Fixer Upper: Garden Edition

Fixer Upper: Garden Edition

Before we get into this post, Veggie Garden Virgin now has a Twitter account! Follow for additional gardening insights and other stuff you won’t find on the blog. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Welcome to the garden edition of Fixer Upper! Instead of gutting and renovating homes, this husband and wife team takes out old garden boxes and builds new and improved ones!

Sad, tiny carrot

One of the lessons I learned from last year was my raised bed wasn’t deep enough for vegetables to establish strong roots. Hence the small, sad carrot I pulled from the garden.

So what to do? In true Fixer Upper style, level the old structure and start over. Preferably, watch someone else tear down and rebuild. Like Joanne, I’m perfectly comfortable putting on the finishing touches once most of the work is done.

See my Chip turn the old into the new.

And time for the big reveal! Unfortunately there are no large panels to roll back, but you can see the changes between last year’s box and this year’s in the slideshow below.

Tricked by a Carrot

Things in the garden are still going well; the watermelon and cucumbers are getting larger and I’m seeing new sprouts each week. This post is focusing on another vegetable in my garden- the carrot.

A couple months back I planted a row of carrot seeds. Weeks went by and I didn’t see any results. I figured they just never sprouted. In this post, I asked if the green things were weeds or vegetables. The consensus was that they were vegetables. The group was right, but I was oh so wrong.

CarrotsThe greenery sticking out of the garden was about a foot high. I thought if these were the carrots I planted, they would be pretty large by now. So, I went ahead and picked what I was sure were flourishing orange carrots. You can see the results to the right. The long, green tops fooled me. The bigger of the two carrots was barely
a nub and very very thin. The other wasn’t even worth taking a picture of. But I did want to put this very nice produce basket (a lovely gift from my mother-in-law) to use. Even though I made a judgement error on the carrots; I’m sure I will soon have enough produce to fill the basket.

On a brighter note, check out the cucumber below. Almost ready to pick!

cucumber 82014

 

Feeling like a Proud Mama

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted again. Since then, I’ve taken a family vacation to Disney World and made a weekend trip to the beach with girlfriends. Yes I know, my life is hard. But the traveling hasn’t left much time for posting.

Watermelon!

Watermelon!

Before I left for my vacations, I started drafting a post about having second thoughts. I felt like I did in college when I woke up the morning after spending the previous night drinking Boone’s Farm. Thoughts running through my head then and now- what was I thinking? Why did I think that was a good idea? I was very frustrated with my garden. It seemed like a lot of work for no return.

But I’m happy to report that I have fruit growing! With all the rain we’ve had lately, my watermelon are really starting to take off. I feel like a proud mama. All the planting, maintaining and weeding have paid off. It just took awhile. I can also see other water melon starting to come in. In a conversation I had with a coworker the other day, we decided that baby fruits and vegetables are extremely cute. Baby anything, really.

It’s good to know that the hard work is paying off and that I’ll soon have produce to enjoy. I think my carrot is about ready to pick and my cucumbers should start coming in any day. Below are other pictures I took of my garden today.

Baby Watermelon

Baby Watermelon

Garden on August 18

Garden on August 18