Day 19 - My Peas had flowers...then they didn't

I checked my peas on Sunday after work (Around midnight) and they had the cutest little white flowers! There were at least a dozen of them. I went out yesterday (Monday, as it's 2:18am right now) to grab a photo of my little flowers and they had died. Within hours! I had never seen something like that. Of course the rate at which my peas are growing is pretty awesome.

I have about 25 pea plants. I have no use for that many plants so what I did was posted on craigslist and offered six of my plants. I wanted to give two plants to three families to help them. I got this email:

"Here's a tip on pea plants.  They are a cool weather vegetable...best grown in the fall, plant in late August to mid-September.  They will suffer and not produce well in hot summer sun in July. They can also be planted in early March, but you have to be careful of frosts when they are young...it will kill the plants."

 So according to this person my plants are going to die. That makes me sad. I'm going to do the best I can and if I have to pot them and bring them in then I will.

So onto the good stuff!

I got lots of photos.

1. Bell Peppers

I think something is eating my bell pepper leaves. Either that or my container is getting too hot? I'm not sure, they are getting taller, I even was able to put more dirt in the container today. But there are a good amount of little holes and brown edges. :(

2. Tomatoes

I have two buds! Out of four plants, I have one bud on two of them. So I'm excited over that. They are getting very tall. I think I may have to buy two more pots and break up the tomatoes as I have two plants in each of my yellow containers.

Here are my two buds:

3. My Egg Crate Seeds

OMG, they TOOK OFF. I got to looking at the egg crate today and noticed hundreds of rolly pollys had taken residence underneath it in the little grooves. so I had to go ahead an pull the crate apart, the plants are ready for planting anyway.

Out of all the seeds in the grate I got the following: 6 Pumpkin Plants, 2 Radish Plants, and 15 Pea plants. I have a TOTAL of about .75 in all of those plants. How awesome is that?

Photos:

Before I discovered a colony of Rolly Pollys.

Close up of the dead flowers. They sprouted and withered within 12 hours.

Pumpkins! I planted the two tallest in the Bell Pepper bucket until I can get the hill readied for them.

Two radishes. I think both "pods" have two plants so I actually have 4 radishes here.

15 PEA PLANTS! OMG THEY WONT STOP GROWING!

4. Potatoes

Finally, I have sprouts showing in my potatoes. Just a bit of off the top I tried to take a photo but You may not be able to see them.

Yep those two things sticking out in the center is the sprouts. lol

Other random Garden photos:

Peas broken apart from the egg crate. They are ready for the ground, I have someone coming tomorrow to pick up 4 of them. 2 for her and 2 for her Grandma.

Big Doggie on her nightly walk.

Tall pumpkins! And the lettuce on the left :)

Carrots and two gourds! I'm so happy the carrots and gourds took! Want to know how much I paid for the seeds? .70

MORE PEAS! lol. I told you I have a lot. These are a bit taller. EDIT: On second thought looking at these I think they are pumpkin and I labeled them wrong!

MORE PEAS! lol. I can't get away from them. I only have .50 in all of these peas. I bought two packets from the Dollar Tree.

I love my Lettuce and Pumpkins.

I have some nice buds coming up on my Zucchini Squash. I lost one plant though. It was weak when I bought them, and it didn't make it.

So there you have it! A friend is helping me with the beds so hopefully I'll get a large part of this in the ground this week. I want to make a small raise for the peas and lettuce. I'd LOVE to have some cinder blocks to do that with. We'll see. :)

Everyone seems to think I'm doing very well. I hope it all comes to fruition and I'm not just growing greenery.

I was in Aldi the other day picking up a few groceries and they had a cool little gardening section. They had trellises for $9.99! (I'm going back for four of those! Will really set me back on my budget) But I did pick up a claw type thing to help dig my little beds.  The claw? Was $3.99!

Days 16-18: Carotts and Gourds

Just about ALL of my seeds have sprouted. Seriously excited over this. I noticed some tiny little carrot sprouts and a gourd sprout yesterday so I'm so tickled I could cry.

Sadly, because of quite a bit of pain this weekend I wasn't able to dig out the beds I wanted. Hopefully soon.

I don't have any photos for the day because it's POURING outside.

Day 15: Beds and Lettuce, Oh My!

I started clearing two spots for "Beds".

Bed #1:

In the back yard I have a pretty steep hill, I started clearing off a section of it so I can plant pumpkins and cantaloupes and hopefully watermelon when I get a plant.

As I mentioned in a previous post it can take me a few days to do something that would take a normal person a few hours.

Here are a few photos:

Partially cleared. I did find a snake hole. O.O. I am going to make it bigger but my hip was screaming.

As you can see it's partially cleared and not very big. I'll make it bigger, as I'm off work tomorrow. My hip started screaming at me so I wasn't able to do much.


Bed #2:

Right outside my door I have a LOT of monkey grass and around that monkey grass on the outside was a lot of leaves, when I racked those leaves out I noticed the dirt is dark and moist. I get half a days sun there so I'm going to clear it out all the way down for my lettuce, radishes and onions. :)

See how dark the soil is?

I just thought my shadow was funny here. haha

So I was able to do another small section here, I'll expand it tomorrow and get the plants in the ground.

And on to crop updates!

My tomato has a bud!

My tomato bud! So proud!

She's getting tall!

My Lettuce seeds are going crazy!

I'm not sure how MANY lettuce plants this is, but they sure are cute!

My mint seems to be sprouting new buds and my radishes are pretty much ready for the ground. The egg crate of seeds are also blooming like CRAZY.

There you have it. Pretty much I'm done gardening for the day except for my nightly water.

Day 14: The Legend of the Peas (And a Pumpkin!)

So there are peas. And more peas. And more peas. I can't seem to NOT grow peas. I bought two packets of Pea Seeds at the Dollar Tree for .25 each. Those two packets have made about 10 pea plants total with more just planted. Remind me next year to only get ONE packet of Peas.

I do have a pumpkin and some lettuce sprouting! I'm super stoked about the pumpkin plant I babied those plants like I gave birth to them.

See the little sprout? I can't wait until it gets bigger!

A person in one of the forums I've been reading for newbie advice said she had had issues with these pots as they didn't break up in the ground like they are supposed to. I'm not taking ANY chances with my plants so I will manually break it up before planting in the ground.

Here is my lettuce:

I planted 4 pots of Lettuce, 3 are sprouting!

The weird little bugs I've seen around my plants at night when I water them don't seem to be eating the plants, but they do scare me. I work to hard to let a tiny worm-like thing take a liking to my Dollar Tree seeds.

Because my job is 2pm until 11pm I had to do some midnight gardening. Because my bone disease has advanced so much in the past few years getting up in the morning takes everything out of me. The other day I couldn't even stand up for 2 hours. It definitely isn't fun so I just take it one day at a time. Today wasn't such a great day either, but I did some midnight gardening after work. lol.

I trimmed the lower leaves off my tomato plants and added more soil then watered everything. The tomato plants are now taller than the container! I'm super proud of them and they SMELL like tomatoes, now if only I could grow some tomatoes. I'm scared the squirrels will go after them as they have done so in the past but I have a few things I'm going to try to keep them away. A friend of a friend told me to put some of my hair around the beds and they won't mess with them, and another blog I read recommended cut cucumbers in a pie tin. We'll see.

And of course here are some peas:

This is the same egg crate I had filled for almost two weeks and never got a bloom. I covered each one with new soil and started watering them twice a day and VOILA! They started sprouting like crazy. The two plants on the left are Radishes, the three on the right are Peas.

If nothing I should have peas this year. My potatoes haven't done a dang thing. My bell peppers look...sad.

It looks like something is munching the leaves but I'm not sure what. Either that or they are getting too much sun?

I'm a complete newbie at gardening. It's all trial and error. I have no clue what I'm doing. If I manage to grow a vegetable I'll probably die of shock. lol

Tomorrow if my legs and hands will comply I'm going to TRY to plant a grape plant. I'm a bit skeptical about my hands, they are very weak still and numb (from the Epic Poisoning Incident).

Anyway all I can do is try, and I'm doing that in spades!

Days 12-13...Peas, peas and MORE peas

The new job is taking so much time, so I haven't been able to do a whole lot lately.

I did get some of my pea plants (from seeds!) planted in a large planter.

 

I had this little trellis so I put it in there as from what I understand peas are a vine. :)

I also made little markers out of popsicle sticks I had in my craft box. You will see more of these in the other photos.

Here are some other photos.

If you look real close you can see a little plant in the center. lol.

And more pea plants. I think a few radishes are starting to sprout now.

More peas. I bought two packets, apparently they make a TON of plants.

Waiting on them to sprout! These are the cute sticks I made.

Lettuce! I cant wait until it grows.

I put another coat of pink paint on the pallet. Tomorrow I plan on getting up early so I can put some wood glue on the pallet and nail the last board down. Hopefully everything will be done tomorrow and I can clean the yard up some. I just KNOW that I'm going to get a nuisance letter if I don't have it all set up by Thursday.

Day 11 - A No Gardening Day

I start my job in about an hour. So I won't be able to garden today. I had to do some data entry for a semi-job I do have. But when I went outside to wet my seeds I snapped a few photos and wanted to share!

Here you can see my Lettuce pots and Pumpkin. I love these pots, they are plantable so once they start to sprout all I got to do is pull the bottom off and plant the pot

Here you can see Pea, Carrots and Birdhouse Gourds. I know my garage door needs to be pressure washed!

Here is my free pallet that we took apart and put back together. The paint? Also free. It was a sample from Valspar about a year ago and I hung onto it for a project.

Close up of the Pink Pallet. It needs another coat or two.

Pea sprouts! They get bigger every day!

Pallet Fiasco and the Rain Without End - Days 7-10

I started a few days ago with a to-do list. I STILL haven't completed it. Below you will see why.

1. I have apparently poisoned myself with fertilizer. I didn't pay attention to what I was doing and have gotten chemical burn on my hands. They are numb. The finger tips are numb, my knuckles hurt, my hands are hot to the touch and even typing this is kind of excruciating. It's 3:43am and I woke up because my hands had started to itch and I felt hot. It's 63 degrees in my room. This has been constant for the past four days. Sigh.

2. The pallet I had gotten had some issues with wood breaking down. I couldn't find casters that were affordable. Most were over $20 EACH WHEEL! If I had $80 then I would have built a raised bed on the hill outside.

The first thing I had attempted to do was spray paint the thing. But that just made it even uglier.

I dug around in my garage and found some stair spindles I had picked up a few years back for like .50 each so I thought I'd  just nail those to the bottom of my pallet. That's when I noticed some of the boards were broken and basically rotting which isn't good and I didn't want it sitting on the ground just killing grass.

I started by ATTEMPTING to nail the spindles to a few pieces of wood I had lying around. I definitely was NOT a carpenter in a previous life.

A friend of mine next door saw me struggling to try to remove some of the rotten boards from my pallet and came over to help. She's a handy girl. :) Caiszon (I may be spelling her name wrong it is pronounced SAY ZON) spent a few days nailing the boards together after we pulled them all apart.

She got to looking at my spindles and discovered that I had four spindles. All were different lengths. Now my being a female girl person who doesn't run around with power tools doesn't own any type of saw. Sooo..bye bye spindles.

So basically we ripped a part a pallet...and made a pallet. She tipped the boards so that only for small sides were on the ground instead of the bigger boards laying across. We are still working on it because it has basically rained every day and the wood keeps getting wet. I have most of it painted as well so when she is done hammering, I paint.

Here are a few photos:

Attempted to spray paint pallet Raspberry color. FAIL

Spindle legs. FAIL

I NAILED A NAIL IN! It only took me 20 minutes. I had to pull it right back out. FAIL.

Caiszon pulling nails out of boards. Her shoes rock.

3. I finally got a good amount of seed planted in my little Jiffy Pots. 3 Birdhouse Gourds, 7 pumpkins, 4 Lettuce, about 5 more pea plants, and 3 carrots. I'll show you photos tomorrow of the seed pots all lined up in front of my garage.

4. I HAVE PEA PLANTS! So excited! I'll get a photo of those tomorrow. I attempted to take a photo tonight but they are too blurry and it was too dark so they look like ghost plants.

5. My radishes are bigger!

I'm going to be putting these in the ground in a few days.

So there you have it. I'm poisoned according to the call nurse and poison control. I haven't been to the ER because frankly I don't have a way. I do not drive and haven't found anyone who is willing to go to the ER in Charlotte. lol. I'll post more photos later today with all the little pots labeled and pea sprouts.