Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Urban gardening update: May 27, 2014











(I'm trying something special this year and am keeping a "photo blog," telling my story mostly through images but with a bit of description added as well, concerning my first-ever year of being an urban gardener. Check the "Garden 2014" photoset at my Flickr account for the entire series, including more photos for each entry than you see here.)

May 27: So, as the decreasing amount of updates have shown, I have less and less new news to report about the garden as the weeks continue; the last of my seeds are growing into adult plants, and from this point on it's just a matter of tending them and getting them to grow as big as possible, as long as possible. Here are some shots of the latest; everything all together in these images you're seeing include chamomile, lavender, lettuce, mesclun, basil, cinnamon basil, green onions, ivy, moonflowers, morning glories, wandering jews, viola, coleus (note that some of the leaves are already starting to develop new colors), sugar snap peas, jade, and of course my majesty palm in the corner of the room, still doing well so we'll see for how long. Plus, exciting news -- I finally had enough adult lettuce, mesclun, spinach, basil, and green onion together last week to make my first home-grown salad of the year! The salad greens grow faster and better than anything else I've tried, so I'm already starting to think of a way of building a vertical shelf system in the sill of my big bedroom window, so that next year I can have literally 12 or 16 pots of salad greens going at any given time, so that I can literally have a salad every day all summer long. I'll probably always try a little exotic stuff each year too (next year, for example, I'm going to try growing lemongrass for the first time); but I think from a practical aspect of what edibles I might be growing every year, on top of just the decorative stuff I'm growing for the front room, I would be wise to stick to growing massive amounts of salad greens, in that prepared salads in Chicago are SO FREAKING EXPENSIVE.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Urban gardening update, May 15th.










(I'm trying something special this year and am keeping a "photo blog," telling my story mostly through images but with a bit of description added as well, concerning my first-ever year of being an urban gardener. Check the "Garden 2014" photoset at my Flickr account for the entire series, including more photos for each entry than you see here.)

May 15: No news to report today; just wanted to get some shots taken of how all the new seeds are growing. As you can see, everything besides the latest morning glories have now sprouted, pretty amazing given that a lot of this stuff was planted only four days ago -- you can really tell with these seeds that we've now entered a period of the year with longer days and warmer temperatures, in that these same exact seeds would take a week or two to sprout back in March and April. But of course, as always, these plants are growing at sometimes vastly different rates -- the chamomile and lavender, for example, are both really taking their time, with these delicate little sprouts whose progress can barely be tracked, while the coleus is growing as fast as a weed, and with a much higher seed-to-sprout rate than just about anything else I've tried this year. (Just to remind you, I've included a photo of what these coleus plants will look like as adults; the hope is that these will provide some shockingly bright colors to my indoor garden, a notoriously difficult environment for growing traditional bright flowers, and that these bushy plants can serve as a main centerpiece in the middle of my apartment to help draw the eye of guests who are sitting on the couch.)

I'm also happy to say that my morning glory plant is producing more and more flower buds by the day, and that they're getting closer and closer to reaching adult size and blooming; just to remind you, I literally grew this entire plant from pebbly seeds, in an environment that the garden center told me was impossible for morning glories to thrive in, so this is probably the most personally satisfying plant of my entire garden right now, and I'm really looking forward to it finally blooming. And interestingly, just a week after plucking them for a dinner party, my adult basil plants are showing significant growth of new leaves again, in this fascinatingly mathematical way -- basically, none of the plucked branches are growing again, but there are new leaves growing precisely in the crevice between these plucked branches and the main stalks they're connected to. This is something surprising that I've learned here during my first year of gardening, of how mathematically precise the growing of these plants can get, with slightly different rules for each particular plant -- how in the case of moonflowers, for one example, each plant ALWAYS starts with two weird V-shaped leaves that shoot up out of the ground, then ALWAYS continues growing by its first adult heart-shaped leaf appearing in the crack between these two leaf stalks, and with every new leaf after that ALWAYS appearing whenever a new crevice has been formed by a growing previous leaf. I had always thought of plant growth as chaotic and random, so it's fascinating to see that there's this baked-in mathematical formula encoded right into the plant's DNA. Anyway, more later as always!

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Urban gardening update, May 12th.











(I'm trying something special this year and am keeping a "photo blog," telling my story mostly through images but with a bit of description added as well, concerning my first-ever year of being an urban gardener. Check the "Garden 2014" photoset at my Flickr account for the entire series, including more photos for each entry than you see here.)

May 12: Well, all right, it was out with the old and in with the new this last weekend -- so I tossed all the plants I accidentally killed during the Great Garden Freezeout of 2014, finally repotted all the viola and mesclun sprouts I had from my April 8th planting, and started my fifth round of seeds, although this time only stuff I've planted before (more cinnamon bail, more spinach, more mesclun, more lettuce, more morning glories and more moonflowers). And not much else to report today, other than that you can see how my basil plants are doing after their first major harvesting last Thursday for my dinner party -- these two large pots of containers yielded a total of one cup of leaves, so I'm obviously going to have to grow a lot more basil next year if I want to have things like homemade pesto on any kind of regular basis. (In fact, this is one of the major conclusions I'm coming to here in my first year of gardening; that for this to be a truly sustainable garden, I need to concentrate the majority of my available windowsill space to multiple pots of staples like lettuce, spinach and basil, then occasionally throw in some other stuff like onions, sage, rosemary, etc.) That's basically the same lesson you can get as well from these photos of the mature salad-green plants, which I'll finally be harvesting next week for my first salad; even though the two pots (one mesclun, one looseleaf lettuce) are growing great, they're not going to yield much more than one small salad's worth of leaves. The big question right now is how fast it'll take for these plants to replenish themselves; that will determine just how many pots I want concurrently growing of this stuff next year. More soon!

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Urban gardening update, May 8th.






(I'm trying something special this year and am keeping a "photo blog," telling my story mostly through images but with a bit of description added as well, concerning my first-ever year of being an urban gardener. Check the "Garden 2014" photoset at my Flickr account for the entire series, including more photos for each entry than you see here.)

May 8: Oh no! I'M A MURDERER! The other day we had one of our first quiet sunny weekdays of the year, so I took all my seeds and most of my smaller plant pots up to the roof of my building, so they could get an entire day of direct sun. (I take them up at 9:05 a.m. then bring them back to my apartment at 4:55 pm, so that the majority of my office-working neighbors never realize I'm doing it in the first place, because I'm still not sure whether keeping plants on the roof is against the rooftop regulations; and I have west-facing windows in my place, so after 5:00 the plants keep getting direct sun until around 7:30 or so.) But I guess the weather was still just a little too cool for some of the plants' liking (it was in the low 50s in the morning, then got up to the mid-60s by the afternoon); because just after a single day, all my newest morning glories had all completely died, about half of my cinnamon basil, and about half of the leaves on my latest moonflower plants too. Ironically, though, as you can see in the photos, some of the other plants seemed to do quite well in the cooler weather; it didn't affect my mesclun or coleus sprouts at all, my looseleaf lettuce is looking better than ever, and the one new sugar snap pea plant I've gotten to sprout grew so much, you could literally see a difference in its size between that morning and that evening with your naked eye. So, yet another lesson about gardening learned the hard way -- some of the plants I'm trying to grow can't handle weather in the low 50s, while others do just fine.

It's funny -- this is the third or fourth plant I've now killed since March, which is just a natural side effect of the "gardening by trial and error" that I'm doing this year, and at first I felt incredibly guilty whenever it happened, like I had killed a puppy or something. But the more I think about the very subject of gardening this year -- and especially the more I think about the way all this stuff happens out in the natural world, away from human involvement whatsoever -- the more I realize that this kind of sudden, massive, almost genocidal kind of death is simply the way that vegetation works, and that there's no real need to be shedding any tears over a dead plant. After all, that's why a typical plant will emit hundreds or even thousands of seeds before it dies off for the winter; it knows that only a tiny amount of these will receive the natural soil submersion, water, nutrients and sunlight to sprout in the first place, and that even a smaller amount of those will survive unusual cold streaks, animal dinners, bugs, weeds, and all the other things that will prevent a sprout from growing into a thriving adult. A plant only needs one of those thousand seeds to catch on in order to continue its own existence, so the other 999 are essentially expendable, which is the mindset you too quickly start developing when you're a gardener, I've come to realize. Anyway, lesson learned, so it looks like it's back to the seed containers again this weekend for my fifth round of plantings!

Monday, May 5, 2014

Urban garden update, May 5th.


(I'm trying something special this year and am keeping a "photo blog," telling my story mostly through images but with a bit of description added as well, concerning my first-ever year of being an urban gardener. Check the "Garden 2014" photoset at my Flickr account for the entire series, including more photos for each entry than you see here.)

May 5: Not much work today, but I did do some transplanting; I noticed that my 4-inch pots of basil and salad greens haven't seemed to have grown much lately, and when I looked at the bottom, sure enough there were tons of roots growing through the drainage hole, so I knew it was time to transfer them both into the 6-inch pots that will be their final adult homes for the rest of the season. (Apparently such plants grow to a total height of six to eight inches under ideal circumstances, so you want six to eight inches of soil depth too.) I also took the opportunity to try a tip from my Facebook friend and fellow gardener Katy, which was to simply buy a bunch of green onions at the grocery store and pot them at home; apparently you can just snip off the green parts whenever you need them, and the bulb under the soil will keep growing more stalks all year long.



But alas, even when I checked in a couple of hours later, at sunset when I move all my plants away from the windows again for another night, the onions had drooped quite dramatically; so I thought maybe that advice should actually be to cut the adult stalks first, and use in some cooking soon, then plant just the bulbs and sprouts and wait for the next round of stalks to come up. And it just so happens that my first dinner party of the year is this coming Thursday -- I'm cooking for eight -- so this giant pile of green onions will actually come in quite handy. So hooray for me!






Also took the opportunity to shoot some "in-progress" photos of everything at sunset, my favorite time to shoot images of the plants, so that in future years I can rifle through all my 2014 photos and see exactly how big everything had gotten by whatever specific date. I have to say, all ten containers I now have of edible plants are each looking great in my opinion, which is a relief since your chances indoors with plants that need a lot of sun is always iffy at best. It'll be interesting to see how much actual edible food I'll get out of these; that will profoundly help me determine how much to schedule in advance for next year's garden, and what kinds of goals I need to set in order to have truly self-sustaining edibles for the entire summer in 2015. (That's the future goal -- to be able to have a salad every couple of days all summer long, and make a big jar of pesto every week, using just crops from my personal garden.) By the way, as a long-term follow-up to the question from a couple of weeks ago -- of whether carbonated water really is a kind of magic elixir to plants compared to regular water, which is easy for me to provide now that I have a Sodastream here at home -- well, I think you can see the results for yourself; all these things are growing like wildfire right now, and it's pretty amazing to realize that even the oldest of the plants you're seeing here were nothing more than pebbly seeds less than two months ago. I can state for a fact, for example, that my pot of looseleaf lettuce had before the carbonated water all been laying on its sides in a wilted-looking way, which I had thought was just its natural state; but after a couple of weeks of carbonated waterings now, it's proudly sticking up in the air like a 16-year-old boy in the math class of a surprisingly hot teacher.






And speaking of seeds, I'm happy to say that every crop of my latest two rounds of seedings (4/8 and 4/28) have sprouted now at least once, although it's quite different from one case to the next; as you can see, for example, the lavender and coleus are starting to sprout up by the dozens, just these wonderfully cute little tadpole things that are spreading like wildflowers; and in a wonderfully satisfying return on investment, four out of my six moonflower seeds and four of my six morning glory seeds have all sprouted now too. But it's still only been one out of six of the sugar pea pod plants, for another example; and less than a handful of the hundred chamomile seeds I spread with my clumsy giant fingers too, even as the oldest seedings of this bunch (violas and mesclun [a French salad mix], from April 8th) are getting very close to being ready to transplant into their transitory four-inch peat-paper pots.


Oh, and look how sad that palm looks all alone in that big white space over in the corner! How wonderfully would a big, bushy, but cheap fern look matched up with it on the radiator there, growing horizontally as the palm grows vertically, and the rest of that wall space filled with some picture frames I'm hanging soon? I think, in fact, a big ol' cheap basic fern is next on my list of major acquisitions from a store, although doubtfully in time for the dinner party on Thursday. Drat!

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Urban garden update, May 4th.











(I'm trying something special this year and am keeping a "photo blog," telling my story mostly through images but with a bit of description added as well, concerning my first-ever year of being an urban gardener. Check the "Garden 2014" photoset at my Flickr account for the entire series, including more photos for each entry than you see here.)

May 4: No news to share today; just thought I'd get some new photos taken of the latest growth, so I can compare this year's images in the future and see just how fast everything was growing over the season. I made a neat observation today, though, when looking at the plants in detail, which is that the first flower buds have started growing on my morning glory plant. I'm not sure how long it'll take for them to reach their mature size then bloom, but I thought I'd at least log their existence today so I can start to keep track!