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

Watering your garden when there might be a frost seems a little backward, but it will protect your plants.

A healthy well-watered plant will do better than a weaker, drier plant will in cooler night time temperatures. You don’t want the plant to be wet, but you want the Earth to be nice and damp when nightfall comes.

All of the processes that the plant uses to take in water and create food for it’s self take energy. When the plant uses it’s energy to take water and create food it releases a small amount of heat. So a plant that is undergoing this process is slightly warmer inside than a plant that is sitting there doing nothing but drying out.

So water your garden early in the day, and allow the plant’s leaves to be dry by nightfall and you should have some added protection against cooler nighttime temperatures.

Happy Autumn!

Sara

So, I thought the yellow onions were dead, done, gone.

I was lazy about getting them out of the garden just because I didn’t have anything to go in anyway so why bother. Well, our weather dried out and I went out to check the onions after about 2 weeks and they had new shoots!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Up until yesterday when we started getting tons of rain and wind they were doing just great!

We’ll have to see what happens over the next week or so if they survive all this rain and if they survive the cold that is now on the horizon.

🙂 So, if you get a lot of rain chances are they will loose their tops and stop growing, but they aren’t dead. If you can dry them out some how or if the rain stops and the ground gets dry again they will come back!

thanks for stopping by – Sara

Hi everyone,

The fall plans are in effect! First order of business is building PVC pipe supports for the plastic sheeting that will become the temporary greenhouse I will be using to extend my seasons! The over night low yesterday was 45 degrees Fahrenheit so I better get this thing up. Last year we had one early frost mid-September. Never mind the unseasonably warm October we had, or the subsequent 80 degree days. Everything had died in the frost and I lost a good 1.5 months of natural growing season.

I am going to purchase 20′ sections of 1″ or smaller tubing and make some large hoops. I am not quite certain how to secure the plastic to the tubes. So far my ideas are zip-ties (which will rip the plastic over time)  or packing tape (which may not hold up in the freezing and wet of winter and spring. Ideally maybe I don’t have to secure it that well. I have enough to cover a very large area, so maybe draping and securing to the ground with rocks will be enough.

The other project that needs to get done is to move what used to be a nice border of small purple mums. These mums are on the outside, front edge of my veggie garden. They started out the size of a basketball, and are now over 2 feet across! They take up so much room in the front of the garden I am missing out on about 3″ by 10″ section of good soil. So they are being moved to the outside corners of the garden. I have a Victorian fence around the veggie garden with rose bushes in the corners on the inside. The mums will be opposite them on the outside of the garden.

This picture was taken last year. The rabbits has eaten every thing right to the ground. So I went to my local super store and bought this Victorian fencing and lined it with rabbit fencing on the inside. It is the Fort Knox of veggie gardens!

So the roses are on the inside and the mums will be on the outside corners 🙂

When I get it a bit cleaned up and moved around I’ll post more pictures. This year’s garden is 100 times better than this poor sad eaten over one.

Thank you to the bird or rabbit that ate some honey suckle berries and then came to Maddie’s garden! We have had this bush/tree for a few years now and I am going to attempt to train it into a topiary shape this year!

The first year it was going to be a tree = one long stalk/trunk and one sprig of honey suckle at the top. I cut that down to the ground almost. It came back and it brought friends! A little scary at first and I considered pulling it out all together. But honey suckle is such a sweet bush and perfect for a little girl’s garden so I left it.

Each year I prune it aggressively and the next season it comes back fuller. It wants to be very tall so I just cut it down. I think I have enough growth and fullness this year to shape it. In this same garden I have another bush that we call the “monster” bush. It wants to take over the whole garden so we cut it back all the time. And there is a clematis. It is in soil that has not been prepared and used to have several evergreen bushes in it.

I have had the clematis in there for about three years now and it looks like it is finally going to really go!

We call this flower bed Madison Square Garden. She has a lot to contribute about what goes into this garden and always plants an annual border around it which she plants mostly herself and then cares for by watering and weeding herself.

Will post pics later!

Thanks for stopping by!

~Sara

So after a fun talk with one of my good friends I have a new plan for the “greenhouse.”

My vegetable garden is up against my garage and has a Victorian fence around it.  So my new plan is to put up plastic awning and curtains that can be rolled back, or rolled down! Picture an awning rolled up in back about 7=8 feet up the garage. When I take it down it will form a lean-to looking slanted green house roof and drape over the fence for support and secure on the out side of the Victorian fencing on the ground with a tent type opening in the middle!

I will use shepherds hooks to have flowers starting and to help support the plastic in the middle. The soil here has been workable for a few months but it gets so cold at night that you can only put certain things in the ground. But with plastic I can start my garden right *in* my garden months earlier and I can extend my growing season by at least a few months in the fall as well!!!!!! We have warm weather until about November but the nights get very cold starting in September.

Last September we had a very early frost and I almost completely lost my fall harvest. No one knew it was coming so there was no opportunity to cover the garden with sheets that night. But we had fabulous weather all through October. But I was so sad because my garden was done. 🙁 This will prevent that entirely!

I will post before and after and also post pics as I build my “greenhouse” as well.

Thanks for stopping by!

I planted my onions, radishes and peas today!

A ton of large yellow onions, snow peas and dwarf peas, and cherry globe radishes! I planted a ton of radishes because once they are done I will clean out that part of the garden to plant other things in, so I use more than I normally would.

Here is a nice little guide for when to plant stuff:

Very early spring (as soon as the ground can be worked)
* Onions
* peas (Martha Stewart plants hers every year on St. Patrick’s Day – she lives in New England!)
* spinach

Early spring
* lettuce
* beets
* carrots
* radishes
* dill
* cilantro
* cabbage
* broccoli
* celery
* kale
* potatoes

After last frost date
* beans
* corn
* melons
* cucumbers
* squash
* tomatoes
* peppers
* pumpkins
* eggplant
* basil

Happy Planting!

My tomatoes are outgrowing their spot on the shelf:

So I had to move them to a new place! I am scared to put them on the ground because I have 3 cats who would probably love to dig in the dirt they are planted in and see how they taste just for the fun of it!

So now, they are living on a little plant stand next to the shelf and have plenty of room to grow upward, for now. 🙂

Here they will stay until they are too tall to get good light on them from above. Then I will have to figure something else out!

Thanks for stopping by!

I started some annual flower seeds indoors this week. My daughter, Maddie, helped me plant them. The seeds were so darn small I wasn’t even convinced that we had planted anything at all! But the baby Alyssum is up!

These seedlings are so small and delicate that I am not at all convinced they will live, but if they do we will have some nice ground cover and some for our containers too.

The other half of the flat that you see here has “Sunshine” Petunias in it…maybe… The seeds were so small they just looked like a bunch of sawdust really. I’ll give them another week and if no one comes up I have some regular Petunias I will be starting in there.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara M