rabbit food...I think not

Growing lettuce is very rewarding to me, it grows very quickly and all you have to do when you want a little salad or need a little lettuce for something is snip a little and head back inside. Whats great about lettuce is after you snip a little for your dinner it will just produce more. It should do this reappearing act 2-3 times before you would actually need to replant. For a household like mine where i'm usually the only one eating "rabbit food" as my husband would call it I usually plant a small little square in my garden and it lasts me quite awhile. It's a nice crop for a small garden because it barely takes up any room. To plant it, I just do a small little well about 12 inches long and salad seeds are very tiny, so I just sprinkle them in my little well and cover them up. You don't have to worry about thinning these because you are going to eat them while they are still baby tender so you don't need to worry about them being too crowded.

Now when i'm talking about lettuces the varieties I loves are Arugula, Mescalin Mix, and Baby Spinach. These are not head lettuces like Iceberg that you see in the grocery store or Romaine. I tried growing those last year and to be honest they were a little slow growing and I also found they attracted a lot of bugs. I found that growing these little baby greens was so much more rewarding and I loved the ability to just snip and eat and have them just continue producing. A little bit more about the varieties, Arugula i've heard it called rocket, it has a very peppery taste and a almost spinach flat like leaf. If you've never tried it I would recommend it, it adds a nice kick to whatever you are using it for. Mescalin Mix is a variety of lots of baby lettuces it has a little bit of everything it's great. Spinach is pretty self explanatory it's a little slower growing but as leaves get edible size start snipping.

If your starting a garden give these little baby lettuces a try, they will sprout very quickly and after just a few short weeks they will be ready for your dining room table. Mine pictured here are about a month old. They are a perfect size and as you can see above i'm enjoying the fresh and healthy reward.

spuds

My favorite crops to grow are potatoes! I love eating potatoes which would be an obvious reason why they are my favorite but they are also really easy to grow and a beautiful plant to have in the garden. This year to give me a little more room in my boxes I decided to get a little creative and figure out a different place to grow them this year. So as you can see below I decided to use plastic party barrels as my make shift potato boxes. I waited till a little after Halloween and picked some up at Walmart on sale for 5$, they seem like a perfect size to grow some potatoes but since this is my first year using them we will see.

This is me planting my potatoes.. Potatoes are a lot different than most plants because you plant them using seed starts. Which you can buy at most nursery's or home depots. A seed start is just a potato that is all wrinkly and for lack of a better word " old looking " which it is, and it has and eye growing out of it. I'm sure everyone has experienced having an old potato in your cupboard that ends up spouting a little something when it was left too long. This is part of that same idea but you can't just plant potatoes from the grocery store because they are usually treated with something to help them not sprout. It's best to buy them from a nursery because they are usually certified disease free and already have a eye spouting out, so they are ready to plant right out of the bag. Now when i'm talking about potatoes I didn't plant big russet potatoes, I planted new potatoes a red a white variety I don't know much about the russet variety and they are so cheap at the grocery store I haven't felt the need to really research too much into that. The new potatoes suit me just fine and they are so delicious fresh out of the ground!

I follow a square foot gardening plan and according to that I can put 4 potatos starts per 1 sq ft. So they are a little tight in my buckets i'll have to see if the get too crowded. Now I did drill holes in my buckets on the bottom to let the water drain. Then put newspaper on the bottom just so they don't clog up with soil and the soil doesn't run right out. I also routed my irragation over to my buckets so I don't have to worry about hand watering them. So back to planting the potatoes. I filled the bottom of the barrel with 6-8 inches of soil placed my seed potatoes in and then covered them up with 3-4 inches of soil.

About a week later my potato plants started to peak up through the soil.

You then want to cover your little plants leaving just a few tips showing with a few inches of more soil.

Another week later my plants sprouted up again, and again you'll want to cover them with a little more soil. You'll want to continue this process until your soil reaches up to 1-2 inches below the edge of you container or bucket in my case. Potatoes are an amazing crop to grow and so rewarding. What is really fun about potatoes are you don't have to pull the whole crop when you want to start harvesting you can just dig and sneak a few potatoes for dinner and then continue to let the plant grow!

something to hang on

Many of your plants like tomatoes, vine beans, cucumbers, peas, etc. need something to help support them as they grow and the plant becomes bigger. Your main goals are to keep it off the ground, and to save a lot of space, and it makes taking care of the plant and harvesting from it much easier. My favorite kind of supports are trellises, I find they take up the least amount of space but also provide a very sturdy place for my plants to hang out. This is a little step by step on how I do my trellising.

First you'll want to put in something to anchor your trellis frame to the ground, the plumbing pipe will then fit right over this steel bar.

( My amazing dad does all my garden handiwork, Thanks Dad! )

Then you cut your pipe ( just a plumbing pipe you can buy at most hardware stores )

you'll need two for the sides how ever tall you'd like them to be. They ones on the the end of my boxes are 7 feet tall the smaller ones in the interior of the box are only 5ft. 

Slide your long side pieces right over your pipe that has been hammered into the ground. While at the hardware store buy some L brackets ( these should be right by the conduit piping  in the store ) like you can see in the photo. Then cut a center piece and just assemble it all together.

This is an up to date photo of the garden. My trellises are up and ready to go. In most garden sections or stores they sell trellis string it is the what looks like netting on my trellises. I just take it and zip tie it all the way around my frame. Now my tomatoes can just be weaved in and out of the string. This way they will have plenty of support and they are nice and tidy taking up little space. 

This is my favorite way to solving the "how to support my plants"  it just seems the most effective for the amount of space I have and they easiest for harvesting and taking care of the plants. We also have A LOT of wind here a stand alone trellis I feel couldn't stand up to those big gusts and I worry they would fall and damage the plants. When you have such limited garden space I feel like every plant counts I do my best to make sure they stay intact. Since the summer heat is brutal here I use the two trellises on the ends of my boxes as support for a shade cloth ( i'll post pictures later ) I put up during the worst part of the summer to help my plants from getting scorched. There are many many other options out there if you took a look, but as said above this just works best for me.

dirt you ask?

This is the one bigger investments you are going to make when you do a garden here in Las Vegas ( zone 11 ) is SOIL. The soil here if you can call it that will not support a nice fresh vegetable garden. You have to get around this by purchasing soil but think of it this way you are providing your garden with exactly what it wants and needs in order to grow healthy productive plants. I purchased a special mix from Home Depot but it was the brand for Mel Bartholomew my favorite square foot garden guru. He recommends using a combination of Peat Moss, Vermiculite, and Compost, FIVE different kinds of compost. I was lucky enough to just find his brand and go with that instead of combining all that but I really think that most potting soils can be just as good for starting your garden. I just purchased some bags of Dr. Q's Veggie and Herb potting mix down at Star Nursery for 10.99 for a 2 cu feet bag, and I was really happy with it. The big thing I also read about soil is COMPOST, COMPOST, COMPOST! It helps to feed your garden over the years I have yet to compost myself but they have a nice big compost bin down at Sams Club I have a feeling i'll be purchasing it. Just take a minute while you are purchasing your soil and read the labels just like you would in a grocery store, look for things like bat guano or worm castings. Of course you won't understand everything in there but take a look you might see more than you think and just compare it to a few others and then make your buy I doubt there is really to many bad ones. Ones that say Veggie and Herbs are usually a safe bet. Good luck dirt hunting!

here we go!

I debated on how to start this blog off..... I decided to just stat with something fairy simple, this is my garden. Are you impressed? Haha from the picture directly below it definitely doesn't look like much but when I consider the amount of space we actually get in these cookie cutter homes in Vegas having two boxes feels like a great start for me. I hope to one day get a little more space and add more boxes, but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve so just wait. So here it is the boxes are composite wood that came in a kit I got at Sams Club. I don't know if I would have taken the gardening leap if I hadn't found these boxes. Building them on your own would not be too difficult but it would probably be above my building skills and these were just so easy and ready to go. For those thinking about buying these since they are on the market again this year at Sams Club they aren't a bad buy. They are very easy to put together and do the job but I will say over the years they will need replacing I don't see them holding up for too long. Pictured below is my garden after winter neglect, but keep scrolling

Here it all all gussied up and ready for spring/summer

( notice my garden helper in the background) The fence around it helps to keep my dogs/children out. So there it is blog post number one. As for my plans I plan to keep you updated on my own garden and how it's going but also to concentrate posts on garden tips, certain plants, and other helpful information....at least I hope it is helpful.