Plant food, & using what you have.
Week 3: Fertilizing
Welcome to 🍅 GARDEN NOTES 🥬
A gardener lite logbook of weekly learnings & findings as I tend to my garden this season. Receiving guidance primarily from my elders; my neighbor, mother-in-law, grandparents, and greenhouse friend. Secondary resources are the Old Farmer’s Almanac and Google.
Logbook:
Week 3: Fertilizer (you’re here.)
WEEK 3 | JUNE 4 – JUNE 11, 2023
This is my first week feeding the plants. After two weeks of religiously watering the garden every day, it’s time to touch soil again.
My genuine concern for the little leaves humbles me. How delicate they are, how happy I am to see they made it through another night when I come round for their morning watering. These early days with the plant younglings remind me of caring for River as a newborn. And the greenhouse before her. How alike the tending is.
At the top of the week, I fertilized the annual flowers with Miracle-Gro powder given to me by my mother-in-law. The purists aren’t using miracle-gro I’m sure but I balance that with, more importantly, using what I have. By the end of the week, I fertilized the vegetable beds and tomatoes with organic fertilizer leftover from seasons past. I didn’t fertilize any of the herbs because they seem to be growing well & full without the assistance.
I’ll need more fertilizer by mid-July as I ran out but so far I’m liking the organic one. I also like how fertilizer is referred to as plant food, it’s less chemically-manufactured-robot sounding, so I use plant food from here on out.
Zucchini
My zucchini plants are gray and flaky around the edges. I guess it’s mildew but the leaves don’t have the symptoms of powdery mildew. I may be overwatering so I back off for a few days.
The joy to see the first zucchini bloom though! The brightest of yellow-gold. A validating sign that the vegetables are indeed growing.
The salad bed
I named my vegetable bed closest to the gate the salad bed — full of collard greens, spinach, kale, celery, and green peppers (don’t tell the chipmunks!). Most of the neighborhood is intrigued by my selection of collard greens, thinking them only a Southern thing. They ask how I make them and I reply, “any green steamed with butter, salt, & pepper tastes good to me”.
I’m unsure when to harvest collards. I tilled the soil a few inches deep in my veggie beds & pots this week, mixing in the organic plant food around the roots for the first feed of the season. I may have placed too much food too close to the roots. I generally have a heavy pour with, well, everything. Hope I didn’t burn the roots!
The bunnies razed my butterfly garden this week but I harvested my first bit of spinach and cilantro and here comes the garden’s first big lesson to me:
There will be bounty and there will be burden, often at the very same time.
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