Beginning of Gardening Season

Here in Tennessee, the weather is sporadically attempting to warm up and everyone is starting to work in their yards again - mowing grass, clearing out dead brush from the winter, getting new bulbs and trees in the ground.  The garden centers are filling up with flowers and fruit trees and young veggie plants.

I have begun to work myself.  Today I mowed and edged 1/4 of the front yard that grows faster and also trimmed some bushes.  Then I temporarily placed a line of stepping stones right down the middle of rectangular veggie garden, I'm dividing it into 2 sections and this will make it much easier to tend things without getting muddy.  Hopefully.

Over the past couple weeks I've been working on starting my seeds indoors.  These pics were taken on March 25, mostly everything has grown since then, I'll update again soon.

  This is my high-tech indoor seeding zone - a spare bedroom with little furniture (good floor space) and decent light from a south-west facing window.
Sadly, this is the most action the toboggan has seen in a couple years.  Oh well.

Here we have cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, corn, pumpkins, squash, zucchini, sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias, morning glories and surely other things I'm forgetting.

 

Yellow squash.
You can see the first tiny "true leaf" in the center of the  cotyledons.  When two of them have emerged and grown to a healthy size, it'll be ready for transplanting.





 

Pumpkins and sunflowers.




As the sprouts grow bigger, I'll transplant them from these cells to larger containers, which will then move to the garage which has windows and gets pretty decent light.  Then I'll shift the young plants to the front porch during the days, back to the garage at night and then finally let them stay out overnight night to complete the hardening off process. 

In 2011 I had great luck with corn in 5 gallon buckets.
In 2012..... not so much.  It was incredibly hot and dry last year and neither my 5-gallon-bucket corn nor my ground-planted corn had any edible success.  There were a couple puny little ears but that was it.



This year I'm planning to add more soil amendments to the vegetable patch (claybreaker and organic garden soil) because our yard is really heavy red clay and I think it will help with rooting and drainage.



Tune in later for more!

Mango Madness

There have been some nice mangoes in the grocery lately and we've enjoyed eating them up. I, being a bit of a budding plant junkie, saved the seeds to try my hand at growing mango trees. Why not?
Let's begin.

Here we have a big juicy Mexican mango and the cleaned, dried seed from a previously eaten mango on a tea saucer. That's a big seed, eh? One of the largest in the plant kingdom.
After eating the fruit, rinse and scrape the pulp from the seed and let it dry out for a couple days - it's much easier to handle when it isn't wet and slimy.














I used a pair of pliers and a screwdriver to carefully open the hull without damaging the tender seed inside. You can feel where the seed is inside and where the "slack" places are on the hull so you can grab on with the pliers and bend the hull a bit to loosen it up/snap it open.
Once opened, you can see the seed is enveloped in a material that looks and feels exactly like parchment paper.














Here is the emptied hull, the 'parchment' and the seed, which is partially removed from the innermost encasement of a flexible, woody-type brown material. Oh yeah, I've got all the proper technical terms here, sure.



This seed had begun to sprout a thick root while still in its hull inside the mango fruit.


(note: the seed pictured here is from a smaller mango variety than the big red shown above, which will be discussed later)




Once the mango seed is free and clear of it's enclosure, I loosely wrap it in a napkin and moisten with water and place inside a zip-seal bag. Here I have a holding station of 3 mango seeds and a nectarine seed resting atop an egg carton, which has been a handy little storage solution.
Every few days I peel back the napkin and check to see what's happening inside and add a few drops of water if needed.

It has been great fun to watch the progress. Much more has happened already (I've been slow to post this) and I will be providing updates on my little mango farm as I have time, so check back!