Thankful Thursday

I am thankful today 
for the rain.  Yeah, it’s kind of nasty and chilly out there, but it’s been so dry recently, the ground must be cheering  And my garden is probably happy about it too.  I’m not so good at remembering to water it sometimes…
for progress that I made at work this week. [...]

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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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New fertilizer

Until now I’ve been using Miracle Gro (the multi-purpose formulation) to fertilize my garden. It works fine, but I ran out So I went to the store today, and started looking at the fertilizer options that they had.
I’ve learned that fertilizers mainly contain three nutrients necessary for plants’ growth: nitrogen, [...]

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Lettuce woes

My black-seeded Simpson is not doing very well.  I’m not exactly sure what the problem is.  Ever since I thinned them, the sprouts have languished– one of them has even flat out died.  They don’t seem to have any self-support the way they used to, and I usually find them sort of lying down.  Perhaps [...]

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More planting!

This garden is going to be our biggest one yet!
First, a quick update:
I FOUND A PEA SPROUT YESTERDAY!

I had almost given up on the peas, because it had been 14 days with no sign of a sprout.  I was going to sort of poke around in the soil and see (by sacrificing one seed, if [...]

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Outdoor seed planting

It is a gloriously beautiful SPRING day outside today! So this morning I decided that this is the day to plant my peas and lettuces!
I started by unwrapping the six 14″ terracotta pots from their winter ensconcement (I think I just made up that word, but I like it ) under the [...]

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Thunderstorm craving

I just want to say, I REALLY want a good thunderstorm. The weather forecast for my zip code predicts thunderstorms and an 80% chance of precipitation for tonight… I hope I hope I hope! But given the way the weather patterns have gone for the whole spring/summer/fall, we’ll probably get the 20% [...]

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It’s a jungle out there!

When friends come over to our place and see the balcony garden, their comments are always along the lines of, “Wow, you’ve got a jungle on your balcony!” I take that as a compliment It must mean that our plants are thriving. Here’s a picture that I took of the garden [...]

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Thankful… Friday?

I’m a bit late this week… but better late than no post!
This week I am thankful:
* for the rain (and the fabulous thunderstorms) and the extra bonus of not having to water my plants every day
* that hand-pollination is working and I have hope that the cucumbers will grow up to be eatable
* for [...]

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Shriveling cucumbers

So I’m having a bit of a problem with my cucumbers. The vines are growing nicely, I think, and the plants are flowering like crazy. And every so often I find a tiny new cucumber starting. The problem is that a few days later, I’ll look for that little cucumber and find [...]

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