The Nu Leaf

Today marks the beginning of the first growing season in our new house. This blog is my journal of the growing process. My hope is to keep this information in an easily accessible place and perhaps share some ideas with other home gardeners who may come across this site.

Garden
Today Emily and I spread four big bags of organic compost on the garden. She followed that with four cups of organic fertilizer and we mixed the top inch in. The soil is very light and fluffy. I’m not sure if this is beneficial for the plants, but it sure makes pulling the weeds easier for now.

Seeds
We have a lot on our agenda this summer:
Tomatoes
Early Girl
Sweet 100
Principie Borghese
Stupice, IPB type

Lettuce
Butterhead
Bon Vivant

Melons
Charleston Gray Watermelon
Striped Klondike Watermelon
Cantaloupe

Pumpkin
Small Sugar Pumpkin
World’s Largest Pumpkin (don’t tell Emily)

Other
Edamame
Yellow Globe Onion
Sunflowers
Bull’s Blood Beets
Little Marvel Peas

Note: Lilly Miller seeds (Early Girl, Sweet 100, and Striped Klondike) seem to come very few per package. Where the indicated packets came with as few as 15 seeds, the comparable Ed Hume varieties had around twice as many. Hopefully their quality makes up for the lack in quantity.

The Plan
It’s quite an agenda, but I’m pretty sure we can handle it. I plan on upside-down hanging the four tomato varieties off of our back deck shelter, with the Von Vivant (mixed greens) lettuce growing on top.

The sunflowers will be in a straight line across the back of our long garden (30′ x 5′). The current plan is to put the pumpkins on the shadier end, followed by beets, onions, peas, edamame, lettuce, and melons.

Getting Started
Today I planted the tomatoes, lettuce, melons, edamame, and onion in starter trays. I’ll leave them in the living room with the lids off over night to let the excess water evaporate out of these rapid-expansion pellet trays. Tomorrow, I’ll move them down to the laundry room and hang a large grow light over them.

Weather
The weather in Seattle has been rather poor lately. We’ve been seeing enough freezing rain to make make our blooming tulips droop. The ground is soggy and the days are averaging about 54F for the next week. With any luck, this will have played out by the time the plants are too big for their greenhouse growing trays, because our cat will have a field day eating them all if they aren’t sheltered.