Week of January 1st

1/1/2019

Even though I started the “garden” when we moved in last year, I thought this might be a fun way to document all the changes.  I’m going to try to be slightly more structured this year, and this will also give me a chance to document my learnings and preserve some notes for future growing seasons.

1/2/2019

The Great Basil Propagation Experiment!

Matt showed me a YouTube video before the holiday that got me inspired to really get good at growing and taking care of basil plants.  I love growing basil, but I always just forget to take care of it so it ends up going crazy and then kaput. So in this experiment, I’ve got two good pots of Basil where I’ve snipped the top few nodes off the health plants and put them in water.  The idea is to keep them under a grow lamp and on heat mats to have the snippings grow some roots then planting them like a normal seedling. This should also give the original plants an opportunity to fill out the spots where you cut from. You can keep repeating the process as the plants grow.  Let’s see if this works!

1/3/2019

Onions!

On one of my last visits to Miner’s in December, they had a box of freebie onion bulbs for the taking!  Never one to shy away from an unplanned challenge, I took 14 bulbs. I got those planted today and am looking forward to seeing how these grow.

1/4/2019 & 1/5/2019

Haven’t been feeling great since the new year, but Spring waits for nobody!  And here on the central coast, that spring comes earlier than in the midwest!  During the holiday break, Dad and I made some modifications to the beautiful Crafted Workshop planter box that I wanted to build, and made it slightly more managable for a first timer.  I knew the weekend was supposed to be rainy, so decided I could use the project as a good rainy day project.

It was actually quite managable, once I got the proper measurements decided.  I cut most of the boards on Friday night (except the bottom boards, waiting until the box was assembled to do that!) and then put everything together on Saturday.  Only a few mishaps (put one side on upside down!) but other wise it was a pretty straight forward build. It’s pretty big, so for future boxes I might make them smaller but I think for the first one, it turned out pretty great!  Now all that is left is to sand and stain/seal and line it before filling her up!

And yes, I know the stain/sealing is a hot topic - but this won’t be used for eating plants and it will be lined, so I’m not too worried about any chemical leaching into the soil.