Free garden
By Ari | Jun 22, 09 10:58 PM
We made a garden this year almost for free. The seeds and seedlings were all given to us - someone always has too much of something, and gives away the surplus. (We too had so many seeds we passed them on. And I look forward to sharing and swapping produce!)
We made a raised bed out of an old shelf and cinder blocks, and traded for tomato cages and plant pots. We dumpstered some plastic buckets that have really come in handy. And the Dacha gave us a lot of compost they'd picked up, and we got more of that and mulch for free from Ithaca. Yay Ithaca compost! The only thing we bought was, early on and out of convenience, a couple of bags of organic potting soil. We needed it for some seedlings, right then.
It's much farther along now than it is in this photo - we'll have to post an update soon! Today we potted all of the remaining seedlings, moved everything around so they get better sun, put in mulch, and pulled out some weeds. Most of these plants are in pots, the rest in a raised bed, because the soil is full of asphalt driveway bits. The tomatoes are thriving, very tall and sturdy. There are also large pots of things we sowed directly in the soil, weeks before the last frost, that are probably the healthiest, strongest plants besides the tomatoes - onions, broccoli, carrots, and zinias, and some lavender and mixed perennial flowers from Lea. The eggplants and peppers are still very small, only a few leaves each. The cabbage, just a little bigger - maybe six small leaves apiece.
Well, that's the garden report. You can keep tabs on the action in the Flickr pool we made just for our garden (you'll get to see our old Brooklyn garden and our houseplants, too!).
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