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

Hi everyone,
It has been hard to keep the posts coming when there is so much to do in the summer! I found it much easier to post when I was trapped indoors just wishing it was summer. 🙂

That being said, I have started my indoor garden 2.0!

This garden contains things that I know will grow well indoors. These plants will be ready to harvest right around Christmas time or a little after. Once these plants are harvested I will plant starter seeds for the outdoor garden. (I am just starting to get a good harvest from the outdoor garden.)

I have planted Basil, Cilantro, Short Carrots, Yellow Globe Onions, Broccoli, and I will plant tomatoes as soon as I find a suitable variety. I am looking for a short bushy determinate plant!

I used old cardboard boxes, taped all over, and lined with garbage bags because I could not find a good size any where to buy. My original idea being to use window boxes. I am hoping to get one season out of them and also hoping that they don’t rot or melt before I harvest!!

Here are the harvest times for all of the above:
Basil (it’s still going from last winter so that’s up)
Cilantro 30 days
Carrots 68 days
Onions – says transplant at 8-10 weeks, so maybe 90+ days to full globe
Broccoli 48-85 days

I have found that it takes longer with artificial light to harvest. So we’ll see!

Planting the yellow globe onions was a breeze.

Watching the green shoots come up, also a breeze…

The trouble started when grass also sprouted around the green onion shoots. I could not tell them apart very well and when I tried to weed I inevitably ruined onions. So I stopped. 🙁

Combine that with a very rainy summer and the fact that birds will grab the onions right by the shoots and pull them up to eat them left me with only 15 or so ping-pong ball sized onions. The green tops have all fallen over and yellowed – which means they are done. They won’t get any larger.

Why won’t they continue to grow?? They are alive and well in there without the tops after all. There is an exchange of fluid and sugar which happens in the shoot/leaves and travels down into the bulb that makes it grow bigger.

So, onions do not like much water. Birds also like them. And the shoots look just like grass – so weed like crazy!

Plan for next year? RAISED BEDS with store-bought planting medium – this will hopefully tame the grass issue. For now they are coming indoors.

Hi everyone!

I have been out of touch recently due to the dance studio recital finishing up and a huge landscaping project!

I used to have these huge ugly evergreen bushes right out my front door. They were ugly, they smelled gross and all they were good for was a rabbit hutch, which in turn got the rest of my gardens eaten to death by the rabbits!

A few months back I finally had some guys with a bobcat come and rip them out! They also took away a lot of the rock that was under the bushes. This landscape rock was put in circa 1980 and was not done right and so was completely mud packed and horrible to try to remove by hand. Thank you bobcat guys!

Here’s a picture of what was there before. In this pic I am actually getting a photo of the huge spider, but you can see where my front door is, and you can see the gross bushes and a huge thistle! YUCK – you can see why I wanted this eye-sore gone.

So, what I did was extend the flower garden that is in the front of my house into that space. 🙂 Here is a picture where you can see the flower bed and the bushes etc… (This is my daughter, Maddie right before her first soccer practice last year.)

And now, after 5 rose bushes, 5 day lilies, 1 dwarf Korean Lilac tree, plenty of petunias, 10 bags of red mulch, 5 bags of manure, 1 bag of peat moss and some garden accents it looks like this:

Now I am looking forward to relaxing next to this wonderful rabbit-free stink-free rock-free area!!!

Thanks for stopping by ~ Sara

I started some petunias from seed this year and I learned a lot about them!

They are picky little things! They need the soil to be very very warm to germinate. So a seed tray warming pad is essential. I thought that most of mine were duds until they sat outside in a 90 degree day and ALL germinated!

They like to be wet all the time and never really dry out between waterings.

I also learned that it takes 6 months for the seedlings to become the small plants you see in the garden centers. Amazing. So they are very slow growing. In order to have petunias for next summer I would need to start seeds indoors around October or November at the latest!!! (Which I intend to do by they way!!!)

Thanks for stopping by ~ Sara

So I was able to harden the seedlings successfully! Normally that’s when I kill things. Generally I forget about them and then they die from over exposure. This time I was meticulous about how much time they were out each day and brought them in properly. The only thing that happened was a little sunburn from starting in a place that was too sunny.

Note to self: Start hardening in a place that only gets a few hours of sunlight per day. The plants get plenty of indirect sunlight even if they are never in direct sunlight.

I have started transplanting them into the vegetable garden today!

I have transplanted the broccoli, and the tomato plants (roma and beefstake). I probably have about 20 volunteer tomato plants out there as well!!! I will wait until they are a bit larger and then thin them out and see what plants came back from the dead tomatoes that were on the ground.

So tomorrow and Saturday I plan to transplant the carrots, peppers, onions and petunias.

Thanks for stopping! ~ Sara

The house finches have laid 4 eggs and they are just the smallest little fragile things!!! I can’t wait to hear the little chirps of the babies in about a week or so. It takes about 14 days for an egg to hatch. They’ve been there for over a week so I am thinking it could be any time now.

Sadly the baby robin did not survive. Momma robins leave the nest during the day to get food and I am afraid that is when we had that nasty cold snap. It was only about 45-50 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and almost to freezing over night. Hopefully she still has time to have another clutch of eggs before winter.

I will take pictures and keep you all posted about the house finches. 🙂

I planted some strawberry plants a few years ago and all we ever got was one single strawberry from them. NOW they are very happy and producing many berries! They are so delicious. Store-bought strawberries are NOTHING compared to the flavor you get from growing your own.

I have them in the center of my vegetable garden (along with the other animal favorite, broccoli) to try to keep them away from other mammals who may want some. I also put bird netting up just in time! We harvested 3 berries yesterday and they were so very good.

I can’t wait to get more off these plants. I wonder if they will keep producing all season. That would be awesome.

I might actually have to get some more of these plants if they are going to be so tasty and so happy and easy to keep.

Thanks for stopping ~ Sara

My indoor tomatoes have fruit on them!

I had to pollinate them myself when they had blossoms. I have never done this before but I must have done it right because the tomatoes came. 🙂 I did it with a spoon so I could catch the pollen and redistribute it to the other blossoms without dropping it.

I have three tomatoes and as soon as these babies can be eaten I am going to take pictures, eat them, and then get rid of these HUGE monster tomato plants.I think they would be up to about 5 feet tall if they weren’t falling all over themselves.

(I learned the hard way that the smaller the tomato the taller/larger the plant, most of the time.)

I will keep you posted!

Thanks for stopping by ~ Sara

I harvested the first of the radishes the other day!

They were pretty small, but the rows needed thinning anyway. They were VERY tasty. Not as spicy as I would like, but at least my daughter can have some then too.

The type of radish I got was a “Cherry Belle” They are a solid bright red and smaller variety. I left them in the garden 2 weeks longer than the 22 days to harvest and even now the vast majority are not ready to harvest yet.

Thanks for stopping by!

~Sara

The House Finches that have nested in my entry way hanging basket for the past 4 years are BACK!

I had seen the nest pop up virtually over night because we had some cold weather and I was bringing the basket in the garage over night so it wouldn’t freeze. I went to move it one night and the nest was just there! I didn’t know who had created it though. No eggs we in the nest yet. So I had to leave it out and hope the Fuchsia in it wouldn’t freeze.

Now there are eggs. I don’t know how many because I haven’t seen them personally, but the momma is in there constantly so she must be sitting on her eggs. 🙂 The birds are very skiddish right now but eventually the get the idea that we are not going to hurt them and they stick around the nest even if we are outside.

I had the hanging basket for about a week before the nest was there. The first time it happened we had gotten a May Day basket from my husband’s grandma and that’s what they nested in. So I know they like to nest around May 1st, so ever since then I have made sure to have something for them to nest in by May 1st. One year I missed the date and they nested in the Juniper bush in front of the door!!! We couldn’t use the front entrance for a good month because that nest was so out in the open we were afraid they would abandon it if we were too close.

I can’t wait to be hearing little baby bird chirps out my front door! It should take about 14 days or so.

Gotta run, hope to get some pictures up on this bare sight soon!

~Sara