More seeds

On Saturday morning, I attended the small-space gardening class at Prairie Gardens.  It was interesting, though having done a lot of reading/research on the subject of container gardening, and having done it for 2 years, not a lot of the information was brand new to me.  But it’s always good to have your facts reinforced.
After [...]

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Container gardening seminar

If you’re local, I’m going to be heading to the container gardening seminar that is offered (for free!) at Prairie Gardens.  I’ve pasted the information from their website below…  Let me know if you’ll go, too!  Registration is online at their website.  
Saturday, March 14
Small Space Vegetable Gardening
With Judie Fair & Jim Wuersch
Not a lot [...]

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Eggshells

I’m not very good at following through with planning ahead for the garden.  I get really excited about it all, but I don’t do any planting research enough ahead of time and when I get to the planting part, there are things I find out that I would have liked to have done.  This year, [...]

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Note to self: date of last spring frost

Last year, for some reason, I had trouble finding this information.  But this year I found a handy-dandy map:
http://www.isws.illinois.edu/atmos/statecli/Frost/last_spring_frost.htm
I’m looking forward to getting home to start calculating when to plant my seeds!

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Yuck.

Well, we cut our last cucumber last night.  It may have had some time left on the vine still, but it needed to get cut…  The second (and last) cucumber plant contracted something nasty…  I’m pretty sure that it had powdery mildew* and then last night I noticed something else:

I have *no idea* what this [...]

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Stop shriveling cucumbers

or, “A brief photo tutorial on hand-pollinating cucumbers.”
A bit of introduction:
Last year, I was having problems with getting cucumbers to grow. I’d see the flowers, I’d see the baby cucumbers (which I later learned were female flowers, more about that below), and then the baby cucumbers would shrivel. I posted about it in [...]

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Strawberry pollination

I’ve been thinking about the strawberry flowers recently and wondering how the flower turns into the fruit.  Tomatoes are self-pollinating.  With my cucumbers, I had to pollinate the female flowers with pollen from the male flowers by hand (see here and here and especially the comments here).  So I started to wonder about the strawberries.  [...]

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Tomato sprout update

It’s been a while since I gave the tomatoes the spotlight… I meant to post earlier this week, but it’s been a crazy one, and so I’ll post my pictures from Monday today.
They’re growing well, it seems. Tiny Tim is the smallest… I was a little surprised at how obviously [...]

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To-do list for the garden and blog

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, considering it’s spring and things are growing in my garden!  Here’s a list of things I plan to do in the near future:

photo update of the garden & tomato seedlings
write a “Strawberries” page (tab)
write a “Peas” page (tab)
start looking into thinning the lettuce sprouts

The cucumber seeds haven’t sprouted [...]

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SEEDS!

Last night my husband and I went to Prairie Gardens and bought seeds!

We also got me an early birthday present of a trowel and gardening gloves. I’m so excited! The photo is probably too small for anyone to actually make out the varieties, so I’ll describe our choices below.

Tomatoes: [...]

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