Talking Sweet About Nothing

After all of our hard work last year recovering and preparing our backyard, we finally got to dive in to planting. We planned our space using Google Sketchup, a drawing and modeling application, that allowed us to visualize the space and our ideas more effectively. We went through a few different versions and it is still evolving as we go.

We planned our plantings to supplement our CSA produce. While it would fun to attempt all sort of fruits and vegetables, it doesn't make sense to double up on items that we would be receiving through the season from our CSA. Instead, we wanted to plant things that we purchase in addition to our weekly share. For instance, we could never have enough onions or garlic and we constantly buy tomatoes when they are in season. In addition, we also wanted a large portion of the yard to be dedicated to perennial kitchen herbs. Not only would we have them in abundance for cooking, but we wouldn't have to re-plant every year.

The first things we planted were 40 garlic cloves back in November '10. These were provided to us by Jason from Breezy Willow. You simply break bulb into individual cloves and plant them in the fall. By late winter we already had signs of life.

From Garden '11

In early spring my parents came to town for a visit. We spent the morning doing some general spring yard cleanup like re-defining the edges on the beds in the front yard, but the biggest project was planting onions. I bought three pounds of onion sets (basically teeeny, baby onions) which to our best guess is somewhere around 300-350 onions. We only used about 2/3 of them and it didn't take long before they started sprouting.

From Garden '11

I saved the remaining 1/3 of sets to plant a couple of months later for a second harvest.

From Garden '11

For the rest of our planting, we waited until after Katie's semester ended so we could dedicate some time. We got all of our plugs from Sharp's Farm in Howard county. Sharps's starts all of their seeds in their own blend of compost, entirely organic start to finish.

Here's our tomatoes and peppers at the beginning.

From Garden '11

Here they are later in the summer.

From Garden '11

And our first few basil varieties.

From Garden '11

And after.

From Garden '11

Over time, we filled holes in the garden with cuttings from the basil plants. Between pizza and pesto, we can never have enough basil!

We also planted a large variety of common kitchen herbs.

From Garden '11

(ignore the soaker. I left it in the sun for a few days to lose the curls and kinks from storage)

In mid-July we harvested the garlic. In its place we planted approximately 120 Hungarian hot wax pepper plants.

From Garden '11

Here are the peppers after only a few weeks. You can also see how much the herbs in the background.

From Garden '11