Hello All!
I hope everything is well with you. So this is my first post about my gardening. If you read my previous post then you know that last year I had a balcony garden that did absolutely nothing for me. I actually blame it on the lack of bees. Well this year I started my garden on my balcony. I had green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, and a starting apple tree.
In July I was at my boyfriends and noticed that he had a lot of bees in his yard. Not enough to bother anyone but enough to possibly have a successful garden. So I brought all my plants to his house and transplanted the tomatoes and green beans into his yard.
He didn't have a garden area so what I did, since I didn't have a tiller, is fenced in a small area in his yard and covered the ground inside with paper bags. Before I put the paper bags down I dug holes where I wanted my plants and then I cut holes in the bags where they would lay. I then put garden soil over top of the bags and in the holes so that it would keep the grass down and kill it.
I put in my green beans and tomatoes but I also put pumpkins and watermelon in there to see if they would do good.
My apple tree is still in a planter as it is not big enough to survive the winter just yet but I plan to plant it next year. I also left the potatoes in a planter as they were already wilting and transplanting potatoes is not the easiest task. I do not recommend planting potatoes in a planter. There is just simply not enough room for them to grow and be healthy. My potatoes did not urn out very good and they ended up very small.
I also didn't get watermelon this year. the plant grew a little and then just stopped. I'm pretty sure my pumpkins just took over that part of the garden and didn't leave any room for the watermelon.
As you can see by the picture, my plants were very stressed from the transplant. this lasted about 2 to 3 weeks and then they stared to perk up and flourish. During these 2 to 3 weeks I made sure they had water everyday but not too much. If it was really hot out then I may have watered once in the morning and once late afternoon. I also took any dead leaves I saw off the plants so they had room to grow new leaves. I really do think it helped.
I started getting green beans in the middle of August through the beginning of September. At this point my garden looked like a jungle. Big healthy tomato plants and pumpkin plants were getting up there in size as well. So when I wasn't getting anymore green beans I pulled the plants out so that I had room to walk in there when I started getting tomatoes.
The beginning of September is when I got my first couple of red tomatoes and there was an over abundance of green tomatoes on only 5 plants! I also had a 3 pumpkins growing and they were about softball size at that time. One of the pumpkins ended up breaking off soon after that and I ended up cutting it in half and giving it to the chickens. They loved it!
About 2 weeks ago it started to get real cold here in Michigan so I started pulling out my tomato plants and pulling off the tomatoes that looked good but were still green. I took them home with me and put them in a box with some bananas to help them ripe. My plan is to make home made ketchup out of most of them!
When I pulled the bananas out today (there were 3) they seemed a little overripe so I made some banana bread this evening! Yum!
So now, the pumpkins. A few days ago I got them off the vine. They were small pumpkins but they got nice and orange and perfect for what I had planned for them. I washed them off and took the tops off. Then I split them in half and took an ice cream scoop an scooped out all the inner stringy stuff out. I took it out to my chickens including the seeds (we aren't big on pumpkin seeds). They love it and its super good for them.
So after the chickens got their yummy treat I put some foil on a baking sheet and placed all the halves face down and baked them for about an hour until they were tender. I scrapped the pumpkin "meat" off of the skin and threw it in the blender to make pumpkin puree. the skin when into the trash and the puree went into the freezer to save for making pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. I defiantly can't wait to try it!
I hope everyone enjoys this post and if you have any feed back or requests then don't be afraid to speak up. I would very much appreciate it!