Gardening–A few hits and misses

This is my first year gardening at this house and only my second year gardening ever. My first year of gardening consisted of 2 planter boxes with a single cherry tomato plant, some strawberries and carrots, a few potatoes and a squash plant. While the tomatoes and strawberries turned out awesome everything else kinda failed so I will state that I am extremely new at this and learning as I go!

This year I have a much bigger space to garden in and am best learning spacing. I am also just now trying to fully comprehend square foot gardening and getting the hang of fertilizers. Any tips or tricks on these topics, or anything else garden related are much appreciated!

I started my year of gardening with the plan of using seeds vs transplants and decided to try my hand at planting some pepper seeds! I started out with some potting soil, a clean strawberry container, and some pepper seeds. I wrapped the inside of the container with seran wrap to prevent leakage of soil and then placed some rocks at the bottom for drainage before filling my container with soil.

I made a trench and planted a total of 4 seeds; my container accommodated 2 trenches. I then watered my seeds, covered them up, placed them in a sunny indoor location and waited hopefully.

Sadly it has been a total of 4 weeks and there is absolutely no sign of life. I have since learned that this was most likely due to the lack of “food” in the form of fertilizer or compost, it may not have been warm enough in my house, and my container may have been all wrong. I think this year I may just stick to transplants and try again next year!

My next gardening project I have tackled was strawberries. I got a whole bunch of strawberry plants from a friend for free from her crop last year that went crazy and decided to try my hand at planting them. Being that my strawberries last year turned out pretty good I am hopeful for these bad boys!

Once again I went into this a bit blind and simply laid out my plants in their pots where I generally wanted them, dug a hole, filled it with water, placed my plant in, covered it up and then called it a day.

I soon learned however that while my simple approach to strawberries would probably work I would not get as awesome of strawberries as I could if I had used chicken manure; apparently chicken manure is extremely acidic and strawberries love acid. In a perfect world I would have placed some chicken manure in each hole before placing my strawberry on top. However! There was a solution – dig a trench around the plant, place your manure, and water very well!

Thus I immediately ran out and picked up a big bag of chicken manure with compost at my local grocery store for only $2.79 and set to work “feeding” my strawberries!

I filled up a bucket with my compost and then dug a little trench around each of my strawberry plants.

Fill your trench with the manure, water well, and cover back up with soil.

Anna had a blast running around with her little watering can, getting super dirty, and helping me pat down the plants albeit squishing them a bit in the process…

Here’s hoping my strawberries yield an awesome crop! They already have a few open buds on them, so exciting! I have also since realized I probably could have planted my strawberries much closer together, oops! Oh well now I’ll just have room for more of them! Muahaha.

All in all I’m hoping to plant 2 pepper plants, 2 tomato plants, a zucchini plant, a cucumber plant, some lettuce, and maybe some spinach. Do you think it can fit? Any tips for trellising those plants? Or is anyone else starting out novice style like me? Let’s talk gardens!