Day 5

Today, I've included a few close-ups of some of the veggie plants.  There are approximately 40 plants in the garden and I see no reason to include close-ups of all of them. So for starters I've included a big boy hybrid tomato (it's the smallest of them all-late bloomer), 2 squash plants (unfortunately in the transplant from indoor to outdoor, I lost track of what types they are - only time will tell), a pepper plant (there's actually 2 of them there because I didn't split them: This might be Serrano, but again the nice organized chart of all our plants that my darling daughters created became useless when I started randomly throwing plants in the garden), and finally the worst looking plant in either of our two gardens - a squash that hasn't quite died yet, but is not happy about being thrown out of the nice cozy house. I haven't given up hope for it.... I never do.

Day 4

I spent some time watering the garden last night making sure to look at each plant for any problems.  Had I realized that a thunderstorm was rolling in late last night, I would not have wasted the water.  In any case, the plants all look pretty healthy. The cherry tomatoes are doing very well and appear to be growing fast.  The pepper plants look healthy, but based on my experience last year are very slow growers.  The squash plants appear to be hit or miss....some of them look healthy and have new growth on them, while others look a little sickly with dead leaves and little new growth.  I will start including a few close-up pictures because you can't see much from larger photo.

Day 3

Most of the plants appear to be doing well. Although some of the squash and maybe the cucumber look to have some leaves that are shriveled. I've been watering them so I don't think it's lack of hydration, and there is enough drainage in the soil to prevent over watering. I have never had luck with cucumbers so I'm curious to see how this year goes. The tomatoes and pepper plants look very healthy.

I have been using weed barrier in the garden to keep the retched plants at bay, but I wonder if that's the best solution. I notice that people around me, that have larger gardens, do not use it. Do they just pull the weeds on a regular basis?

I have also started a blog about our pumpkin garden. While I'm not trying to go for any world-record size pumpkins, it's lots of fun for the kids come Halloween time :)

Day 2

There's not much going on in the garden yet. I was a little late with the suggested May 15 planting date, but it should be fine as we grew them indoors to begin with.

We went through 3 different styles of fencing until we established one that appears to be most effective. The first year our fence was tall, but the garden was small; it was a successful garden, but we wanted to expand to allow room for squash. The second year we made the garden larger, but the baby rabbits were walking right through the fence (gaps between were only slightly too large) - they ate most everything. Finally our current garden has a 2 part fence. There is a 2' fence that's buried about 6" into the ground....that's to keep the little rabbits out. Then there's the 4' fence to keep everything else out. It's not necessarily pretty, but it works.

The Bantz Garden 2010

This is my first attempt at a blog and I will be exploring improving our vegetable garden. We are currently growing Squash (Spaghetti, Butternut, and Summer), Tomatoes (cherry and big boy), Eggplant, Cucumber, Peppers (Habanero, Serrano, and Jalapeno) and pumpkins.