Sara's Garden MarketSustainable Living, Gardening, Flowers, and Food

If you have a hard time getting things pollinated in your garden I highly recommend planting cilantro!

First of all it’s super easy to grow, seeds go right into the dirt and keep moist until they are sprouted.

Second, cilantro is very tasty in soups, salads, and salsa!

Third and most wonderful, if you plant a lot and let it flower your garden will be full of bees!!!! And we all know the pollinating power of bees! This year I have a 4′ row of solid cilantro and bees galore! Almost ever blossom of tomato, and peppers and eggplant and zucchini have been pollinated! In previous years I have had to do the zucchini and some peppers by hand. It’s so much better to have the bees do it!

If you haven’t yet discovered how essential bees are to our food sources please visit

http://environment.about.com/od/biodiversityconservation/a/honeybees.htm

or read up on honey bees and the *essential* role they play in our food supply!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara Murray

So my sweet little tiny eggplant now has 4 blossoms on it!!!!!

I cannot wait to eat those lovely little veggies. The zucchini next to it had 3 zucchinis get blossom-end rot, so I watered that section of my garden bed with a mixture of water and milk last night to help any new veggies from getting it – such as the new little eggplants I am expecting soon.

I have several tomato plants that I need to get rid of. I dug them out of my vegetable garden last night to create some space between my existing tomato plants. There is one pear tomato plant, the rest are standard tomato plants. They are ALL producing tomatoes (green still).

They have been raised organic, never sprayed with anything. They are from NON-GMO organic seed stock http://www.stclareseeds.com/ a great company which has signed the safe seed pledge. So you could even save these seeds and get awesome tomatoes year after year! 🙂

Let me know where you planted them, and if you liked the tomatoes they produced! Join the forum and talk gardening with us all year round.

Thanks for stopping by

-Sara

Everyone knows that carrots love sandy pliant soil. I have tried them for many years with good success in the germination and health of the plant factors, but not so good in the actual root being a nice long carrot factor.

Carrots will turn and get knotty at the least resistance in the soil. You need to provide an easy path for these guys or you will have a knotty twisted mess of a carrot to try to peel!

For me the raised bed was the ultimate solution. I built square frames from 8×1 inch remnant wood and created a nice carrot friendly soil in that. I did not have to disturb the other soil which normal veggies can’t handle. I mixed in pearlite, sand, black dirt and manure to make a nice extremely soft bed of dirt for the carrots to go into. I planted straight from seed (which in Minnesota is sometimes not able to get any result because the season is so short). And I have some AWESOME carrots coming up right now because of all my hard work in preparing that bed.

If carrots are royalty then the carrot is the princess. It’s can’t handle any resistance, even deep down in the soil (this is a weak reference to princess and the pea!) 🙂 So, if you’re going to do carrots be prepared, or stick to short varieties.

So after letting my vegetable garden get completely away from me I finally hired someone to come help me out.

His name is John Beall (pronounced “bell”) and he did a wonderful job and was very fast as well. Very reasonably priced. We talked about gardening a bit and he had a lot of neat things to share about it. I found him in the gardening services on the Twin Cities Craig’s List here: http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/dak/fgs/2552468878.html

I highly recommend him! Now I can get out there and work on the projects I really want to be doing. Like staking my HUGE tomato jungle! 🙂

Thanks for stopping by!

-Sara

(I totally should have taken a picture – I might just sneak over to the neighbor’s and do it tomorrow.)

A friend of mine has built himself some awesome tomato supports! He took lath or about 1 inch wide wood and made square cages. They are at least 7-8 feet high (with more to spare under ground I’m sure.) They are awesome. They are sturdy enough to support indeterminate tomatoes which are topping 7 feet high and lots of tomato weight while they ripen and support for the plant and leaves. It looks awesome. Harvesting is easy. The plants COULD NOT be happier! I definitely need to build myself some of these for next year!!!!!

Today I put the perimeter fence around my larger veggie garden! It doubled it in size.

I still have the wrought iron black fence, and rabbit fencing inside. I was short about 5 feet of rabbit fence so I put up some extra lattice I had to block that corner. The rest was cake!

I will have all warm-weather veggies on the new side. Tomatoes (tons), Basil, Cilantro, jalapeno and bell peppers and maybe a few more zucchini plants if there’s extra room. These will all go straight into the ground, not a raised bed since I will be starting them in the greenhouse and putting them out when the weather is warm. (Over 55 degrees F. at night consistently – we see this kind of weather here in Minnesota from about June 1st).

Here are some pictures:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Now all I need is a sod cutter – which is proving very difficult to find!!!!!!!!! I might end up hiring someone – I have a few other jobs I could use the help with anyway. This is phase 1 of 3, 1. Fence, 2. Cut Sod and Cultivate Dirt, 3. Plant! 🙂

If you have any questions please leave a comment below or start a thread in the forum!

-Sara

Hi everyone,

As you know I have a very small strawberry patch. 🙂 Last year it kind of went a little crazy and sent out little shoot off plants all over the garden! (This is a good thing.) So this Spring when those new plants came up I dug them up very carefully and put them back into the strawberry patch. They did not suffer for the transplanting at all and in fact they are going crazy again! I have TONS of blossoms woohoo!!!! They are so happy in there. I already have the bird netting up so that we can greedily have all the juicy berries to ourselves.

Here is a picture from right after I transplanted the babies:

And here is one from today – approximately 3-4 weeks after the one above:

Yeay strawberries!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you have any questions please comment below – or start a thread in the forum.

Thanks for stopping by!

-Sara

So, This year to extend my Spring 2011 season and help my fragile ego recover from my major FAIL at building a greenhouse last fall I decided to get some lumber and build mini garden bed greenhouses.

This entailed me first constructing raised beds that were not off the ground, just allowed me to raise the dirt level and then gave me a sturdy structure to secure my metal clasps to for the plumbing plastic pipes I used for my plastic supports.

I used wood pieces from the value wood pile at my local lumber yard. This is junk lumber, normally cut to about 4-6 feet long with knots, or warped. It’s super cheap! I got some outdoor screws, and metal pipe loops, and flexible plumbers pipe – not PVC, it’s a bit more flexible than that. The name escapes me right now.

To construct the beds I just took boards of the same length, cut one in half and then screwed them all together to make a rectangle. I just screwed right into the long end of some of the boards. To make them last a bit longer I would suggest getting smaller 2×2 pieces to put in the corners to screw into. (That’s for the hoop house 2.0 version!) 🙂 I then decided how tall I wanted the hoop to go, and cut 2-3 pieces of the plumbers pipe to fit that. Then I secured each pipe across the bed using 2 metal loops on each side so that they would also be held upright and not tip front and back. After that I cut some of my greenhouse plastic with enough so that it would go about a half a foot over the ground (extra) on all sides. I used bricks to weight it down when I wanted it on and I was then able to have several options of how open or closed I wanted the beds.

I also secured a hanging thermometer in the middle of each bed so I could easily tell the temperature without opening the house itself. These little beds were about 100 degrees in the sun no matter what the temperature was outside when closed up tight!! I tried to maintain a temperature for the plants at about 55 degrees and that worked out just great!

In these beds I have onions, radishes, salad greens of all kinds, broccoli, and carrots. All cooler weather type things. That way if it was going to snow I wouldn’t have to stress out – and it DID snow on these beds – TWICE!!!

Here are some pictures:

These houses worked out so well that we just had our first harvest of spinach, radishes and arugula the other night as our dinner salad! See the next post that is coming up!

If you have any questions please comment below!!!!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara Murray

Hey there,

With Spring right around the corner I am anxious to get out in my garden! I saw a FABULOUS video today on Patti Moreno’s www.gardengirltv.com about growing in four seasons – She lives in the North East so I knew it might apply to us here in MN.

Here’s the video:

I am going to try building a little hoop house as soon as I get over this cold I have so that I can start my seeds outdoors sooner and extend my season. My goal is to have two plantings someday! The second planting deadlines are mostly in July, so I would have to get the first harvest by then. Using this method, if I can get the night time temperatures to stay over freezing would allow me to extend the season to all months except January and February! (If it works!)

This is how I am going to re-purpose all that PVC and plastic that I was not able to use last season as a large greenhouse. I think I am just going to scale everything down to make it more manageable and more wind friendly. This will consist of building raised beds and constructing a removable hoop house over each one.

Here’s a list from Patti about which veggies to do this with:

I would also add onions to that list since mine were coming up outside on their own from last season two weeks ago!

I will post pictures soon.

Thanks for stopping by!

-Sara Murray

http://www.gardengirltv.com/four-season-gardening.html