Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Veggie Venture: Big Honkin Update



After a busy summer of slightly-neglectful gardening, I actually managed to produce some crops! From seeds! The broccoli never had a chance, and I think I lost all my green beans, but I had some nice luck with lettuce, peas, and carrots.

Young bibb lettuce (mid June):



Yummy grown bibb lettuce (early July):



Young sugar snap peas, starting to flower (mid June):



Sugar snap pea blossom:



Yum! Peas! These were reeeeeally yummy while they were young. They got a little bitter a couple weeks after this (early July):





Young carrot plants (mid June):



Young carrot plants, a couple of weeks later:



Young carrot I peeked at too early (I couldn't help it!) while I was spacing the plants out to give them room to grow (mid July):



Yummy, albeit small, grown carrot (late August):



Overall, a MUCH better patio gardening experience than last year. I learned a lot about how much sun my plants were getting (not a ton, but enough), what types of plants did the best (climbing ones!), and what to avoid next time (not all seeds do better germinating inside - it took me three tries to get the carrots and lettuce into the ground). Next year I will definitely do carrots and lettuce again, and think I'll be tackling some small tomatoes.

I did have another run-in with aphids early in the summer, but I stuck it to em good this time around.



I tried to find something non-toxic that would actually work (I had some bad luck with the soap suds method last year). The main ingredient in this stuff is fish oil. It smelled fishy... but it only stayed on the plants for a few waterings, and that seemed to do the trick for the rest of the summer. Heinous packaging though. Good god.



I still would love to find a better solution for aphids than this stuff. Although it worked, I don't know where the fish oil in this product comes from. I'm certain there has to be a better, greener way. Suggestions welcome!

3 comments:

-=AHB=- said...

What kinda camera are you using to take those pics?

Vicki said...

A reeeeal cheap one. Sony Cybershot - 99 bucks at Best Buy... four years ago. :) It works fine for now, but there's a Canon I'm eyeing.

Mrs. V said...

Those snap peas look amazing and the carrot is so cute :)
Great garden and lots of learning, sounds like a success!