Mosquito Dunks release Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, a bacterium which kills the fungus gnat larvae. The larvae are the damaging insects; they eat the plant roots and kill them. The pesky adults fly in your face when you are near, but they don’t harm the plants.

Drink up, my little larvae. You may have gotten these plants, but now I have your number.

April was extremely busy. My sister and I spent two weeks in Houston at the M D Anderson Cancer Center (she has a rare type of thyroid cancer). I worked on a new website which should be launching in the next few weeks.

Oh, yeah, and I fell and broke my hand. My right hand.

I never before realized just how right-handed I am.

Cooking, everyday chores, and gardening are all extremely difficult with only one hand available (and that the weaker hand). But it’s getting easier with practice and my left hand and arm are growing stronger. I’ve learned to chop vegetables backwards and discovered that ragged trapezoids taste just as good as perfectly neat little dice, even if they don’t look as good. Yesterday, with the help of my son, I transplanted another four tomatos and six pepper plants. I got one potato barrel started. I’d planted a few of my seed potatoes into small clay flower pots when it became apparent that I was going to be out of commission for a while, and the vines were coming up strong and sturdy. They needed room! And dirt! There are still two more barrels to prepare and more vines to transplant, but I am feeling fairly good about what I’ve been able to accomplish.

I go back to the orthopedist Thursday for a follow-up. If everything is healing well I may graduate from the cast into a removable splint, which will be delightful because it’s driving me nuts not being able to wash.

Next goal: get back into the studio and figure out how to create without doing any more harm. (Left-handed rotary cutting? Um, no.)

All my herbs succumbed to the heat and drought last year, so I replaced the Greek oregano, spearmint, and chocolate mint. I added a lime basil. Still want to get a lemon balm, but dill and parsley just would not grow for me last year. I killed four or five dill plants.

I got two Romaine lettuces and a couple of French sorrels. The sorrel is completely new; I’ve never even tried it but it sounded interesting.

And so far there are two types of tomatoes: Early Girl and Rutgers. I’m going to start several other, more exotic types from seed in the next few days. My reasoning is that these early tomatoes will bear by June and then go more-or-less dormant during the heat of the summer, just about the time the Heat Wave and other high-temperature plants should be beginning to fruit. We’ll see if the plan works.

Also need to start from seed: squash, peppers, and eggplants. And the Berry Bed came today, the strawberries yesterday, so those get planted this weekend.

After last year’s strawberry disasters (flood early in the season, then drought and heat that killed the survivors) I ordered my strawberry plants back in January to be shipped the last week of March.

Oops. Here it is the last week of March, and I don’t have a bed ready for them.

Late last week I realized this and began to panic. I picked a place for the berry bed and then started checking on renting a tiller to dig up the grass and make it ready. My husband was adamant that I was not going to run a tiller; that he and our son would do it. But they too have been so busy that there has been absolutely no time to even think about it yet.

Enter The Catalog.

Gardener’s Supply Company had this really cool raised berry bed in the catalog that arrived Saturday. Just the thing! No digging required, takes a cubic yard of soil, and can hold up to 50 plants. I can set it up by myself and get it ready for the plants. Sold! Went onto the website and ordered one. Send it 3-day express, please, because the strawberries are coming!

Ahem.

Sunday morning I got a spooky call from the Fraud Prevention department of my credit card company.

“Did you by any chance just order $1300 worth of flowers from Flowers.com?”

They denied that fraudulent charge and blocked my card. Unfortunately, that caught the order for the Berry Bed in the block as well, so when they opened today I had to call and explain what happened and make alternate payment arrangements.

Sigh. At least the credit card company realized that this was waaaaaay out of the ordinary and flagged it as suspicious.

And now my Berry Bed is on its way.

I thought I had lost the last of the Greek oregano this winter, but it’s beginning to come back. Just a few leaves right now; it will be a couple of months before I can pick fresh ones for cooking. My big lemon tree (the one I bought as a twigling last spring) is doing well, and the little one, that I planted from seed in May, is also coming along nicely. In a few years I may have my own lemons!

The strawberry plants, too, the ones that survived the flood and then the drought last year, are looking quite healthy.  I hope we’ll see some berries from them this spring.

So this morning I pulled out the Seed Box and took stock of what I had left from last year and what I’ve collected since the beginning of summer.

• Tomatoes: 10 (!) varieties, of which 7 will be new this year.
• Squash: crookneck yellow and zucchini
• Peppers: Bell and Anaheims
• Eggplant: Rosa Bianca and White Beauty
• Carrots, parsnips, beets
• Spinach, mixed lettuces
• Lemon basil
• Red potatoes

So I sat down at lunch with the Burpee catalog and picked out some more things to round out the garden.  I’m going to get another couple types of peppers, some Delicata and spaghetti squash, more culinary herbs.  I’m seriously tempted to try canteloupes, but I imagine this will be more than enough to keep me busy in the second season of the Great Container Garden.

This year I know much more about the sun’s position during the growing season.  I know a lot more about tomatoes and which varieties do best in this area; I know that peppers are a roaring success and taste delicious; and I know that I have a good ways to go in learning about squashes.  I also know that, despite making tomato sauce and putting up roasted tomatoes for what seemed like all summer, I didn’t put away nearly enough.  They’re almost gone and it’s only December.  Next summer I need to do even more.

On to the 2007 Garden Adventure!

All except one tiny clinging-to-life hopeful have succumbed. I’m going to clean out the strawberry pot, transplant the one survivor to the hanging basket with the others, and move on. Strawberries next year.

The other Learning Experience hasn’t resolved itself yet. The Early Girl tomato plant, the one with the four tomatoes on it:

A day or two after I posted that photo, I went out to water and found aphids, whiteflies, and about 1.72 million baby spiders crawling all over the plant. I checked with the folks at Dave’s Gardening Forums, who suggested a dilute spray of hydrogen peroxide, dishwashing soap, and neem oil. I found the neem oil at a locally-owned nursery company which doesn’t have a website, mixed up the stuff, and sprayed the tomato, both front and back of each leaf, as directed.

The next morning all the bugs were dead or dying. Hooray!

Three days later, so were a bunch of leaves:

The tomatoes still look okay, and there is new green growth on the top of the plant, so I didn’t kill it. It seemed to be mostly the lower branches and the most saturated leaves that turned yellow and brown. I assumed that was because the spray probably dripped down and collected on the lower branches, while the upper ones drained off fairly quickly.

But this morning I was doing some more research, and those wounded leaves look an awful lot like leaves from plants afflicted with bacterial speck, a seed-borne disease. I also read that Bonnie Plant Farm, the producer of this seedling, ended up having to take back several hundred thousand pepper plants this year because of diseased seed stock. Peppers and tomatoes are very closely related and often share bacterial and fungal diseases when planted in the same soil without rotation.

So I wonder. I will continue to watch. If the neem oil was the culprit, the new foliage won’t be affected and the tomatoes will be fine. If the plant does have bacterial speck, it will show up on the fruit and the new leaves will start to show symptoms as well.

Either way, next spring I will either grow my own from seeds or buy transplants from The Tasteful Garden. Their plants are amazingly healthy, and I can’t wait for the Carmellos I planted last week to start bearing.

I should start by saying that I have never had a garden before. (My mother once called me “Dr. Deathfinger” because everything I tried to grow eventually died.) So what in the world possessed me to try jumping in with both feet?

One thing I’ve been concentrating on this year is the concept of sustainable living. There are a number of reasons for this: DH is just a few years from being able to retire and we are seriously discussing moving to New Mexico. This will necessitate a much simpler (read “frugal”) lifestyle. Depending on where we settle, we may be quite a distance from grocery stores. Right now I can hop in the car and run up the hill if I need fresh garlic for dinner, but if I’m 20 miles or more from the store that won’t be an option.

I’ve also been working toward eating food that is not processed to death, laden with chemical stabilizers, shipped 2000 miles or more to my local grocery to sit on a shelf for weeks or months before I take it home. I want to eat things that are fresh and produced locally. I want to be able to go to the dairy farm and watch the cows grazing in the field; see them milked; watch the milk being bottled on premises and take it home with me. What better way to become reacquainted with the source of my food — the very building blocks of life, intimately part of my self — than to try to grow some of it with my own hands?

The garden started reasonably. DH went to one of the Big Box hardware stores in mid-March and came home with a tomato plant. One plant. I think it was an Early Girl, but he tossed out the label and bunged it unceremoniously into a pot left over from last year. No lime or calcium in the old soil; no fertilizer. We had ten or twelve nights of frost after he planted it, and although I tried to remember to bring it in whenever the temperature was low, I missed a couple of times. I bought some Tomato Spikes, a compressed fertilizer that you just poke into the soil, and stuck those in the pot. Watered it. And despite the neglect, it’s now the largest and healthiest plant of the bunch. Yesterday I had to tie slings to the cage to help support the stems and the growing tomatoes.

I bought some books on gardening, joined a couple of forums, and … well … I might have gotten a tad carried away.

Here is the herb garden. (Man, I need to sweep the deck.)

Top shelf, left to right: parsley, dill, Greek oregano, chocolate mint (smells like Girl Scout cookies!). In the back are a lemon balm and two more pots of Greek oregano. I love the stuff for cooking and I was afraid I would kill one plant with cuttings if that was all I had.

Bottom shelf: chives and more Greek oregano (did I mention I love oregano?)

I did have a pot with garlic in it, but I planted the garlic at the wrong time and it died. I’ll try again in the autumn.

This is the rejuvenated Strawberry Garden. When I first bought plants, I put them in the half whiskey barrel that the pot is sitting on. They did well for a while, but the soil wasn’t really very well drained. We had a storm that dumped four inches of rain into the barrel in one day, and that was it for the strawberries. I rescued a couple of plants and put them into a hanging basket:

and ordered a second batch to plant into the pot you see above. I have no idea whether or not they’ll make it this year. If they don’t, it’s a learning experience. Right?

Continuing widdershins around the deck, we come to Tomato Plant #2. This is another I’m-not-sure-what-I-have. It was supposed to be a Roma plant, but there were two labels in the pot and the other said Best Boy or something similar. So who knows. We’ll be surprised together.

Then I really got charged. I ordered some seeds for a heirloom variety of tomato which is supposed to have superlative flavor, the Costoluto Genovese. I didn’t even start the seeds until the first week of April, so these poor babies have some growing up to do.

The three pots on the table are the Genovese babies. The paper cup holds another experiment — a sucker off the Early Girl plant that I dipped in rooting hormone and planted. If it works, I’ll have another Early Girl plant. If not, it’s another Learning Experience.

The pot sitting on the deck holds a fruit tree. I ordered both a Meyer lemon and an orange, and one of them died, and that’s whichever one didn’t. I’ll let you know which is it when it bears fruit, in about four years.

Now we proceed to the Downstairs Container Garden. I ran out of deck space.

Please note the nice sturdy tables that the pots are sitting on. I mentioned to my son one day that I needed to move some pots downstairs but needed something to put them on — Millie the Adorable Hairy Beast digs in them when they are at ground level. He went to his room and came back in about ten minutes with the design and a materials takeoff list. We went to the hardware store and later that afternoon I had a waist-height table for working on and a knee-high table to support the plant pots. Isn’t it wonderful to have talented children? (DH points out that the genes for this skill did not come from his side of the family.)

White pot closest to the camera: French bean (haricot vert)
White pot between it and the blue thing: Bell pepper
Red pot in the back: straightneck yellow squash
White pot in the wayback: crookneck yellow squash
Blue thing: Yukon Gold potatoes

Now the remaining side of the Downstairs Garden:

These last two pots are Italian Romano (flat green) beans and edamame (sweet soybeans).

And there you have it!

Now I hope you will excuse me. I have to go buy more pots for the three new Carmello tomato plants I bought at the farmer’s market this morning.

I bought carrot and chile seeds and strawberry plants last week. Foolishly, I checked that little box on the order form that said “Yes! Send me emails about your great deals!” I’m weakening, and I know I’ve already bit off more than I can chew with the seeds I already have.

The only thing that keeps me from ordering is that I tried squash once before. Got beautiful plants, lush foliage, blossoms… and no squash.

But maybe… this time… ya think?

Wow, what a difference! Comparing the displays on Bunter III (the new one) and Bunter Jr (the old one) is amazing — this one is much brighter and the colors are infinitely more true. I didn’t realize how much eyestrain I was having until suddenly I wasn’t having it anymore. :)

In other news, I’ve decided that I will dip my toes into the garden this year. I’ve ordered some seeds for several types of lettuces, two varieties of tomatoes, and some bell peppers. I have absolutely nowhere to plant them that gets full sun all day in the summer, but I have aimed for shade-tolerant plants and we will see how they go.

Now I guess I will have to learn how to can and make jelly in order to be a proper pioneer mother. (I already know how to quilt.)