Community Garden!

A big positive of moving to our new apartment is that there is a Community Garden (pay $30 in mulch and work to fix up the neglect from previous years and get a couple plots to ourselves) very close to it.  Since sustainable agriculture is a passion of Mike's, and I grew up gardening flowers with my Mom during the periods where we had a yard, this was pretty much a no-brainer.  We were so excited!

These are the seeds we purchased.  In the end it was too late to plant a few, so we only planted the Swiss Chard, Spinach, Mesclun, Peas, Peppers, Beans, Cucumbers, Carrots, Beets, and Tomatoes.

Some new plant babies sprouted in our little window starter!  The tomatoes never looked very good, but we transplanted the peas and peppers.  Unfortunately the peppers and peas scorched in the sun after transplant and died.

Here are our two plots.  Mike made a little bamboo scaffold to divide the 4x4 plots into 16 1x1 foot plots in preparation to try out the Square-Foot Gardening technique he discovered online.  Essentially this makes it easy to arrange plants according to how far apart they are supposed to grow, and you grow them as vertically as possible.  We also turned the soil around, added organic garden soil and organic composted manure (thank you Home Depot), and finally lined the sides with black plastic bags to retain moisture.

We rented a Zipcar and headed over to a local nursery to get some nice butterfly/bee-attracting flowers and some other plant babies to supplement our seed stock.  We ended up with Echinacea (the nice pink flower), a stonecrop, the leaves almost look like a succulent), ice ballet butterfly weed (yellow blossoms), and yarrow (with the yellow blossoms).

Here's the Echinacea with two doting bumble bees :).

We planted beets, carrots, mesclun, cucumber, and beans straight into the ground.  They all came up!  The beans didn't do so well and looked a little stunted like the peppers -- boo, heat waves!  Mike went over to the nursery again to buy some new plant babies a little further along: peas (which all died again in the sun after producing two delicious pods), a cherry tomato, and two bell pepper plants.  He also planted some more beans, and they all grew with fervor!

Here is the garden when we came back from the Cincinnati reunion.  Notice the Thai basil and nice healthy looking weeds next to our pretty lettuces :P.  They didn't taste like much, so we pulled all the intruders out.  Can you name all of the plants?

This head was ready for harvesting!  It was tasty :).