2008 Garden - Picture Of The Year

My wife Stephanie does all my plant photography. She is a professional photographer and does an excellent job. I'll link her on this site when she's done creating her new page.

Anyways, I grew Yellow Wax Beans for the first time this year. They have the simplest, yet most beautiful of any flower that i've had so far in all of my vegetable gardens. Here is my 2008 Steve's Garden picture of the year:

2008 Garden - Part 4: Peppers & Spider Mites

The next item (and most upsetting) in my list of gardening incidents, failures, etc. is my pepper plants. I stared about 20-25 seeds and ended up with a good solid 14 or so very healthy nice looking seedlings with no problems at all (after thinning out an almost 100% germination). A few of them did not take well to the transplating to their final homes (one, at least, was my fault...tore the roots). After the transplating fun, I still had 11 very healthy plants with no issues. The problem began when the first buds showed up and eventually opened into beautiful flowers. Unfortunately, that's as far as all 11 of my plants ever made it. I don't know if it's because I used the generic Burpee Hot Pepper Seed pack or if I had bad soil or what. I never found out what attracted hundreds and hundreds of little tiny devils to these plants. Spider mites is what I found out they were after a bit of research. I first tried my Liquid Sevin (several different times, more concentrated and more often each time) with no luck. I continued to have no success getting rid of the #&$@# spider mites! I tried 2 other pesticides, neem oil, tobacco, soap solution & a few other things that were suggested. The only thing that worked a tiny bit (not nearly good enough though) was the Neem Oil. It got rid of about 25% or so of the mites. Every single time a bud would open they'd be all over it...hundreds of them. Then, it got to the point where they wouldn't even wait for the bud to open. It'd just start turning lighter color & they were all over it and all over most of the plant just sitting there waiting for more buds...grrrr! . Finally, it got the point where I was so upset that I tossed 10 perfectly healthy looking plants. =( I kept one, the one you will see in the pictures below. The plant continued to grow extremely well, but was continually slaughtered by the spider mites. They never spread to any of my other plants, even my bell peppers which were quite close to the hot pepper plants. Any help, suggestions, etc. are definitely welcome on this post, as I do not want to go through this heatbreak again this year. I'm using different, higher quality pepper seeds & probably a different potting mix too. Maybe i'll just get lucky and things will be better.



Here is a picture of one of my failed transplants. I pretty much ran out of pots & had to use this inadequately spaced container for a few plants. Obviously, it's not deep enough or even wide enough for a pepper plant...




Here is the picture life of what ended up being the last remaining pepper plant in my vegetable garden...




The spider mites started showing up a day or so after this picture was taken...






Look at how beautiful this plant became...only to never produce a single pepper...


The mites were all over this thing by this point (late July)...you can see a few browned buds dead due to their presence beforehand...


No lesson learned on this one yet as it's still a mystery. While writing this post, I thought of one possible cause. I started my pepper plants while I was still living alone with my uncle in a 100+ year old house...very possible they could have come from there. I plan on fully sanitizing all my pots I used last year before sticking any plants in them this year.

2008 Garden - Part 3: Failed Cilantro

Unfortunately, last year, I had several failed plants. Some from pests, some from bad transplanting & some for other miscelaneous reasons. This post covers one of them with a description of the reasons for failure. Hopefully, if you're an avid gardner reading this who doesn't know much about Cilantro, this will help you. Always feel free to contact me through Blogspot about questions you may have regarding any of my posts.

Every time I started Cilantro (3 times), I had to learn the same lessons over & over the hard way because I didn't figure them out until late in the year. First of all, Cilantro is not a warm/hot weather plant. It will do ok in somewhat hot temperatures if kept moist & in the shade. For best results, indoor growth is what i'd recommend. Second, it really almost must be grown in close proximity batches (not an herb that needs or wants space). Cilantro experts will almost always tell you to grow it in "bunches." I started it from seed, of course, as I do almost all of my plants. Mine never passed that stage of being about 3-4 inches tall with only one or two sets of leaves. Anyways, here are a few pictures of the unfortunate Cilantro incidents. =)





This is about the largest my Cilantro ever got, in all three attempts...




This is after I learned the plant in "bunches" lesson, but still hadn't learned the shade/no extreme heat lesson...

2008 Garden - Part 2: Store Bought Plants

This post will cover the plants I bought from stores (Home Depot, Wal-Mart, etc.). Like the last post, I will show from first picture taken to last picture taken. The only two vegetable/herb plants I bought from a store last year were Dill Weed & Orange Bell Peppers. They both did quite well. The Dill Weed was a bit hard to take care of, but once I figured out the proper care for it (limited sunlight, lots of water, a tad of fertilizer, etc.), it grew great. The Orange Bell Pepper plant pretty much grew on it's on with little care after I doused it completely in Liquid Sevin to get rid of the pests that came with it...



Dill Weed:















Orange Bell Peppers:

Notice all the Liquid Sevin on this plant right after I bought it. Another lesson learned, store-bought plants from non-nursery stores are liable to be infested with some type of pest...














What a beautiful Bell...

2008 Garden - Part 1: Successful Plants

I created this blog because I thought it would be an awesome idea to track my yearly gardens. =) This first post will show the progress of sucessful plants from last years garden. I learned several things from my experiences last year:

*Container size needed for certain plants (you'll see my beautiful, yet mini Bell peppers)
*When to start planting (my tomato plants last year were started in early May...I probably got a total harvest of about 20 or so tomatoes because they were started too late...that's just one example of this lesson learned)
*What pests to expect in my area (spider mites were death to every single one of my pepper plants...11 of them! I never did find something that got rid of them...I tried soooo many possible solutions & none worked...i'll probably have a post about this soon)
*Some other things like how often to water certain plants, how often to fertilize (if at all), what plants like full sun & what plants only like partial sun, etc.

Below are the pictures of last years garden. They are organized by plant type from first picture to last. They are not organized by week because I didn't do that last year (Time between most pics is a week...there are two times where the gap is 2 weeks). I will be this year though. I planted almost everything from seed, except my Dill Weed & Orange Bell Peppers. I have most of the lifespan of Basil, Garlic Chives, Green Bell Peppers & Tomatoes shown (1 plant of each type).



Basil:



















Garlic Chives:

















Green Bell Peppers:















Tomatoes:















Yellow Wax Beans:





These should have been lead to grow along some type of pole or trellis way before this point. I think I bought one a few days after this pic though...




Pretty flowers on these plants...




I am not growing these again only because I realized, with this bean at least, that you need several plants to have a good yield...