All the free recycled coffee cups one could ever want...

These have been rinsed with a 10% bleach solution and are sitting out to dry.

We got these free for the asking at our local coffee shop (Thinkers Cafe on 20th street in Potrero Hill.) The nice folks there left a basket with a sign out for the customers to place used coffee cups in a milk crate. They call us when the crate is full. This is the 2nd load of cups in a few weeks.

Roll Call

As of today we have (above ground) in our Square Foot Garden:
2 Musk Melons (Cantaloupe)
1 Watermelon
2 Spinach (of 9 seeds sown)
7 Broccoli (started indoors)
7 Snow Peas (of 8 seeds sown -- I actually pushed a snow pea seed into the ground in the place of the missing snow pea today.)
X carrots (16 seeds sown .. none sprouted but I had some sprouting indoors that I transplanted. I'll consider these a wash for now)
1 Zucchini
3 Cucumbers (of 6 seeds sown)
1 Coriander (aka Cilantro - of 4 seeds sown)
16 radishes (woohoo)

Went into the ground (date):
1 Chico III Tomato transplant (3/29, Determinate paste/roma-type)
1 Costoluto Genovese Tomato transplant (3/30, Italian Heirloom)

Separate, in 5-gallon planters:
9 Blue Lake Bush beans (Sounds exotic, almost, but they're just green beans. All started indoors and transplanted in their newspaper pots.)
1 Green Zebra Tomato transplant (3/29, green 'mater with stripes!)
1 Chudo Rinka Tomato transplant (3/29, a Ukranian Determinate -- bush-- tomato)

Into 2-gallon hanging basket: Tumbling Tom Tomato transplant (3/29, dwarf cherry tomato)

Elsewhere:
4 - Beauregard Sweet Potato Slips (taken from an organic sweet potato purchased at Whole Foods that happened to start sprouting)

Future (what is still under grow lights and sitting, pampered, indoors):
Eggplant
Sweet (California Wonder) Bell Peppers
Pumpkin (a lone seed -- but I have peeked and it has sprouted..)

The next set of seedlings: tomatoes, eggplant and carrots

For whatever reason, the top level of the grow center maintains temperatures of 75 degrees. The lower level only gets to 65 degrees. For this reason I've started using the top level to germinate seeds. (Center: eggplant seedlings and 2 young tomato plants)


Carrot starts in little fingerling starter pots. The carrot seedlings are so tiny and delicate that I developed this tiny starter pot to accommodate them. They also take up a lot less precious space under the grow lights this way.


Eggplant


Tomatoes (in 50/50 soil and vermicompost mix)

Saturday Morning, March 28 - Progress Photos

Snow Peas taking off -- now there are 6 of 8!


1 of 1 Zucchini Plant - these require 9 squares in the square foot garden. I'm sure they are worth it!


There's a little melon seedling peeking through here (1 of 2)


Cucumber (1 of 6)


Broccoli (7 total, started indoors)

Stuff is Growing!

These photos were all taken this morning. By the time I returned from work, there were two more surprises (not pictured): 1 of 1 zucchini and 1 of 6 cucumbers.

Snow Peas (above)


Radishes (above)



Blue Lake Bush Beans (above, and so you knew about these already...)

OT: tomato plant progress and grow light setup.

Chudo Rinka Tomato plants (above) on March 10. These were sown on February 28.

Same tomato plant today (March 24) 2 weeks later. I guess I have been a bit impatient with my thinking that they don't seem to be growing too fast.

Grow Center: $30

If anyone is interested in the setup that I have to grow my tomato plants, I used an old microwave cart. I have been meaning to freecycle this microwave cart (FOR YEARS NOW) and finally came up with the idea to turn it into a grow station. The cart rolls around on wheels and has a shelf underneath. I purchased 2 undercounter fluorescent lights (about $15 each, one for each pocket) and lined the inside of the shelf with aluminum foil. However, the shelf is already white which is highly reflective, so in hindsight, I could have skipped the aluminum lining step. I used packing tape to tape heavy cardboard over the big opening in the back of the cart. Then, I used an old sheet to cover the entire thing. This keeps the plants warm at night -- recently, they've been growing in 75 degree temperature!

OT: (sorta) newspaper seed starting pots

What's not in the ground right now are tomatoes, eggplant and maybe a few others. I started tomatoes in little newspaper pots as early as February 7. Those wound up in our daughter's Preschool classroom and they did not fare too well (not enough light.) I was able to rescue a few plants by bringing them home and sticking them under a grow light.

A few subsequent batches (Feb 28 and March 2) of tomato seedlings are doing MUCH better because I kept them warm (in the house) during germination and I placed them underneath the grow lights as soon as they emerged.

March 15: Added mulch

This is what Yoel looked like after filling 10 yard waste bags up and dragging them on to the deck. What you don't see is me after I surrounded the beds with the cedar mulch. Oh.. It was $100 worth of mulch, by the way.....

March 14: darker squares are the ones that have been planted.

What's in the ground: basil, cilantro, radish, spinach, oregano, carrot, snow peas, cucumber, musk melon, watermelon.

Additional costs

So, I lied, there are a few additional costs for twine ($3) that I used to make my 1x1 squares and various others. Just be aware of that. There will be some costs here and there.



Oh, did I forget to mention the Motion-activated Scarecrow I bought ($60)? I caught the neighbor's cat hanging out in the yard the other day and the last thing I want is to find cat poo in my raised beds where I will be growing food that my family will be eating. Also, last summer we were thrilled to have some visitors in our yard: a family of Raccoons and an Opossum. This year I will not be so thrilled if they were to visit. So, $60 is a wise investment.

I also had to buy another garden hose to hook up to the Scarecrow. $15 at Lowe's.

$255 + $80 = $335. (so far... this may get interesting)

So, you want to grow your own veggies? (Or, how much will this cost me?)

I actually started thinking about a garden a few months ago when there was looming threat of a drought. "What drought?" you ask. Well, if you have been living in a cave you wouldn't know of it but everyone else (in California) is well aware that are our reservoirs are only partially full and we need another 120-150% of normal rainfall to get 'em back up to normal levels. Along with the threat of drought comes the threat of water rationing and higher water prices.

If you know me (well, Yoel and me but he agrees with all of my ideas pretty much), I have a solution for everything. Back when they threatened $5 and $6-a-gallon for gas, I bought a Prius. And when PG&E threatened to raise electricity rates, I had solar panels installed. When Sunset Scavenger told us they were raising rates - nuh uh -- my answer was that we'll make less garbage so we can request a smaller garbage bin AND PAY YOU LESS! (Worm composting .. I may or may not talk about that in this blog..) Take THAT Sunset Scavenger! And now, when they threaten us with higher water charges (oh, right .. and drought) .. Well, you guessed it -- I'll stop watering the lawn. The lawn costs a lot of money to keep green even with our as-little-as-possible watering practices of watering 5 minutes every other day. I have no idea how much water this is but it is clear from our typical Spring and Summer water bills that the lawn is to blame for our $200+ per month water bills (vs. $50/month normally.)

But I don't want to look at a dead lawn. So I started researching small gardens. My research led me to a gardening method call Square Foot Gardening (they have a website.) I bought the book over the Winter Holiday and read it -- but you don't need to because it's pretty simple and you can look up all the details online. The basic premise is that you build some raised beds using lumber framing, fill it with great quality soil mix, partition off (just for looks) the garden space into 1 foot by 1 foot squares and grow your veggies (or herbs or what-have-you) in those squares.

So the journey begins.

We hired a gardener to come do some (6-hours-worth) of weeding in our yard on February 28. This created a huge heap of yard waste that was piled into the rear of the yard. Unbeknownst to Yoel, he would be bagging this waste a few weeks later and dragging it to the front for pick up. The original idea was that we were going to compost all of it. Turns out there is no way we would be able to compost all of this weed and shrubbery in the amount of space we had so.

I'm going to be honest about the money I spend doing this because it may turn out that I wind up spending a ton of money to grow $50 worth of vegetables when I could have just gone to the store and bought them. But the experience is worth it if that turns out to be the case.

The cost to buy my initial supplies to make 4 raised beds, each bed is 4' x 4' x 6" height, was $30:

8 - Douglas Fir 2"x6"x8' boards cut in half ($25)
1 - box of 1 and 3/4" wood screws ($5)

Pretty simple, I screwed 4 pieces together at the ends to make a perfect square.

Next, I had to prepare the ground. I did the super easy way -- by covering the ground (our lawn) with weed cloth.

2 - 3' x 50' roll of weed cloth and plastic pegs ($35)

Finally, I fill the frames with ($120 worth) of soil from the garden store (Home Depot and Lowe's)
28 cubic feet worth -- I think that's about "a yard". The soil is one of the following, either straight up Miracle-Gro (for flowers and vegetables), Sta-Green (for flowers and vegetables -- a Miracle-Gro competitor), or a mixture of Kellogg brand "Amend" plus steer manure compost mixed with Kellogg garden soil.

2 - 4 cubic feet bags of Horticultural-grade Vermiculite ($50) I had to hunt high and low for these!

I spent about ($20) on various extra seeds: spinach, corn, sunflower, carrots, zucchini, eggplant, cucumber, musk melon (cantaloup), watermelon and sweet peppers. I have some varieties of seed on-hand which I do not count (tomatoes, basil).

So there you have it. So far, $255 spent.