Historically, I have always had somewhat of a brown thumb. Plants and I have not gotten along well. However, my dad is wonderful at gardening, and I have grown up eating freshly grown vegetables. Now that we have a house and a yard, I really wanted to grow my own garden.
Over Christmas, Jake and my dad built me a nice little 4’x8′ raised garden. Now that it’s mostly warm in Houston, I got to planting. I decided this year to try broccoli, romaine lettuce, cucumbers, and a few varieties of peppers (bell and jalapeno) and tomatoes (better boy, roma, and grape or sweet 100, TBD). It seems that everybody else decided to plant gardens this weekend too, because the tomato options were limited. I found out that the Bonnie man delivers to Lowe’s on Thursday, so I’ll have to to go back then for my small tomato variety.
So, here’s what I’ve got so far:
If you click on the picture, you can see hover over the notes to see what I’ve planted. If you don’t want to, I’m going to explain it anyway.
The taller stuff is in the back row so that it doesn’t block the sun from the front row plants (I’m told this is important). On the left I’ve planted some cucumber seeds that will grow up each of the 3 vertical poles in the tomato cage (hopefully – I was too lazy/cheap to get a better system, and I couldn’t pull apart the bigger cages).
To the right of the cucumbers are my tomatoes – better boy, roma, and then small TBD.
In the front row are bell peppers and jalapeno peppers in the cages, then romaine lettuce and broccoli. I actually planted the lettuce and broccoli last weekend, and they’ll supposedly be finished harvesting pretty early, so maybe I can put something else in there later?
I’ll try to post updates as I hopefully keep these plants alive and grow some food. And if I am successful, I’m going to need some good salsa and pico de gallo recipes.
I’ve also got some herbs growing – in one planter I’ve got cilantro, rosemary, and parsley. In the other, 3 basil plants:
The basil was starting to get a little big, so I actually used this recipe and the food processor I got for Christmas to make some pesto.
Sweet! It looks great! (and the pesto turned out beautiful!). I will have to look around and see if I can find my recipe for salsa- a guy I used to work with on the ambulance made the best and shared his recipe.