Today's Harvest - Nourishing Juice

Today, I harvested kale and a couple large collard greens all of which promptly became green juice -- the primary reason we planted as much kale as we did.

Three kinds of kale and two large collard greens

Green juice

Garden at Six Weeks

With the exception of the peppers (which don't seem to be growing at all) our new garden bed is doing quite well at the six week mark. The kale in particular is amazing.

This past week, I trimmed down and thinned out the marigold plants because they'd grown quite full and tall...and had the potential to take sun away from the pepper plants.

In one of the photos below, you can see our other small garden beds. I'll cover those, and give the whole backstory, in an upcoming post.

The peppers are still really small

The kale keeps producing

Storm Damage

A strong storm swept through our area the night of June 22 and knocked over several of our plants, including the broccoli plant. The roots were well established so they didn't actually pull out of the ground. Instead, the plants just sort of, well, tipped over.  I had to stake up several of the plants to save them.  A week later and they all seem to be doing well.

Poor broccoli plant

Staked broccoli plant a week after the storm. 

A Typical Lettuce Harvest

Here's an example of a lettuce harvest about four weeks after we planted our seedlings. I haven't really tracked our harvests (I'm going to try and take a picture of every harvest going forward), but I'd estimate we've pulled this much lettuce out of the garden 6-8 times since we planted it. We simply cut a few leaves from the outside of every plant. Because we have 16 total lettuce plants, a few leaves from each plant easily yields enough for two large salads. (We did lose one lettuce plant in the last week. I think it got crowded out.)

Salads for dinner!

Garden at (Roughly) Four Weeks - June 16, 2013

Everything is starting to look so strong and full. Amazing how much lettuce and kale we've already been able to sneak out of the garden (small bits at a time).

Marigolds are out of control.

Lettuce is doing quite well. And it's delicious, too!

The peppers are doing absolutely nothing!

An Early Harvest (June 9, 2013)

Here's one of our first kale harvests. We used it to make some delicious Tuscan vegetable soup. We also used some herbs from our original garden bed.

Garden at Two Weeks - (June 2, 2013)

Here's how the garden looks two weeks after we planted it.

The kale in particular is doing really well.

Garden at One Week (May 26, 2013)

Here's how the garden looks at one week -- all of the seedlings are planted. For this year's experiment, we planted a lot of kale, lettuce, collard greens and peppers. We also planted one broccoli plant just to see what would happen. Then, we added in some marigolds to help keep the pests away.

The kale is already growing! And so is the lettuce.

Fully planted. Now, we wait.

Honey, I have an idea.

That's pretty much how it started. Six weeks ago, I had an idea for how to grow a bigger vegetable garden in our small city lot. So, we did a little research on square foot gardening, picked out a raised garden bed and headed to the local nursery for seedlings.

Over the last three years, we'd done a small amount of gardening. We had what I would consider a primarily decorative raised bed in which we'd grown some herbs, tomatoes and peppers. So, we're pretty much novices. And we consider this year's expansion one really big experiment. I'm writing this blog so I can remember everything we learn along the way.

May 19, 2013 -- Assembling our raised bed, and trying to get it level (in our not-at-all-level yard).

May 19, 2013 -- Added our grid (made of lath) to create our new square foot garden.

May 19, 2013 -- Planted about half of our seedlings.