Mistakes....

I have been looking through my pictures trying to get them all in one place and organize them.

Looking back now, I realize all the mistakes we made in the last couple of years.

An 8 ft trellis for a Bean-Bush (read your seed packets)

Over planting Squashes (Almost 30 squash plants and we got a harvest of about 5)

Fresh wood chips on a tomato that was planted in a container (no wonder our plant was yellowing and didn't produce much fruit)

We have come a long way and I am happy to learn something new every year.

The garden in 2009

A post describing the garden in 2009....you might wonder why it is being written in 2010 !

The blog and the posts have been in the works for over 2 years. Getting around to posting anything was a challenge with all the firefighting we were doing around the house.

This is a summary of the what went right and what went wrong in the 2009 garden

First the good

1. the rubble and base rock pile (from the pool demo in 2008) in the backyard was finally hauled away in Spring and we had a clean slate to start.

2. 5 planter boxes went in to the ground (these were boards that came off our old fence). I am glad we got started.....(the bad part on that start later)

3. We had a huge harvest of beans, good for 4 adults for over a 5 month period plus lots to share with friends and family too.

4. We learnt a lot along the way (mainly what not to do), and I hope we don't make those mistakes again

On to the bad

1. We started our seeds late (In early May)

2. I just put all seeds in a packet into one of those nursery pots, too much shock when trying to transplant them and they should have been direct seeded in the first place ! Never read any instructions and thought that it would not matter.

3. We didn't do any companion planting of beneficial plants.

4. Never knew about slugs or what to do with them. They wrecked havoc on the eggplants.

5. We planted almost 8 zucchini plants (when a garden book will tell you that 2 plants would be more than enough for a family of 2). But we never had the problem of plenty. We barely got 2 Zucchini's out of all the plants. There were loads of flowers but no produce. I wonder why.

6. We added fresh wood chips on to the surface of our tomato planters to help prevent evaporation without realizing that it depletes the nitrogen from the soil as it decomposes.

7. We never fertilized any of our beds during the growing period. The only saving grace was that we amended our soil by mixing in compost.

8. That brings me to the last blunder....there were 2 beds where we just dumped pure compost instead of combining it with the soil and it proved terrible.

I hope 2010 is more productive and we put to good use all the reading we have been doing online and offline.

Potager-Part 1

I had not heard of this term until i read this post on Gardenporn. It dawned on me that this was what we were trying to do in my garden- a garden planted with vegetables, herbs and edible flowers.


I was then off to my next task-Google the term and read up all about it. I came up on these 2 links on Brooklyn Botanical Garden, post 2 on bbg. I have quite a few of their books and like the simple way in which they explain things.


This is how our garden beds looked last year. A recap......these were re-purposed from the fence boards on the north side of our property

The tomatoes went in buckets (and in the background you can see the missing boards on the fence).


Granted that this didn't turn out to be a true Potager because it was all vegetables of one kind in one bed, and no ornamentals/ companion plants. The intent was there though and hopefully it gets implemented this year.

Trellises-Summer of 2009

This was our first shot at building trellises. After a lot of research online, "Gu" designed these and put them together.

The tomato cages that you see below did well, and i have absolutely no complaints. Next year, they would go into the ground instead of the blue buckets

The bean trellises were a complete disaster.I was not because of the design....i had planted Bush beans instead of Pole Beans. The trellis proved to be a big hassle in reaching down and harvesting the beans

This trellis was designed for our bitter gourds that grew fabulously well but never produced anything

We are planning on adding 6 more planter beds for next years garden with some well designed trellises that would work with our plants