Weekend Gardening: Containers
July 5, 2009 by Andrea 
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Long before I had Michael and the boys and a house with a yard, I had a few pots of herbs and tomatoes on the balcony of my small Chicago apartment. It was a small container garden, just enough for me and my roommate, and it was perfect for my needs at the time.
To this day I continue to keep some things in containers even though we now have a few raised beds in our yard. My container garden varies from season to season and year to year. In the winter we grow basil and cilantro indoors so I have a steady supply of those herbs for much of the year. I keep scallions in a pot year round, indoors in cold weather and outdoors for the rest. In the late spring we move the indoor pots out to the deck and plant new things in the remaining pots. Read more
Weekend Gardening: An Unexpected Visitor
June 27, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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This weekend our gardening chores included some weeding, routing the beans and peas so they would climb properly, adding more tomato cages, and transplanting the volunteer tomatoes and tomatillos to a spot where they would have more room. Some of our tomato plants are now two meters tall and it’s not even July yet, and all have set fruit, both hopeful signs of a good harvest to come.
The cages were three and five feet tall, and several plants have already gone a foot or more above, so Michael made some more cages and stacked them on top.
He used some binder clips to hold the layers of tomato cages together. We tend to Macgyver things a bit. Read more
Weekend Gardening: Successes and Challenges
June 20, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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In spite of all the rain this year that has drowned parts of our garden, the tomatoes and peppers have continued grow. The tomatoes and peppers do well in their location on the south side of the house, the same spot we had them in last summer, and we already have lots of blossoms on the plants. I found four more volunteer plants, some tomatoes and tomatillos, bringing the total number of volunteers to eleven. There’s no room for them here, so we’re going to move them to another part of the yard to see how they do.
Weekend Gardening: Not All Garden Pests Have Wings
May 17, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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We planted our garden. It began to grow and we were very happy. First we had this.
Weekend Gardening: Fruits of our Labors
May 2, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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We’ve had a very busy spring full of building raised beds, transplanting herbs to their new home, planting seeds, planting trees, planting new edibles, ripping out inedible ornamental bushes and replacing with edibles. It seems like we’ve hardly had time for a break on the weekends, and we still have more to do. It’s a lot of work but we’re already enjoying the fruits of our labors.
BUILDING THE RAISED BEDS
After two years of being in the house we finally decided on the location for our raised garden beds. The first year we had a container garden, then last year we ripped out a bunch of inedible bushes on the south side of the house and planted tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, and herbs in about 48 square feet of space. This year we added 132 square feet of raised bed space and about 50 more square feet where the apple and cherry trees and blueberry bushes are planted. Still had plenty of room for the rhubarb and horseradish that’s coming back from last year.
Before building we took some scrap boards and laid them out where the beds would go so we could get a visual idea of how it would look and test the width between them to make sure we would have plenty of room to walk, turn, and bend.
Weekend Gardening: Vegetable Gardening Tips from Southern Living
April 11, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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While visiting my parents in South Carolina for spring break, my mother gave me a wonderful present: a ticket to a presentation on kitchen gardens at the Riverbanks Zoo and Garden given by Rebecca Bull Reed, Associate Gardening Editor for Southern Living magazine (thanks Mom!). Reed, a South Carolina native, has been traveling around the southern states finding examples of great vegetable and herb gardens, and along with Steve Bender and Gene Bussell, the other gardening editors, has put together some great articles on these gardens. Check out the links below to see some of those gardens on the Southern Living website. (I forgot to take my camera, so no photos of her presentation. Sorry!)
The point of the presentation was to encourage people to start kitchen gardens and provide smart tips on how to do it successfully as well as demonstrate some easy dishes to make from homegrown herbs and vegetables (The Lemon Thyme Cookies were to die for.) My notes do not completely cover Reed’s two-hour presentation, but here’s a brief summary of her tips (notes from me in parentheses): Read more
