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

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

You may have heard that we had our first harvest from the garden the other night!

We did indeed! I planted radish, spinach, arugula and other salad greens and cabbage in one of the hoop houses at the beginning of March. Through many opening and closing of the hoop house plastic to maintain 55 degrees they made it through our last two snow falls and flurries with flying colors!

Here are some progress pictures (you can refer back to the original post about just the hoop houses to see what they looked like in March, but I bet you can all envision dirt pretty well!)

Onions and Broccoli - Transplants started Dec 2010 and Feb 2011

Don’t they look great!!! I am so glad that I did this!

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

-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

Hi everyone,

I figured this needs it’s own post so that people can search for it. 🙂

I have a chive plant (perennial) that I have had for about 4 years now. I love chives in dips and potatoes, but in a flower garden I am reconsidering my choice!

Chives can send out runners and their seeds take well and are very plentiful, and carry on the wind like dandelion seeds! So be careful where you plant one!

I am going to be constricting mine with a coffee can (surround the root ball by pushing the can into the ground around it.) as well as topping them off before the flowers turn t seed.

A flower bed should not smell like chives!!!

Well, in my effort to take tomatoes from seed to table 100% indoors I have created some monster tomato plants! Very tall, about 90% healthy, but no flowers to speak of…yet. Check it out:

These babies (there are 4 large  and one small one that took longer to germinate than the rest) are over 2.5 feet tall. I am not sure if they just seem larger because they are inside rather than out, but they sure are HUGE in my little dining room!

I have been gradually increasing the amount (time) of light they get in a day in an effort to get them to flower, and tonight I will be employing the use of my timer to get them on a consistent schedule. I checked the seed packet and it was not very helpful at all in telling me how tall these plants would be or if they were indeterminate (keep growing taller and have flowers throughout the plant) or determinate (form flowers at the top and stop growing). They seem to have a more condensed cluster at the top of the plant and have slowed down in growth a lot the last few days, so I am going to go with they are determinate plants.

Some valuable information that I got here (University of Ill. Extension) about the salad varieties does point to them having a longer time to flower/harvest than larger more typical types of tomatoes:

Super Sweet 100 (70 days to harvest; 1 inch; red, cherry-sized fruit in large clusters; indeterminate; resistant to VF)

Sweet Million (65 days; 1 inch; red, sweet, crack resistant; large clusters; indeterminate; resistant to FNT)

Yellow Pear (OP) (70 days; 1 inch; clusters of yellow, pear-shaped fruit; indeterminate)

Large Red Cherry (OP) (70 days; 1-1/2 inch; solid, deep red, tasty fruit; indeterminate)

Mountain Belle (65 days; 1 1/4 inch; red, crack resistant, ripens uniformly and holds on the vine; determinate; resistant to VF)

I don’t know what variety(s) I have. The packet just says “Salad Mix.” It looks like I could even have a mix of determinate and indeterminate tomatoes! I chose the salad variety to try out first because with the fruit being smaller I thought maybe the overall plant would be smaller as well. But it turns out that the plants are taller and take longer to fruit than other varieties! Go figure!

So, I am now going to increase their light to 18 hours+ and see if they flower! (Cross your fingers). For my next indoor tomato experiment I will be hunting for a small condensed determinate plant of some sort!!!!

Thanks for stopping by!

~Sara Murray

So, the indoor garden plants are getting very big now!

The tomato plants now have a regular support cage around them and are about 2+ feet tall. I am wondering when they will flower!

The Cilantro continues to be prolific and I use it often in salads, breads and salsa.

The Basil is also getting rather tall. One plant in particular is about a foot tall and towers above the rest of the Basil forest. I am wondering if my pruning is causing this growth? It sure is delicious though! I love to just run my hand over it and smell the sweet Basil smell. MMMmmmm…

Here is a picture of the new set-up now that I have my seed flats started for spring planting.

Thanks for stopping by!

So, the tomato plants have some yellow leaves on the bottom! That are falling off!!!

The health of the over all plant is good though, so not a huge concern. Here is a picture:

If a plant gets sunburned (which it can from indoor lighting as well as very hot direct sunlight) sometimes the first leaves will yellow and fall off. Other leaves with sunburn may show white-ish gray spots. Normally someone living in MN wouldn’t have to worry about sunburned tomatoes at all! Desert climates and summer heat down south can burn plants though.

Here is a picture for you:

It’s just the bottom leaves (the first leaves) that have an issue. The rest are green and healthy. 🙂

Thanks for stopping by!

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!