Some success, some failure

Its been a few weeks now since beginning this gardening and growing my own plants which will hopefully produce nice food. I've had 6 of the 10 strawberry plants grow, the others there was this hairy fungus or something growing inside the pot. It must have been the humidity created by the bag over the countainers to keep warm air in here. Probably not good enough air ciculation? Anyway thats ok, 6 strawberry plants is fine and I'm happy. Now I just got to get them to a full plant without losing anymore! THey're still really tiny but I read that soon they should start to pick up and grow much faster.



I have two types of spinach out the garden and one of them is doing FINE, everything is growing as you can see above. However the other box only a few have come up and in total I was expecting around 50 spinach plants. Maybe its the seeds I used in the other box are not too good or maybe they just take longer (i'll have to re read the packet). If nothing happens in the next week I'll sort that out again because its not too late for spinach :) The broccoli is also doing fine, I think its also starting to pick up a bit now.



Now my tomato plants, I gave 2 of them away to a friend and have 5 in a big pot, and a couple downstairs that I think are only just starting to come up. The other plant I hit the pot over by accident lol. whoops! But even if I only end up with 5 tomato plants that great! (also note my Mint plant to the right here, gottta find a home out the garden for this because apparently it literally takes over. So this will go in a small box on its own I think! In the middle there is a strawberry plant, just one in that pot but I might have put 2-3 seeds in there. The others are downstairs.



As for the Basil, well its holding up, I realize that cold weather not so good. Sometimes its showing signs of dying, then it springs back to life agian. Might have been at least a month too early to put it into the garden but I'll learn from this if it dies and just buy another one. Cheap anyway!

Soon the made up green house I made out the garden will be done, I will then place some of the plants in there shortly.

Oh yes and I almost forgot, I sowed two rows of carrots and there seems to be these grass-like things coming up. I guess its not grass so I'll leave it alone lol.

thats all for now :)

Garden Update

These plants you can see in the picture are tomato plants, the top right two big pots are from apple seeds that my niece and nephew planted. They look after these because I want to learn them to take care of the plants and stuff. I'm not using these of course, I'm buying apple trees because I actually want fruit either this year or next year! The little green pot I have no idea what it actually is, I never did that... maybe it was the kids again. The plant right at the bottom of this picture is an Aloe Vera plant that was given to me by my aunte. Soon when these grow a little more I will plant the tomato plants outside in the green house that we're building. Okay so it's not the best looking thing in the world, but I'm making something out of materials that we just had around the garden to save money. At least it will get the job done! Maybe at a later point I can buy a nice glass green house but maybe next year.


To the right you can see part of the garden but theres still more space around the top corner to the left which is about the size of my house, and then behind the camera and to the right. I have to sort out the trellace that you can see in the picture because we haven't grown anything on it before. I have no idea why not... my dad just didn't bother in the end I guess. I'll post other pictures of the rest of my garden when it's actually all sorted out and the plants are in place. I might actually make a video instead and go around my garden showing what I'm growing and how everything is getting along. You can probably see a lonely little basil plant in the big garden box to the right. I have to get more herb plants this friday to put in that section.

So this year is mostly a big learning experience for me. Next year I'll probably start preparing in feburary or so rather than end of march to early april as I started this year. It's all fun though, I love watching everything come up. I get my cup of green tea and go into the garden to check every morning or evening :-)

The strawberry plants I haven't pictured yet because they've only just started germinating after 2 weeks. I have about 3 or 4 left to germinate but I ain't sure how many seeds I put in each pot... I'll see if I can transplant them later on.



The spinach and broccoli are really started to grow a bit faster now, the 'true leaves' on the spinach have just started coming up I think. I couldn't get a detailed enough picture but below is how they're doing now. Because the true leaves have just popped up I think the plants are really going to start growing faster soon.




Other stuff

The other day it was a nice day so me and some friends went to the park. As you all know I took something called CIPRO in 2007 that caused tendinosis all over my body, including both achilles tendons. Although it was relatively mild to what msot people who react to these drugs get, it was still was very long lasting and persistent even with the right measures employed to try and heal. Anyway, it's 18 months later and thye seem to have finally healed or mostly healed. I played football for over 1 hour and I had no problems with my tendons at all. This is definitely a good sign, because as you can see with my garden progress I've also been busy there and had no problems. So everything is going in a positive direciton right now, I hope it continues :-)

Thats all for today everyone, I'm off to make a green smoothie and relax.

Oh yes one other thing before I go, I'm a bit disappointed that so many CRON bloggers have stopped. It seems we go through waves of new bloggers then they all eventually give up. This is what I've seen over the last few years anyway. I hope some of you out there can continue to blog, even if it's once a month! It really doesn't take a lot of time. But I understand if you haven't got much to say them you can tend to start just repeat yourself over and over. I've also had a few people ask me about how successfully people are with CRON because all they can see is CR blog community just getting smaller and smaller and they assume that everyone just gives up on CR. It's my understanding that for most people this isn't true? The majority of CRers actually do not share their experiences, but you can find them at the Calorie Restriction Society email lists.

Seedlings

I never thought that I'd become so interested in gardening, as I said in my previous post I was going to do it for many years now but each time I never pushed myself to make any real effort in growing things. A couple weeks ago the sun was out, I stopped being lazy and started to prepare the garden and make the garden boxes. This was all fun, gave me plenty of exercise and time outside away from the computer or TV. I was surprised how much work had to be done though because it took quite a few days to get everything sorted. A lot of hard work from 11am to 8pm most days with only a few breaks. Because of the energy requirements I did actually lose a bit of weight because I never compensated but I'm sure that will come back again. On a side note, I had no issues at all with my tendons (from Cipro) so this is a good indicator that they have healed or are very close to normal now.

The best part though is watching the little seedlings germate and come through the soil. One night there might be nothing, and then suddenly they just appear the next morning! I think at least 90% of the seeds I put down seem to have germinated. Majority of my broccoli and spinach seedlings have germinated but one or two that didn't come up. Some of them I put 2 seeds in each hole just in case ad then will pull out one of them soon.

Because I'm growing several different things I hope I can keep ontop of it and not become too much for my first effort. I think I'll be alright though.

In a week or two I should have enough money to go and get the apple trees. I'm also thinking about getting a mini green house. Although our garden is definitely big enough to support a big one I don't think my parents would be happy taking such a huge space up :) If I had my way though the whole garden would be growing something lol.


Spinach Seedlings


So yeah, very excited to see the results and love watching the seedlings come up and grow :)

Why Grow your own vegetables? For me I'm hoping its going to save me money... See this news report.

Growing my food

After many years of saying that I would grow my own food I finally just got started on the garden and preparing it all. Because kids come over and for other reasons we made a couple garden boxes. Although there is no sheeting underneath it, it acts more as a barrier so that they don't get stamped on by people. So far in the first box that you can see has been done I have planted spinach and broccoli. I plan on having tomato plant, carrots, apple trees, herbs, I'll also have some sprouts growing by my window inside the house. I'm still looking at other things to grow of course but doing some research on it at the moment since I'm quite new to this. We have a fairly big garden so at least we are now putting the space to good use.

Here is the garden as of today;





I am planting in those two boxes, to the left of them where you can see the earth dug up. Also I have a little patch on the upper right too. We have more space behind where I was standing on the first picture, and we also have even more space to the right of where I was standing. At the moment I'm checking out how long each patch has in sunlight though first. I'm wanting at least 5-6 hours I think, preferably more.

I will keep you updated and add photos as I progress :)