Green Thumb Sunday Tomatoes and Going to Bakersville!

The early tomatoes that were planted outside this week are doing great! Here is my first baby picture:

See it? Its right in the center of the picture, small but oh so cute. Grow quickly little fella!

Around here folks always say that if you don't like the weather just wait a day or two because it changes drastically. It works the same way in reverse too. Thursday and Friday were perfect Spring tomato weather days with highs in the 80's and lows in the 60's. Last night however it got down to 36 degrees and tonight is supposed to be even lower! Yesterday I had to spring into action and construct the temporary lean-to greenhouse. Last night, this it what my early tomatoes looked like:

Here is what they looked like inside:

It was enough to get them through last night. Hopefully tonight and the rest of the cold front will be okay too. If I would have left them out in the open, I probably wouldn't have them today for Green Thumb Sunday!

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Next Sunday I will get to be with the man who possibly has the greatest green thumb of all - Jere Gettle of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

What an amazing business he and his wife Emilee have established by collecting and growing 1200 unique heirloom seed varieties. The reason I may get to meet him next Sunday is because I'm headed to Bakersville! Next Sunday and Monday, May 4th and 5th is Baker Creek's Annual Spring Planting and Heritage Festival.

Yes, Baker Creek is in Missouri and I live in Kentucky. They are 9 hours away but I can't think of a better gardening pilgrimage. Last year they had over 5000 people attend and many vendors. It will be neat to see their set up, the town they have built and the period costumes and demonstrations. The speakers at the festival should be spectacular as well. If you live anywhere near Mansfield Missouri or are willing to drive long distances like me, you should really check out this event. I would love to hear from anyone who has attended in the past and find out if anyone I know is going this year. It would be fun to meet up with a fellow garden blogger or someone who reads this blog.

I am pretty excited about going. My family and I are making a whole vacation out of it. See you in Bakersville!

Green Thumb Super Bowl Sunday!

Okay, I haven't actually been using my green thumb much lately but the NFL Super Bowl marks the beginning of the gardening season for me. I know that sounds strange but I usually spend much of Super Bowl Sunday planning the upcoming growing season. After church I will likely get out my seeds, my seed catalogs and my graph paper and get to work. By the time kickoff happens, I will have most of my 2008 garden planned out.

You may think I'm crazy, but organizing a garden is a lot like an NFL football team. To get into the spirit, here's my garden/football team's helmet:

I'll call my team the "GardenDesk Growers"!

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the off-season for the NFL. The off-season for a team is spent figuring out which players and coaches are good enough to remain and which ones need to be cut. They look to add new players to better next year's team. They also look back at the season that has just ended to figure out what worked well and what didn't. All teams but one did not achieve their goal of winning the Super Bowl. They try to learn from last season's disappointments so they can do better this season!

These are the things I have been doing in the past couple of months because my garden's off-season actually took place in December and January . I have been pouring over seed catalogs looking for new star players to draft and have decided to cut some of my under-achieving vegetable varieties. I am redesigning part of my game plan and am even planning to increase this year's playing field! I have carefully looked over the 2007 "touchdowns" as well as the "fumbles". I will be reporting more about that in the near future.

So the Super Bowl marks the beginning of The "GardenDesk Growers" 2008 pre-season! Many players will soon report to my basement to begin their season under the grow lights! Today I will be mapping out the 2008 garden and figuring out what plants will occupy what spot on the field. Of course I will also be dreaming of winning the Super Bowl of gardening in which every vegetable grows to perfection and every flower is beautiful!

If you are a gardener, chances are that you are also dreaming of a winning 2008 garden. So I know it is only February, but I must ask you that famous question:

Are you ready for some Football Gardening?!! I sure am!

Since this is the official beginning of my 2008 gardening season, this will also be the kick-off for my 2008 Green Thumb Sunday posts. This post is actually not a very good GTS post, but be sure to visit other Green Thumb Sunday participants!

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My next GTS post will be much better I hope.

For today I say, GO GIANTS! I mean GO PATRIOTS! No, I mean GO GARDENDESK GROWERS!

Happy Rose of Sharon for Green Thumb Sunday!

We have had a Rose of Sharon bush in the front yard for about 7 years or so but I've never noticed how great it is. It has been in bloom for about a month now and it doesnt seem to care about the lack of rain we've had.

It is on a hill and is growing near where the downspout lets out, so maybe it gets more water that the rest of my plants when it DOES rain. Whatever the reason - it is a happy plant. Perfect for Green Thumb Sunday!

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A Child's Garden for Green Thumb Sunday!

I haven't been very good at displaying a green thumb this spring, but my 10-year-old daughter has! I am very proud of how well she has done with her cool season garden bed. This year we built two 12x3 garden beds exclusively for her and her sister to work with. She decided that one bed would be for cool season veggies and the other for the warm season crops. Here is her beautiful cool-season bed:

On one end she planted broccoli and several kinds of leaf lettuce.

In the middle, she planted more leaf lettuce, head lettuce, spinach and garlic.

On the other end, she planted onions and more spinach and lettuce.

Also notice the two potato plants on the top right of the above picture. When we built the new raised bed for her, we dug some dirt out of the existing garden. The most fertile soil was from where we planted potatoes last year. While digging, my daughter found two of last year's potatoes, so she decided to stick them in her garden to see if they would grow. Of course with her green thumb, they are growing like crazy! Now we know where Sammy, her Guinea Pig gets her green thumb from!

We have already enjoyed eating salads from her garden. It has been great because she has at least five different types of lettuce and spinach. I am so glad that she planted this cool-season garden, because I didn't plant any spring lettuce or broccoli. I was much too busy working on building our deck. By the way, it is getting closer to being finished. The floor is done, so we were able to put the furniture out.

But this post is NOT about the deck, it is about my 10-year-old Green Thumb Daughter. My other daughter has a pretty good green thumb too. She planted a whole bed of flowers in the main garden but they are all still very small. I'm sure I will have beautiful pictures of it to post in about a month. It's nice having good gardeners for daughters to pick up the slack for ol' dad.

Happy Green Thumb Sunday, and have a great Memorial Day!

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My Mom's Garden for Green Thumb Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day and Happy Green Thumb Sunday! It promises to be a beautiful day here. The weather will be perfect for going to church and for visiting my wife's mom and family for a cookout!

Last weekend we were treated to a cookout with my mom and family. My mom and step-dad are great gardeners. Their vegetable garden hasn't been planted yet, but their entire yard looks like it belongs in Better Homes and Gardens Magazine!

I thought it would be appropriate to show my mom's gardens for Mother's Day and Green Thumb Sunday.

I just love their water garden with all of the fish. It looks like a natural pond with a great waterfall. The pond is complete with aquatic plants, but many of them will be more visible later in the season. My step-dad will probably say that I should have waited to show pictures of his pond until then, but I think it looks great even now. I don't know how he got to be so good at aquatic gardening. One day he just started digging, and before long he had a great custom built water garden!

It's not just water gardening that he and my mom are good at. Every where you look there are beautiful and unique flowers and plants.

I had fun taking pictures of my mom's gardens and had a great time visiting with her, my step-dad and many other family and friends. Today, we are set to do it again with my wife's family.

Happy Mother's Day Mom!

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Organic Gardening and Great Big Plants!

My garden is an organic garden. I don't use any kind of chemical fertilizer or pesticides. I don't consider myself an environmentalist though and I don't try to make other gardeners feel guilty if they use chemicals. I simply think my flowers and especially my vegetables are far better by not using chemicals.

So what do I use for fertilizer? Lots of compost. I believe in feeding the soil instead of feeding the plants. A properly fed soil WILL feed the plants. I do have a bit of a problem however. I have expanded my vegetable, fruit and decoration gardens quite a bit this year and I don't have a sufficient amount of compost right now. Time for some 10-10-10 right? No way!

I am going to turn to a new product to help me out. It is an organic liquid compost enriched concentrate called Great Big Plants.

I have never tried it before but it sounds very promising. The company that makes it calls it "The Energy Drink for Plants". Here is a little of what they have to say about their Great Big Plants:

What's The Big Deal?
Great Big Plants is a concentrated organic liquid compost mixture that invigorates soil, producing maximum plant growth with minimum effort. The Big deal is bigger, brighter blooms; deeper, more emerald greens and plump, tastier fruits and vegetables.

I hope all of that is true. You can find much more information about the product at GreatBigPlants.com. In addition to using this liquid compost on my garden in general, just for fun I plan to grow a side-by-side comparison. I will use Great Big Plants on one side of a bed and not on the other. I will document and photograph the difference, and share the results in a future post.

I can't wait to get those early tomatoes that are in the picture's background planted outside. I will give them a boost with Great Big Plants so I can brag about them and many other plants on future Green Thumb Sunday posts.

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For Green Thumb Sunday: A Guinea Pig's Garden?

Green Thumb Sunday is about showcasing what you have growing in your gardens. Well this Green Thumb Sunday, I am being upstaged by Sammy, my daughters guinea pig. Everything I have planted outside in the garden has done poorly so far but Sammy seems to be a master gardener!

She has planted a nice garden in the corner of her cage.

I don't know how she did it, I guess she does have a green thumb. But wait, guinea pigs don't even have thumbs!

Seriously, we just notice those sprouts yesterday morning. Obviously she spilled some of the seeds from her food bowl and her water bottle dripped on them. She spends most days out of her cage playing with her guinea pig brother, Fizzy. That would explain how the seeds could have undisturbed time to germinate.

The sprouts must have been there for a couple of days without my family noticing. We all got a pretty good laugh when my daughter saw it and exclaimed that Sammy's garden is doing better than ours.

It's not good to be out done by a guinea pig. I hope I grow better tomatoes than she does!

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Magic Sproutz For Green Thumb Sunday!

I have written several times before about The Spinmaster Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes plants. We have just grown two more of them and our new fortunes are "Adventures Await", and "Long Live".

The symbols on the other side are a sun and a horseshoe. If those secret fortunes are referring to the garden this year, I like them! Adventures, long life, luck and plenty of sunshine - sounds like a winner!

My family enjoys these Secret Fortunes plants but I would like to find some of the new Disney Magic Bean Message Plants. Has anyone seen these?

They appear to be just like the Secret Fortunes Plants, but the cans have Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh on them. You also get to pick the message ahead of time. Messages are things like, "I Love You", "Thank You" and "Happy Birthday" so you can give them as gifts.

I have not seen them in person. Robin commented on one of my Magic Sproutz posts about them. She found a website in Hong Kong called Sun's Collection selling them. That's where I got the above pictures. Does anyone know if these are available in the United States?

These Spin Master Magic Sproutz products sure are mysterious. They are very hard to find in stores, and there is not a lot of information online. That is why I keep bringing them up. People are contacting me with questions about them, but I don't really know much. All I know is that my daughters gave me one last year as a gift and we really liked it. We then found them again later for $1.00 each at Walmart in the discount toy bin.

These really are neat little novelty plants. As far as I could find out, the plant is called Jack Bean or Sword Bean, which is also called the Chickasaw Lima bean, Brazilian broad bean and other names. These are cool, but why are they hard to find?

Here's the beef with these products as I see it; They are marketed as toys! Spinmaster Company, if you are reading this, please understand that you are missing a huge market by not showing these to us gardeners! We are the ones that can appreciate them. Our kids are the ones who would want these, not regular kids that happen to see them at Wal-Mart or Dollar General while they are looking for their favorite action figure. You need to put them on the shelf next to potting soils and seed trays at all the box stores where we spend insane amounts of money this time of year because we just can't wait to get our hands dirty and plant something!

These Magic Sproutz products, especially the Disney Magic Beans, need to be put right next to the Jiffy Kid seed cups. Have you seen those? My kids just had to get one of each kind:

These Jiffy cups are just a peat pot with a soil disc and a seed! Not near as cool as the Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes. They need to be more readily available. Sorry about the rant. Do you agree with me?

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Green Thumb Sunday Dafodills and Happy Easter!

This is the coldest Easter Sunday that I can remember. Right now it is 27 degrees! Our daffodils are frozen and gone now, but a week ago they were beautiful!

I took these pictures the day before the weather went to below freezing. Actually, it was pretty cold standing in that rain to get the photos!

This unusual cold we are having will make this Easter have far fewer flowers than usual, but that is okay. Easter is wonderful because our Savior lives!

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Early Tomatoes for Green Thumb Sunday!

My goal is to have extra early ripe tomatoes by July 1st!

I planted Early Girl Tomato seeds in cell packs back in February and then transplanted them to peat pots. They are looking pretty good now.

They now need to be potted up again to a larger pot. Each time I transplant them, I bury the stem all the way to the first set of leaves. This way extra roots grow from what was the stem. Here is what the seedling looks like now compared to the first day I transplanted it.

These seedlings didn't start out as well as they are now. They germinated alright, but then we had a cold spell near 0 degrees and my basement got pretty cold. The seedlings still looked good from a distance, but upon closer inspection I noticed that the underside of the leaves were purple.

This has happened to my broccoli plants outdoors in the past when it was too cold, so I was familiar with it. Leaves turn purple when there is a phosphorus dificency in the soil or when the plant can not take up phosphorus. When soil gets cold the phosphorus in the soil gets "locked up", meaning it is not available to the plant at all until the soil warms back up.

Since my tomato seedlings were still inside, I had complete control over their soil and its temperature. I suppose I could have heated the plants and soil, but instead I decided to go ahead and transplant them up, using warm soiless mix and warm water. The tomatoes responded well, the outside temperatures and my basement warmed up, and now my plants look healthy as can be. They are enjoying being part of the cool season veggies, sitting in the flat beside my broccoli and lettuce seedlings.

There is more to be done than just transplanting to enjoy early ripe tomatoes. I will be warming the bed they will go in with black plastic, and will have to fashion something that can be covered with clear plastic after they get planted outdoors in April (about a month earlier than my main season tomatoes).

I will post more about that when the time comes. As for now, I am just enjoying my growing plants and dreaming of eating that first organic garden fresh home grown tomato - before the July 4th holiday! That is if I have a little luck and if I really do have a green thumb!

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Orchids for Green Thumb Sunday!

These are the orchids that my friend brought to me to look at:

I have to admit that I know very little about orchids. About all I know is that they are beautiful, and they look good for Green Thumb Sunday!

Since I know very little about them, I have to ask you (who hopefully knows more about orchids than I do) the question that my friend asked me. She has two orchids that she got about three years ago and they are still in the containers they came in. Here is a full picture of the one that is currently in bloom:

And here is what the pot of the other one looks like:

So the question is "what are those giant above ground roots, and are they normal? Do the orchids need to be repotted, and if so, why are they still blooming so nicely?

Gotta Garden is a blog I like to read that posts about orchids from time to time. She said that the roots are normal but they should probably be repotted. My friend is reluctant to do so since the orchids are doing so well in the pots that they are in. I would appreciate any further advice. Thanks!

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Fresh Apples for Green Thumb Sunday!

My family went grocery shopping yesterday and I was surprised and upset at how expensive fruit was, not to mention that the variety and quality was very poor. It made me remember the wonderful apples we had just four months ago. So this week's Green Thumb Sunday photos make me hungry!

I wish I could say I grew these apples, but I can't. This past October, I did take these photos and I did pick and eat many of the apples pictured! I do have two apple trees of my own. Unfortunately, they did not produce very well last season so the family and I headed to Evans Apple Orchard in Georgetown Kentucky. They have a great pick your own apple orchard as well as many fun things for children.

We ate our fill in the orchard and took home bushels of apples. The children also enjoyed the pumpkins, some farm animals, a corn maze and a playground. They also had a giant slide perched high atop a mountain of hay bales. I didn't get a picture of the slide, but this next one was taken from the top of the slide.

I can't wait to go back this summer and fall. I wish I had one of those apples right now! I will have to settle for going outside and pruning the two apple trees that I have, and of course I will have to do what every gardener hates the most... wait.

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My First Green Thumb Sunday

This is my first official Green Thumb Sunday post, and I am excited to finally be a part of it. When the weather is nice and I'm not gardening, I like to do other things outdoors like fishing out on the lake!

Since there isn't much going on in the garden right now, I went back to last summer looking for some good garden pictures to post. The more I looked at those pictures of my sunny and warm garden, the more I longed for this coming season. It finally got to where I didn't want to look at the garden pictures anymore, so I settled on these lake sunset pictures.

But since Green Thumb Sunday really ought to have a garden theme, here is another silhouette picture from the garden:

Can you believe that is a hornet visiting our butterfly bush? I was trying to take an actual color picture of him, but none of them were very good. So even though the above picture was an accident, it is one of my favorites of my insect photos!

So there you have it - my first Green Thumb Sunday pictures. If you want to see other Green Thumb Sunday pictures, there is a blogroll of everyone else who participates at the bottom of my sidebar. Or of course, you could join in the fun and post your own Green Thumb photos!

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