At the organic gardeners meeting last Wednesday we became the proud owners of a Sweet Potato slip and a Seminole Pumpkin plant. If you are not familiar, Sweet Potatoes are just awesome. The Seminole Pumpkin is a butternut squash-like veggie that is supposed to grow well here. As of now, I still have the sweet potato on the porch until I can determine what to do with it. And the Seminole Pumpkin has been transplanted to a larger pot and put under a bottle brush on the side of the house ( so it can climb it).
Tag: gardening
Preparing square Foot Garden
After a late start, I finally finished the square foot garden. I used the book Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew for advice on how to prepare a garden. Carlos assisted me in clearing a spot in the garden. After the area was cleared and leveled off, a weed sheet was put
down and the garden frame was assembled. The garden frame was purchased as a pre-configured set to save time.
The potting mix used is a combination of peat moss, vermiculite, and compost in 1/3 amounts. Large quanties of vermiculite was hard to find, I was only able to obtain it in an old school feed store (that sold bab
y chicks and live turkeys). The sq ft gardening book recommended that the compost be a mix of different brands and types of compost to ensure diversity of nutrients. I mixed the soil on a large tarp.
The last step in setting up the garden was setting up the grid system. A theme you might notice is lazy gardening. Instead of setting up the fancy wood grid as specified in the book, I made a grid from leftover garden string. I used old popsicle sticks to hold the strings.Finally, I prepared a diagram of what I plan to grow in my new garden. I was able to use Carlos’s old graphing paper for this one 🙂
Growing With Leala 