I have missed a few days. First, we had a day or two of rain which kept us indoors and eliminated the need for watering. Second, we were out of town for a funeral and took the opportunity for some shopping. Third, I have been lazy about writing. I have taken some photos during the past few days and will post them soon.

The garden is going wild. One of the eggplants is in full bloom. The cantaloupes are now over 8 feet tall! We now have a lot of baby cantaloupes.

The leeks and onions aren't growing, and I can't figure out why. I've never planted onions from seeds, so maybe it just takes a lot longer. The second garlic plant has bloomed, and the first one is fading. I'll have to check to see if I get any garlic seeds.

The Fordhook lima beans are almost shoulder high and will soon be blooming. We have a tiny squash about 2 or 3 inches long. There are so many blooms that I'm sure we will have enough to cook before long. We have picked all the green bell peppers. I don't know if they'll bloom again or if they're finished for the season. If they are finished, I'll pull them and plant something else.

The yellow bell pepper plants have bloomed and have tiny peppers on them. All of the hot pepper plants have pepper pods growing. The red hot cherry peppers are big as ping-pong balls and still growing. The red beefsteak tomato plants have 2 tomatoes the size of baseballs and lots of smaller ones. The Goliath tomato plant is full of blooms.

One of the hanging tomato plants is blooming. They aren't handling the heat well. It's been close to 100 for several days. I had only put about 8 or 10 inches of dirt in the bags, so I think I'll mix up some more dirt tomorrow and finish filling up the bags. Maybe that will help hold more water.

I also need to repot some of the flowers on the back porch. The orange butterfly weeds were iffy for a while but are now growing like weeds!

I started stringing up the Fordhook lima beans this afternoon. I used screw eyes and dowel rods with yellow plastic twine.

The cantaloupes were outgrowing the wire and string, so I put another wire and added string all the way up to the pipe at the top.

Here are photos of the two garden boxes.

I think there will be eggplant blossoms this week.

The stevia plants are growing fast. If they do well, we will have no-calorie sweetener for free.

The one cayenne pepper is getting longer.

I just spotted some jalapeno peppers.

All five of the hummingbird vine seeds that I planted have now sprouted. They will grow very quickly. The last ones we had grew 2 or 3 inches a day.

My wife just used a bell pepper from the garden to make chicken fajitas. They were good.

I just watered the garden again and found two more leeks sprouting. The cantaloupes are moving on up, so I may have to move the hanging tomatoes aside and put more wire and string up higher on the posts. The hanging tomatoes aren't going wild like everything else, so I think I'll add more soil tomorrow. I think they might be drying out too much during the heat of the day.

Here are the latest photos of the garden:

The divider strips are hardly visible in the first box.

The second box will be covered more once the cucumbers start climbing.

I just harvested a bell pepper from my garden. The garden is producing after just 3 weeks from initial planting.

The Fordhook lima beans are growing like crazy. They are supposed to be bush type, but they a running up so tall I will have to give them support. We went to Lowe's and bought some screw eyes and 4' dowel rods. I will screw in two screw eyes, one above the other, on each side of the box near the beans, and then insert the dowel rods. Then I will run twine back and forth between the rods and weave the bean plants through the twine. It is too hot today and there's a good chance of thunderstorms, so I'll probably take care of this tomorrow. I'll post photos when it's done.

The bell peppers are so full of peppers that they are starting to lean, so I will give them some support also.

I think the eggplants are getting ready to bloom.

This morning I watered my square foot garden and found that one of my leeks has sprouted. Only 17 to go. The leek is the green speck near the bottom center of the photo. (Click on the photo to see a bigger image.)

Also, four of the hummingbird vine seeds I planted four days ago have sprouted.

I have now caught up with past history on my gardening this year. Now I will start with current information.

Early this morning, we got 0.2" of rain, so I didn't water the garden.

This afternoon we found that a huge branch had broken out of one of our pecan trees. There were small pecans on the branch, so hopefully the tree will give us some this year.

On June 11, 2010, I was checking my orange butterfly weeds. I had put them in a pot, but they weren’t doing so well. They were still green, but were drooping. I saw that one was completely dead. I started to remove it, but saw that there was a sprout coming up from the root. So I just cut the dead top away. One of the other plants was broken, but the leaves at the top have perked up. So I may have orange butterfly weeds without having to revisit our friend and dig up more or wait for hers to have seeds.

I was waiting for the hot peppers to start bearing and found that a cayenne pepper plant had sneaked one by me. My wife spotted an almost full-grown pepper that I hadn’t seen.

The garlic has beautiful blue flowers.

The fig bushes are loaded with little figs.

The red hot cherry pepper plants have peppers on them.

The blueberry bushes are hanging full of green berries.

On June 10, 2010, I set up a wooden pyramid trellis behind the house. My wife and I had bought the pyramid trellis at Lowe’s for our birthdays several years ago. I set it up near the back of the house and put a pot with a hummingbird vine under it. That worked pretty well, but the wind blew it over. I had put a u-shaped pipe through it and driven it into the ground, but it didn’t hold.

For my latest attempt, I drove a metal fence post into the ground behind the house beside the nandina bush. I did this a day or so previously. I cut a square of weed blocking cloth, cut a small hole in the center, and put it over the fence post and pushed it to the ground. Then I placed four concrete pavers around the post. I set the pyramid trellis over the post onto the pavers. I got out a roll of wire and wired the pyramid trellis to the fence post. I don’t think it will blow over now.

I got a clay pot, filled it with garden soil mixture, and planted five hummingbird vine seeds that I had previously collected on January 1, 2008. (I always date my seeds, and I store them in medicine bottles in the dark.)

We got our first hummingbird vine plant at a yard sale. People at the sale were admiring her landscaping and the hummingbird vines in particular. Someone asked for one, and the woman who owned them reached under the vines and pulled out a small sprout. I asked if I could have one, and she pulled one for me. I took it home and planted it. It soon outgrew the stick it was climbing. That’s when I moved it to the pyramid trellis. I have seeds that I saved from two different seasons.

On June 8, 2010, I planted the Goliath tomato and the leek seeds. I planted 18 leek seeds in two squares.

Eight cucumber plants were up with leaves.

I had planted two eggplants in one square, but they started crowding each other, so I moved one of them to an adjacent empty square.

The onions started sprouting.

The Climbing Pinata rose had three open blooms, and the Climbing Joseph’s Coat rose had a number of new buds.

On June 5, 2010, the cucumbers had sprouted. The Climbing Pinata rose had an open bloom, and the squash plants were blooming.

On June 6, 2010, we bought another tomato plant and some leek seeds. The tomato is Goliath hybrid. It is indeterminate, which means it doesn’t know the seasons and will grow as long as the weather is warm. It could grow all winter in my greenhouse.

On June 4, 2010, I saw that the leaves on the lima beans were larger than any I remember seeing in the past.

On June 2, 2010, I planted the onion seeds in four squares of the garden. I planted the two types of cucumbers in two squares under the string trellis. More of the Fordhook limas had sprouted and one had a full leaf. Later in the day, more of the beans had leaves.

The bell pepper plants had some small peppers on them.

On June 3, 2010, I planted a nandina bush behind the house. A few days previously, we had visited a friend who had offered us some of her orange butterfly weed. I dug up the ones she pointed out, but there was a tall nandina bush there, along with a number of lily of the valley plants. So I had to take all of the plants home. I had immediately planted the butterfly weed in a pot and the lilies in a window box. I didn’t know yet where to put the nandina, so I had just laid it down in the shade, shoveled some dirt over the roots, and watered it. It stayed green and healthy looking for a number of days and is still green in its new home behind the house.

The lima beans were taller and had more leaves. They have really grown fast.

On June 1, 2010, the Fordhook lima beans were sprouting.

One of my beefsteak tomatoes had two tomatoes on it.

I planted tomatoes in four “Topsy-Turvy” hanging planters and hung them on the pipe using S-hooks.

I then ran wire from one post to the other at three levels. The first level was near the dirt in the garden frames. The second was a little higher, and the top level was just below the hanging tomatoes. I then ran string up and down between the wires. A couple of the cantaloupes were big enough to start them up the strings.

On May 31, 2010, I bought some more compost and vermiculite from the garden center. The Fordhook lima beans started cracking the soil.

On May 28, 2010, I set up two of my posts. I had found a 12' foot piece of 3/4" pipe out back and decided that would be good for hanging the “Topsy-Turvy” tomato bags. I drilled a pilot hole through each post near the top. Then I got a 1" paddle bit and drilled in from each side of the post until I had a 1" hole through both posts.

I got the post-hole diggers (a Christmas present from my mother a few years ago) and dug two holes. The propane line runs through the area, so I have to watch where I dig. I set the posts and inserted the pipe through the holes.

On May 26, 2010, I assembled the lathe strips. The book says that you can’t call it a square foot garden unless you have physically divided it into square foot sections. I measured and drilled three holes one foot apart through each of the lathe strips. I made the holes just large enough for a cotter pin to push through. I assembled the strips with the cotter pins, using needle nose pliers to bend the cotter pins. (In the future, I might use washers to keep the heads of the cotter pins from eventually pulling through the wood.)

I set out all the plants that we had bought at Lowe’s and the garden center. My wife drew a plan of the two garden squares and wrote down what was planted in each.





The green bell peppers were blooming and already had some tiny peppers. The Beefsteak tomato plants were blooming also. Either on this day or the next I planted some Fordhook lima beans. I like them, so I planted four squares.

On May 25, 2010, there was still water standing from the rain. Here is a photo of ducks swimming in our yard.

We went back to Lowe’s for more supplies. I had planned on hanging some “Topsy-Turvy” bags with tomato plants near the new garden and also needed to put up string and wire for cantaloupes and cucumbers, so we bought three 4"x4"x8' treated posts.

The book had said to use nuts and bolts to put together the lathe strips to divide the garden, but I thought that was too expensive. I bought some 5/32 x 1 cotter pins instead.

We went to a local garden center and bought some more plants and seeds. Those included a couple of Stevia plants and some Fordhook lima beans.

On May 21, 2010, I cut two 4' pieces of chicken wire and four 4' pieces of weed blocking cloth. I put down the chicken wire first, then put the cloth on top. Then I set the wooden frames on top of the cloth.

We went to Lowe’s again and bought more manure, compost and humus. We also bought some seeds and plants. I put the plants on the back porch for the time being. They included tomatoes, eggplants, various peppers, and some herbs. The seeds were Texas Grand onions, Muncher cucumbers, Organic Lemon cucumbers, Early Golden Acre cabbage, and Mammoth Russian sunflowers.

I put down a large tarp on the ground and started measuring out buckets of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. The book calls for one-third of each. I pulled the tarp and rolled the materials back and forth to mix them. I got the garden rake and mixed some more to get the soil completely mixed. Then I started shoveling the soil into the boxes. After I got a good layer in the bottom of each box, I sprayed it with the garden hose. I did this about three times until the boxes were full. Daylight was going away, so I stopped working.

We had put a bag of thistle seeds with the bird feeders in hopes of attracting some more birds, but the birds weren’t interested. Finally, on May 17, 2010, we saw a pair of goldfinches working on the thistle bag. They were there long enough for me to get the camera and photograph them.

A week later, on May 15, 2010, my wife and I went shopping for the materials required for square foot gardening. We decided to start out with two square beds, each being four feet wide. We went to Lowe’s and got them to cut four 2"x6"x8' boards in half. We also got six 1 1/2"x1/4"x8' pine lattice strips cut in half. We got a 48"x50' roll of chicken wire, eight 8 quart bags of vermiculite, two 3 cubic foot bags of peat moss, and 80 pounds of cow manure compost.

I then started constructing the frames. I drilled three holes near one end of each board. I then screwed the boards together into two 4' square boxes. This was enough work for one day, so I stopped.