Look at me, baking bread, drying herbs, hydroponics, sour dough starter and attempting to make yoghurt for the first time all in one corner!

(actually I lie, there's no herbs drying in it, but there was.  I don't trust mother in laws elderly machine but I've found it works by putting the basil in it and sticking it in my incredibly hot garage rather than using the electricity)

July 27th

An update!  I keep starting updates and then get distracted, the one time I tried to do it on my phone (instead of having to transfer the photos on my phone to my computer) it crashed and lost everything I'd written.

So tomatoes.

Not good.

I think just too hot so I ended up pulling them all up.

My eggplant has gone bananas growing, but as yet no eggplants.











Peppers... some are doing good some are not.  So far harvested one lonely ripe one but there are about 4 jalepenos and 4 sweet varieties.  Again, I think it's just been too hot.









Potatoes are plodding along.  Some of the stems have got long and fallen over, I guess if I had bigger buckets they would have more growing area.  Maybe next time.





Strawberries.  Sigh.  All the effort I put into the strawberry tower and only one plant has survived so far.  I was given another plant by my mother in law and that seems to be doing ok, but not the result I was hoping for.

I now have several fruit trees going, fig, papaya, meyer lemon and key lime (in one pot), guava, the weird little oranges I keep forgetting the name of, and the pineapple stump I planted.


Lettuce is coming along.










I decided to start some heirloom tomatoes for when it cools down a bit, so they have been growing on my windowsill.

Peppers and potatoes have gone crazy the last few days.  The pepper plants have grown and I've been pruning them so they've also bushed out a bit and I have several peppers growing.  Some may be a mystery as to what they are, lessons for next time make sure I keep the labels better.  We had a big storm the other day (well, every day, but this was a particularly big one) and afterwards the potato plants grew a ton.  I got a bit over enthusiastic with covering them up though as some of them have grown at different rates, so I've had to put the soil in the buckets a bit unevenly so that the smaller ones can still get some light.

Egg plant has also got big, we have another flower but as yet no egg plant.

Basil is also growing like crazy.

Two things that aren't doing so great, the strawberries.  A couple of the plants are growing nicely, some have shown no sign of life from the bare root plants, and some have grown leaves but then I guess died or gone back to sleep.  So not sure.

Tomatoes I think I have planted at the wrong time.  I may start some seedlings as we have such a long growing season, but on the whole they've been a disappointment.  I've got some growing on the cherry bush, the only one that ripened so far split.  And the only other one that has fruit is one lonely roma.

Still thinking about how to effectively get a rain barrel going without gutters.  I have some ideas.

Garden update with photos July 6th 2017

I took some quick photos of the garden this morning, I got sunburned at the pool yesterday with the kids so I didn't want to stay out there too long

All 4 potato buckets have at least one sprout coming up now, yay!
Each bucket had 5 potatoes in so I'm hoping a few more will start sprouting, and then I just need to wait for them to grow a bit and cover them with more dirt.

 Peppers!  The plants seem to be doing well and I have a few peppers coming in.  I got all different types some sweet and some hot (I don't like hot but Andrew my oldest is a hot sauce nut so maybe he'll like them), but I might not be entirely sure which ones are which now.  Oops.

Tomatoes, really only one plant has produced anything so far.  I think it's the cherry tomato plant.   Strawberries.  There were only planted 4 days ago as bare root plants, but out of 25 I have about 7 that are showing signs of life with growth so far.

Growing some romaine lettuce from seed, these have just been hanging out in my house on the windowsill so far.

And lastly the citrus trees and pineapple.  The pineapple is just the top off a fresh pineapple I bought from the store for the kids to eat, and planted.  I don't expect to get a pineapple from it for several years but I thought it would be fun anyway.  I also have a guava tree, the one little guava on it was already there when I bought the tree.  I really have no idea what guavas should look like so I should probably research that.  And lastly my calamondin citrus tree.  I think these are supposed to be more ornamental than anything but it produces fruit that is a bit like a large kumquat apparently.  Sweet on the outside and sour on the inside.  I may make some marmalade or something from them when they are ripe, at the moment I just have a lot of very small green ones.

July 4th update

Today I noticed a few of the strawberry plants are starting to wake up and grow some green leaves which is pretty fast since I only planted them 2 days ago.  Today I got some worms for the tower in the crates so now I have two towers to keep happy.  Luckily they like coffee grounds and egg shells.  Mind you, I will have no idea if they're not happy so I can live in blissful ignorance.

Also in the garden some of the potato sprouts are breaking the surface.  I need to watch the video I saw on them again, I think I wait until they are about 4-6 inches tall and then cover them with more soil so that they will grow potatoes up the whole bucket.

I also pulled up the spindly tomato plant that wasn't doing well and put 3 more healthy ones in, and dug up some of the pepper plants that don't seem to be growing, put them in pots and put the new healthy ones in the bed instead.    One tomato plant (I think the cherry) is doing well and is fruiting.  Next year I'm going to grow a bunch from seed I think.

I have a feeling this first year is going to be a steep learning curve.

Things I want to do:

Plant carrots (probably in a deep container)
Plant garlic
Figure out a rain barrel situation.  We have plenty of rain here especially with summer storms, but I need to see what kind of gutter system it going on because at the moment I end up with a moat all around my back porch, so ideally I want to collect all that, but it sounds like a big hassle to do it.  And that's without even making the rain barrel.

Strawberries

I decided to combine two ideas I saw on YouTube, one was the worm tower which I already started in my raised bed and the other idea is making a strawberry tower out of crates.  I hadn't seen any strawberry plants at the garden centers, so I ordered some bare root ones (which I forgot to take photos of as it was about to storm as I was putting all this together, so I was working as fast as I could to get it set up).  I picked up 4 plastic crates from Walmart which were $3 something each, and had already ordered some landscaping fabric.

The bottom crate I just have completely empty as it's just to lift everything higher off the ground.  I took some more of the tube I used for the raised bed worm tower and made some holes in it to let the worms in and out, and then in the bottom of two of the crates I made a hole big enough to feed the tube through.





The second crate up I did not cut so the tube wouldn't fall through and I completely lined it with the fabric to stop the soil falling through all the holes.  The next two up I just put fabric around the sides so that water and worms could travel freely through the crates.  I used some moisture control potting mix and regular potting mix in the hole it might help the bottom filled crate retain a bit more moisture in the Florida heat.  I also added a bit of plant food.


Then it was time to stack them all, filling as I went the same way until all three were filled with the tube through all three.  I then cut a little hole in the fabric in sides poked my finger in and then shoved the roots of the plants in careful to keep the crown out.  I had ordered 20 plants but in fact ended up with 25 so that was a bonus!  I scattered them around the outside of the crates and then put 4 on the very top, and also added some mulch to the top to help with water retention.   As the plants produce runners eventually I will add more to it.  At the moment there is nothing in the worm tube as I don't have any more worms, but I will be given some tomorrow as my mother in laws worm farm has an abundance of them.

 Hopefully the tube will help with getting water all through the crates, and in a few weeks the plants will wake up and we will see some growth.

Potatoes

Another gardening project, potatoes.  Instead of growing them in the ground, I decided to use buckets.  Lots of videos on YouTube for doing this, so I bought some 5 gallon food grade buckets from Firehouse Subs (who says the money for the pickle buckets goes to a charity for the Fire Service, which I hope is true).  The pickle smell was pretty awful.  We washed out the buckets while I waited for the seed potatoes I had ordered to arrive.  I ordered Yukon Gold because we like them.

When the potatoes arrived, they hadn't really sprouted much but some of them had a bit so I cut them up into pieces where the sprouting eyes were and left them to dry on a paper towel for a couple of days.

Next task was to drill holes in the bottom of the buckets for drainage.  I used a 1 inch spade bit to make the holes and then put the buckets on some bricks I acquired from my mother in law. 

Next I put in a few stones to stop the soil immediately falling though, and then a few inches of soil, and then put my potatoes in, careful to put the eyes that were sprouting so they were facing up.  I had enough to put 5 good ones in each bucket, and gave the rest to my mother in law who says she will try and grow them.  I covered them with some dirt and will now cross my fingers for a few weeks to see what happens.  Once the prospective plants are about 6 inches tall I will put more dirt in and keep going up the bucket.

Worms

I had been reading and watching YouTube videos on using worms in the garden, but I don't know that I want to commit to a composting area yet, our back yard is big enough but not super big and we seem to be having an insect problem as it is which I don't want to add too much to.  So a worm tower seems like a good option.

I plan to make a milk crate tower for some strawberries this week and adding a worm tower, but in the meantime I thought my poor over manured raised bed might benefit from a worm tower as well.  Most videos I saw used either a bucket or a pvc pipe to build their tower, but I decided a bucket would take up too much room.  And the only cut pieces of pvc pipe I could find were really thick and I wasn't sure if I could easily drill holes in them.  I was going to purchase it anyway when I went to pick up some replacement plants (see the earlier post on my raised bed) and saw some stretchy black pipe that I thought would be easier to make holes in and had caps for and I only had to buy one piece of pipe to make several worm towers since it could be stretched out.

I wasn't entirely sure it would work, but I liked it better than the pvc pipe.  It already has some small holes running through it which I thought would be good for drainage, but I needed bigger holes for the worms to come in and out.  I tried to drill some holes in, but it didn't work out well because the pipe was squishy.  So I cut some holes with scissors.  It doesn't look very pretty, but it's underground anyway....hopefully the worms don't mind too much.  











I dug a deep hole (had to snip some roots from a nearby tree) and put the pipe in, and then added some shredded newspaper, some coffee grounds, some crunched up egg shells, some veggie scraps and some worms from my mother in laws worm farm.   I watered it in a bit and hopefully the worms will like it and in return give me some nice earth for my veggie bed.  I'm keeping a cap on the top to keep insects etc out, and I'll just add some scraps to it for them.

Lastly I added some tomato plant food to the plants and mulched the whole bed so that it will retain water in the Florida heat.

Gardening (for the clueless).

We decided we wanted a little vegetable patch.  Before we have only rented houses so haven't been able to actually plant anything in the ground.  There was a dead spot of grass where the previous owners had a child's trampoline, so we decided to get a little raised bed.  A few days before we had got a bunch of tomato and pepper plants, an eggplant/aubergine, and some basil which were doing nicely in pots on our patio.

I dug out the grass in the area we wanted to put it (which turned out to have quite a few roots from a tree that is about 12 feet or so away on the outside of our fence) and then we placed the raised bed, and filled it with soil mixed with cow manure.  Then I replanted all the plants out of their pots.








All looked well to start with, the peppers looked a bit droopy but I thought they were probably just shocked and would perk up.








However, the next day they weren't looking so great.  The peppers were the first to look a bit rough, they had perked up but their leaves looked a bit brown.  A couple of days later they looked worse, and the basil had big black spots on it.  I wasn't sure what was happening so turned to google and thought maybe it was a fungal thing from the soil.  So I got some organic spray.  However now I've done some more research I think we used too much cow manure and the plants got burned.  Some of them have recovered okay, but some of the peppers seem to be stunted and some of the tomato plants have yet to grow any fruit (I've got one that is fruiting).  So this may be a good lesson.  I've bought a few more pepper plants, so I may just swap out the stunted ones.  I also decided to build a worm tower for my bed....

New lights

The previous owners kept the house in very nice shape. It was built 7 years ago and they made some improvements, put in wood floors through the main areas aside from the bedrooms, obviously replaced some lighting in the kitchen, added some surround sound speakers into the ceiling in the living room.
Here's a picture from the real estate listing (so not our furniture).




 

One thing I did not like though was the lights outside the garage, they looked like they may have originally been painted red to match the front door, but the sun faded them to pink? Not sure but I thought they were ugly. So the day after we closed on the house we purchased some black ones, which I am much happier with (although we ended up having to take one back as the motion sensor wasn't working, but it was an easy swap).

Two weeks ago was the 20th anniversary of our first date. Four weeks ago we bought our first house. I'm British, he's American and having tried living in both countries, we have settled in Florida, having also tried several different States. We have 3 children between the ages of 8 and 13. This blog will be about various things I'm up to around the house, things I'm gardening (which I have no clue what I'm doing, so is a voyage of discovery), and craft projects. And anything else I feel like sharing. For many years I had a blog on Livejournal but when Facebook took off I migrated to there, which is not the same at all. This will be more of a documentation of things I'm up to, things that work and the things that don't.