Salad Ingredients Travel Short Distance

It's interesting to think that a lot of the we get at the grocery store sometimes has to travel across states to get to where we live--even produce that can just as easily be grown in your back yard.

Although not not all of the ingredients in my salad I ate with dinner last night came from my garden, some of it did. It was fun to be able walk two feet from my back door and pick fresh loose leaf lettuce, basil and chives to add to the mix. If I had grown carrots, I would have added them instead of the ones I got from the store. Maybe someday.

The lettuce and basil came from seed, and the chives were from a start I planted last year.

I encourage you to plant produce close you, either from starts or seeds. It's quite fun and satisfying when it comes time to cook, especially when you plant something that is cheap to grow but expensive to buy at the store, like herbs.

Gardening When You're Broke

If you want to bring newcomers to your garden, but you're short on cash, one thing you can do is check places where people are giving away plants for free.

A couple months ago, I looked under the "free" section of Craigslist and found an post for free grape hyacinth. This caught my eye because I planted some of these bulbs on my back porch at least a year before. I called the woman listed, and she set aside a grocery bag full of them that she thinned out in her front yard. My mom and I planted them along my fence and also at my front door. They will look much better next spring. It was a neat experience because I got to get free flowers for my garden and meet a fellow gardener. I hope to return the favor.

So before you go out to buy lots of plants, check online to see if someone is giving any away.

Blooming Chives

Sometimes I think gardens can oftwn resemble the illustrations of a Dr. Suess book. The chives in my garden are no exception. They are now blooming their puffy purple flowers and weighing down some of the long, thin green scapes (the part you dice and eat).

I ate one of the green the other week, and it tasted so fresh. I'll have to make some potatoes or another dish that I can add the chives to soon.

One thing I like about this plant is that I got it for free at a garden event. I'll write another post about how to get free plants later.

Flower Basket Resurrected

When Mother's Day roles around, that's when I start to see a lot of hanging baskets for sale. My mom usually gets one with fushias in it as a gift and has to keep my uncle from popping the blossoms open. He does this to my grandma's fushias as well.

I like to get my own hanging flower basket every year because it's so easy to take care of, adds nice color and hopefully attracts bees. There are a shortage of them partially due loss of habitat.

This past year I decided I would see if the flowers in my basket from last summer would come back. And they have! I think I might call them Frankenflowers. Other gardeners probably call them perrenials.

In the meantime, I've planted flower seeds I got for free at an Earth Day event in between the stems to add some variety.

I'd encourage you to buy or build your own flower basket. Bring those bees!

Apartment Gardening: Basil and Lettuce Plants Have a New Home

I took advantage of this morning's dry, cool weather by transplanting some of my plants. The basil, and especially the lettuce, outgrew their small spaces and needed room to expand. I moved lettuce from three small pots to one large blue pot and planted another round of seeds in the small pots again. Transplanting the lettuce was difficult because I planted too many seeds in each pot, so they were hard to separate and probably not very strong. I hope they survive.

The basil wasn't as difficult to transplant, but again, I should have planted fewer seeds in the small blue pot they were in. The transplants are now in a medium red pot and medium-sized leftover black plastic pot, and I planted some more basil seeds in the small pots.

Elsewhere on my windowsill, the forget me nots still have not come up. I think the seeds might be a bad batch or I should try something else. I need to do more research.

Apartment Gardening: The Peas are Growing!

It's been about a month since I planted snap peas in my garden. Now they have grown a few inches tall!

I installed a synthetic net along the fence this past weekend, so the peas will have somewhere to go in order to grow nice and tall. The first time I planted peas, they were starts instead of from seed. I made the mistake of not researching how to plant them. I didn't trellis them and the bugs ate the pods.

I wasn't about to make that same mistake. Hopefully, the net that I put up will do the trick.

If you have any tips about growing peas, feel free to post them below.