Discouraged

Lately, it seems as though as soon as I blog about something, it turns to shit.

Take, for instance, my valiant effort at taking up some good exercise--and attempting to learn to love running in the process--with my foray into a C25K program. I posted this after running Week 2, Day 2, and I was doing well. I was getting through the workouts fairly easily. I was *gasp* actually enjoying myself a bit. I felt good.

But in the days after, I noticed that my knees were doing a little bit of screaming as I tried to do simple things. You know, like run up the stairs, squat, or... walk. I dismissed it as a bit of soreness since I've never been a runner. I decided to soldier on, but during that Week 2, Day 3 run, I was hurting pretty badly. I questioned whether I could make it through, but I did. Then I waited a few days (with still sore knees), and completed Week 3, Day 1.

My knees were not happy with me.

I reached out to some friends who are runners and asked if this was normal, if it was a sign of my poor knees being out of shape. They all pointed to my sneakers, asking if I had good ones (I don't). They also advised that I NOT run through the pain, as I would likely just make it worse.

So, I stopped. My (old, unsupportive) sneakers have been neglected for the past few weeks as I try to let my knees heal before starting back up again. I've been shopping--visited a Fleet Feet to get fitted for good sneakers, even--and found out that like a lot of people, my arch collapses under the pressure of my body weight, so I need a more supportive sneaker to help absorb the shock of running. I haven't made the commitment and bought a pair yet--I'm still gawking a little over the $100 price tags (I'm more the "find-$40-sneakers-on-clearance" type of girl).

Before I give up on running completely, I do want to give it another try--so it sounds like I'll have to bite the bullet for some good sneakers. Otherwise, I guess it'll be strictly walking for me, and we'll eventually get an elliptical machine for our basement. I have a hard time believing it is my knees, even though they have given me a few issues throughout my life. I used to do kickboxing and step aerobics (hard on your knees!) classes twice a week and my instructor was the master of jumping lunges, so it's not like my knees have never taken any abuse.

Let's hope new sneakers do the trick.

On a completely separate but equally suck-tastic note, I posted last week about my adventures in square foot gardening. I had been working hard for over a month on this venture, watering, watching, waiting, anticipating. I was so proud and happy to show off my bountiful plants, and all of my baby tomatoes and peppers.

Yeah, well, apparently rabbits and/or squirrels read my blog, because they found my bounty and they STOLE IT ALL. I'm serious, I do not have a single baby ANYTHING on my plants any longer. These rodents PICKED.IT.CLEAN.

I very nearly cried, I'm not going to lie.

So, I don't know what to do. I think the tomato plants will keep producing--they have a number of flower buds left on them at this point--and my zucchini and cucumbers have yet to produce anything yet anyway. My zucchini plants seem to have grown so tall that they are keeling over under their own weight (two of them are now lying on their sides), but I'm hoping that this is normal?

Whoever the culprit is has also been munching on my broccoli leaves, but I guess we'll see what happens there because I'm still not seeing anything resembling actual broccoli coming from them. But my red pepper plant? There is basically nothing left on that guy. He was only producing one pepper anyway, and now he has nothing. Not even any flower buds or shoots that look like they will result in buds. Nothing.

I wonder: what can be done at this point? I am contemplating replanting a few things, but it's mid-July, will they have time to produce before it's too late into the fall? Also, it's clear that I need to build some sort of fence around this thing, but I'm struggling with what exactly to use that will keep both rabbits AND squirrels out--AND give me access to the beds if I need. Until I figure that out, I've been sprinkling everything with cayenne pepper, garlic powder, and/or cayenne pepper to try to deter the little f-ers.

I also put out a pie plate full of water, which sounds ludicrous, but I read that during particularly dry weather--which we've been experiencing, we haven't even mowed our lawn in 2+ weeks!--the rabbits and squirrels will actually steal veggies not because they are hungry, but because they are thirsty. On one of the gardening forums I came across, they suggested that if you provide water, they might be so inclined to leave the veggies alone. Here's hoping. It seems to make sense, since I went so long without them bothering anything, and now they raid the garden like its their job.

So these are my two latest failures in life. I'm trying not to let them get me down! Hopefully I will emerge victorious--with both a completed 5K and a boatload of homegrown vegetables--by fall.

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Square Foot Gardening

I have been meaning to write this post for a month, but I'm just now getting around to it. Oops.

Back when we still lived in our condo, one of the things I looked forward to most about moving to a house was the opportunity to try my hand at growing my own vegetables in the summer months. This winter, as we got closer and closer to spring, I began thinking about a veggie garden. But I had no idea what I was doing.

And honestly, I still don't really know what I'm doing. But I'm experimenting, I suppose. Experimenting with guidance, because I did do SOME research, after all.

I had heard a lot of good things about raised garden beds and the method of square foot gardening. I had good intentions to buy Mel Bartholomew's book on the subject, but uh... I never got around to it. Instead, I asked a lot of questions of friends and did a LOT of Googling.

We bought a raised garden bed kit (4' x 4') at Home Depot for around $30. Then I used Mel's soil mix "recipe"--1/3 part peat moss, 1/3 part vermiculite, 1/3 part compost. I got all of my soil supplies at a local gardening store. To fill our garden bed, I think I ended up with about 10 cu. ft. of material. I mixed up the soil (eyeballing the amounts) in batches in our wheelbarrow, then filled the garden bed. Not before debating for weeks about where to put the garden bed, though.

We have a very shady yard. Our house faces south, so our "side yards" (which we don't really have very much of) would get the most sun, except that the light tends to be blocked by neighbors' houses. Our front and backyards have a lot of trees (which we love), so it's just... shady. For best results, veggie plants need approximately 6 hours of sunlight a day, so we needed to figure out where in our yard that was possible. We debated between 2-3 locations, and observed the sunlight different times of day, trying to determine which area was best. It was sort of hard, as we were doing this in May, when the trees out back were starting to fill in with leaves again, but certainly weren't as full as they are now!

We finally settled on an area behind our garage, and got busy. We laid scrap cardboard out to block weeds/kill the grass, and put our garden bed kit on top of it. Once filled with soil, I sectioned off each square foot of the garden with string so that I would have a guide for planting.

Then, I just needed plants.

I decided from the beginning that I had no interest in growing anything from seed. Call me lazy, but I would rather leave the seedlings up to somebody else. So, I set out to pick up a variety of veggie plants--from our farmer's market, from our local gardening stores, and I even picked up one from Home Depot. Then, I needed a plan for planting--so I mapped out the locations of each of the plants in the bed on a piece of paper.

Anyway, I'm sure you want pictures, yes? Unfortunately, I didn't take many, but here's what my little garden looked like at the beginning:

This is actually before I even bought the zucchini and cucumber plants! Pictured above are six square feet of broccoli plants, one red pepper plant, four basil plants, and two tomato plants (one beefsteak, one lemon boy). The tomato plants have the little ring thingies (see? I'm such an expert) to help support them as they grow. The plant in the pot is a strawberry plant. Within a few days of this photo, I added three zucchini plants (occupying one full sq. ft. each) and four cucumber plants (two per sq. ft.) to fill up the rest of the garden bed.

At first, I watered daily. Then, I read that it's best to do a deep watering, but less often, so now I've been watering every 2-3 days (mostly every other day, since it has been hot and dry here).

Five weeks later, I've got this:

Woot woot! Most of our veggies are singing. But our grass--well, our grass is crying. Poor grass. Did I mention it has been REALLY dry here? Also, don't mind the wheelbarrow full of kindling in the background.

ANYWAY. Here's a closer look at each plant.

Our red pepper plant has had this baby bell pepper on it for a few weeks now. It doesn't seem to be growing very quickly, but maybe this is to be expected. At one point, it had a bunch of flowers on it, which I thought would turn into a bunch of peppers, but alas, only one. The rest of the flowers are nowhere to be found anymore. I don't know, maybe we'll only get one pepper out of this guy. I'm holding out hope, though!

Side note: Funny story about my inexperience as a gardener. At one point during my Google adventures, I read something about how you're supposed to prune the flowers off of the plants so that all of the plant's "energy" is focused on growing the fruit, not the flowers. So, when this pepper plant started flowering (it was the first to do so), I actually almost cut off the flowers! I was too chicken to do it, though, and it's a good thing--since I now know that THE FLOWERS TURN INTO THE VEGETABLES.

Here's a shot of a couple of our zucchini plants (we planted three). My father-in-law is in disbelief that we dared to put zucchini plants in a small garden bed like this because he's convinced that they'll overtake everything else. And, well, maybe they will. We shall see. Somehow I need to try to keep them contained as they grow--I think I can trim back the leafy parts, yes? Anyone with gardening experience care to share some expertise?

The zucchini plants are currently flowering like crazy--the flowers are really pretty when they're open during the day! I noticed tonight that one of the plant's flowers are starting to shrivel up and fall off so I'm hoping to get some zucchini babies soon!

Here is an above shot of our six broccoli plants. As you can see, some of them are doing better than others. I'm pretty convinced that the one in the bottom middle square isn't going to make it. Poor thing. Also, you can probably see that something is chewing the hell out of the leaves on my broccoli plants. Everything else appears to be untouched, but whatever it is sure likes broccoli. I'm not stressing about it too much since the leaves aren't the part we're planning to eat. Unless someone tells me I should be stressing about it. Should I be? Anyway, no signs of baby broccoli crowns yet. Fingers crossed.

Oh, you can also see the little yellow spots forming on my zucchini plant leaves in this pic. All of them have it, but I have no idea what it is. Thoughts?

Cucumbers! I had some trouble with these guys, as one of the plants didn't survive transplant. But, I replaced him quickly to give another guy a chance. These haven't been springing up as quickly as other things, so I was starting to get worried about them all. But tonight I noticed that they are starting to form small flower buds, so YAY! I think they're on their way.

Tomato plants are awesome. It's so satisfying to grow them because I swear, it seems like they've grown another few inches every day that I go out there. And we've noticed a TON of flowers forming on them that we're hoping will result in lots o' tomatoes.

I was diligently checking for tomato babies every day for a couple of weeks--to no avail--but then suddenly BOOM! Within the last few days, we've sprouted babies!! Two days ago, we had two tomato babies, and as of tonight, we have SEVEN. I am so excited!

Last, but not least--basil. I had plans to grow more herbs this year, in separate pots, but didn't get around to buying or planting them. But at least we've got basil, because this family? We like pesto. A lot of pesto. I've actually already harvested enough basil off of these plants--twice--to make a full batch of pesto. I've stolen various amounts of leaves for other recipes calling for fresh basil, too. In fact, this picture doesn't do my basil plants justice because I just harvested leaves to make pesto on Saturday, so the bounty has been significantly depleted. Needless to say, basil is doing really well.

I forgot to take a photo of my strawberry plant, but it's pretty boring because I swear it has not changed AT ALL. I am not holding out very much hope that we'll be seeing any strawberries this year. Boo.

So that is my gardening experience so far. I've gotten a pretty big kick out of it and am pleased with our success so far. Assuming things continue going well, I want to expand the veggie garden next year--by at least one, if not two more garden beds. Imagine the possibilities! Wheeee!

What are you growing this year? What has been successful? Any failures? Any inexperienced gardeners out there with funny stories like mine (almost cutting off the flowers)? Do you have any comments or tips based on what you're seeing in my little ol' garden here?

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Green Thumb

We had our first little taste of spring yesterday, with 60-degree weather. When we got home from work, we spent some time playing with Nora outside, which was so refreshing. And girlfriend LOVED IT, so I think we will be spending a lot of time outdoors in the coming months. I cannot wait for that.

In the meantime, though, we have retreated back indoors, where we New Yorkers belong this time of year (brrrr!). But the little spring preview has me dreaming of warmer, sunnier days, and how I want to spend them.

I want to start a garden.

When I say "green thumb" in the title of this post, I mean GREEN in the sense that I am inexperienced. A newbie. I have no clue what I'm doing.

We have a fair amount of shade in our backyard (lots of trees), so I've been told that a garden might not fare well back there. However, I think we have a few spots that get enough sun for it to work, but I don't know that. Because, well, how much direct sunlight do gardens NEED?

What are the best things to plant for newbies? I'd love to grow tomatoes, zucchini, bell peppers, and some other things, too. But what? And when do we plant?

How do we plant? Raised beds. Containers. Planter bags. What is a clueless girl to do?

And, how do you keep your hard work protected from little critters? We have a fenced in backyard, but we've still had rabbits make repeated appearances back there. They're cute and all, but I don't want them eating my veggies. And insects? I think I've read that there are some herbs you can plant that are natural insect repellants? But what do I know?

So, if you would, give me the rundown. Where do we start? What do we need? Any good resources to point me in the direction of? If you've had success starting your very own garden, I want to hear from you. I need to know I can pull this off.

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