Gardening Update!

Despite the forecast rain for the weekend, Billa and I headed out to the La Casa Della Marino to check on our garden boxes.  If you'll remember, this is what they looked like when we began this journey a little over three weeks ago:

This is what they look like now:

Pretty awesome, right? Right?  We are very excited by the amount of growth we've achieved in four weeks.  Let me take you on a tour of our garden.

This is what we call the "Shade Box" or "Cool Weather Box."  It's called this because it does not receive full sun all day long due to a two story house on the other side of the fence.  Anyone who has visited Texas in the summertime knows how brutal the sun can be in these parts, so having a partly shaded bed for some full sun plants is actually not a bad thing.  In this box, we have planted onions (white and red), carrots, spinach, Bibb lettuce, romaine lettuce, blue adirondack potatoes, white russett potatoes, black beans, pole beans, and strawberries.  The strawberries are the blank spot.  We got these strawberry root things for about a buck, so we figure since they're not coming up, we didn't lose out on too much.  I transplanted some of my lettuce to some of the blank spot since I overplanted them a bit.  Oops. I'll probably leave the rest of the strawberries though and see if anything comes up. 

This box is our "Full Sun Box" or "Hot Box."  We have Moon & Star watermelons in the back, with tomatoes and tomatillos in the middle, and serrano and bell peppers along the front.  I'm super excited about the tomatillos; you have to get two plants in order to make baby tomatillos and I got two different kinds.  One of them makes PURPLE tomatillos and the other regular green ones.  On a side note, anyone know the proper plural spelling for tomatillo?  Is it like tomato, where you add an 'es' or do you just add an 's'?  I'm going to go with the 's' for now.

And this is the Corn Box.  It's pretty straightforward.

This is my lemon tree.  It's not doing so well right now, because the wind keeps blowing off leaves and blossoms and now I am worried it has something else going on because the leaves are beginning to yellow.  I need to contact the folk at Natural Gardener and find out what I need to do to resuscitate it, otherwise, I may not have any lemons this summer and that will make me super sad, considering how long I've been waiting to get some from it!

So there's our gardening update.  It's so much fun to see everything grow and Billa loves helping us water.  I can't wait until we actually start getting produce so that we can cook and eat the fruits of our labors.

Until next time,
Kelly & the Gang