The second "crop" is in

The lettuce I planted six days ago has sprouted. There are about a dozen tiny plants so far. In the photo, it's the out-of-focus green thing to the right of the stick. Sorry about the fuzzy photo.

Nothing yet from the spinach, chard or collards.

I picked up six strawberry plants on clearance at one of the big box stores. They are the Elam variety.

This 2' x 10' bed is one of several I have planned for strawberries.

I filled it just like the others with chicken wire underneath landscape fabric, paper and the Square Foot Gardening mix. Since I had some empty paper bags from the vermiculite in the SFG mix, I used them instead of moving boxes and packing paper to help keep the weeds down inside the bed.

I staggered the plants in the bed to give them some room to stretch and grow.

I need 14 more plants to fill this bed. There's an ad on the local Craigs List from somebody selling their extra strawberry plants for $1 each, so I'm going tomorrow to get some. I've realized that Craigs List is a really helpful resource.

By next year at this time, these plants will have sent out runners and I may be able to separate some of them to plant in another bed. Within a few years, these original plants should have enough "babies" for me to expand the strawberry patch to several other beds....such as the empty one there in the background.

This 3' x 3' bed is for garlic. Fall is the time to plant it.

  I'm putting in Spanish Rojo hardneck garlic. Hardneck garlics are hardier and more suited for growing in Northern climates. Softneck varieties will store better/longer than hardneck, but grow best in milder, Southern climates.

 

 

You just break the garlic head apart and plant the individual cloves.  Put them in with the pointy end up and the root end down. Push them in about 2 1/2".

 Each square foot of the bed gets nine "seed" garlic cloves. I used scrap PVC pieces to mark off each square foot section.

Once I got all the garlic heads broken up, I only had about 70 cloves, so some of the square foot spaces didn't get the full nine. However, that's still quite a bit of garlic for a 3'x3' bed. This is why SFG is so wonderful....you really maximize minimal space!

Once winter arrives, I'll put about 6" of mulch over this entire bed to protect it. Since there are a lot of pine needles around, that's what I'll use for mulch.

The asparagus plants I ordered have been delayed in shipping again and aren't scheduled to arrive until December now. Ugh! I think that will be too late for "fall" planting and they'll have to wait until spring to go in the ground.