tubs!

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/containers/

March 21, 2014 by Peter S

Seedlings getting big

Time to transplant the seedlings!

October 1, 2013 by Peter S

Garden Update: The Late Bloomers

A quick post since I don’t have a computer today, so I have to only use the iPhone with my big fat fingers on it’s tiny little keyboard, making frequent corrections to its autocorrect spelling assumptions.

For some reason, most of the plants in the garden are very late bloomers. A lack of planning on my part, I suppose.

The good thing is that this means that we have flowers well into October, the bad thing is that once we notice them blooming it means that Fall is here!

We see a lot of these plants in the forests when we go hiking, this must be why a lot of people say that we grow weeds!

The flower below is more than seven feet fall. It looms over everything else.

One of our neighbors has a bee hive, his bees go crazy in the garden this time of year. Probably since it’s such a large concentration of late blooming plants so close to their hive.