I could be off on this slightly, but my brother would rather hire someone to garden for him and both my sisters appear to tolerate gardening (aka - they like the idea or theory of gardens and will actually plant a garden but they don't like the watering, weeding and other tasks that come along). So I'm pretty sure I'm the only one of my siblings that actually enjoys gardening.
I'm not a world class gardener but I do take pride in my garden. While I was outside tonight, I thought I'd take a few pictures and maybe document what my garden looks like now.
This is a picture of my Rose garden. I can't take much credit for these, as they were planted before we bought the house 3 years go, however there is more to gardening than planting.
Here is my garden. (don't look at the weeds around the boxes. I planned on putting bark around them but I spent all (and more) of my gardening budget already. Maybe next year.) It's actually a square foot garden, I read about Square Foot Gardening a few years ago and have been successfully Square foot gardening for 2 years now. I have 100 sq feet of garden space. Not alot of space, however it is used quite efficiently. Our garden has really mutated into a Salsa garden. We grow tomatoes, peppers, onions and we are almost able to make Salsa completely from our garden. (last year we had to buy onions as we didn't have enough.)
My new addition this year are my tomato cages. The ones you buy at the store work for the first month or so, then they are not able to hold up the tomato plants, so you end up having a big tomato bush all over the ground. Last summer we went to my Uncle Kims and he had built 5 foot tall tomato cages from remesh used in concrete. After a few emails back and forth, I went and bought a 150 x 5 foot roll of remesh to make similar cages. Each cage took between 5 to 6 feet of remesh. As I visited my Uncle last year, his tomatoes were actually growing out the top of these 5 foot cages. My tomatoes are doing well so far this year and are on track for to grow out the top and give us a great salsa harvest.
I also cut a 5 foot cage in half and put it around my Squash and Zucchini, seen below. I'm going to try and grow squash and zucchini vertically. This year I also planted new or Red Potatoes. I've never grown potatoes before, so it is an experiment for me, however since both my parents were born in Idaho, I'm assuming it's in the bloodline somewhere. If I fail miserably, then there might be some substance to my brothers claim that I'm adopted. I didn't know this until this year, but when you plant a potato, the roots grow down and the potatoes actually grow above where you planted. Since I planted about 8 inches deep, I'll only get potatoes from where I planted to the top of the soil. So as potato sprouts come out of the ground, you are suppose to mound the dirt up so that they have more places to actually grow potatoes. I built another box that I set on top of my box and am planning on filling it with dirt, so that instead of having only 8 inches of potential potatoes, I'll have 18 inches of potential potatoes. I'm hoping to get some more dirt tomorrow.
