Today's Harvest: RADISH & SNAP PEAS

Quickly...the peas are coming and the radishes are ripe for the picking! It is such a great feeling to poke my finger around the base of the radish greens and feel the round red roots. They are, by far, the easiest and fastest food I have grown in my little garden.

Today's Harvest: RADISH

Aside from my aphid woes, I harvested a single radish today to see how big they are.

They are not quite big enough to harvest, but very tasty so far. I can't wait to add them to my salad. My husband and I sliced it and enjoyed tiny slices of radish at lunch.

More Aphids!

I thought my aphids were fat and green with skinny little sticks for legs. Wretched little creatures that I can't stand to touch. Apparently, they are also winged and resemble gnats. Good grief!

Tonight they must die. Where is my magical aphid spray?

Today's Harvest: LETTUCE

Just a quick post today....I harvested some lettuce from the garden this afternoon. I filled a 16 inch colander — enough salad for three days — and I could have cut three more days worth! Doesn't it look crisp and tasty?!

How to Kill Aphids

When I started this perfect little garden of mine, I never though that my plants would have pests. My stomach sank when I saw the greedy little green aphids on my lettuce. I panic every time I see a microscopic orange mite crawling in the dirt. I hunt those tiny fly-like bugs that cling to my tomato leaves and squash them out of fear.

I have never seen so many bugs! I knew that aphids were bad news and I found an easy organic solution, thankfully. But there are so many others and I have read online that some pests are beneficial. Its confusing and I need to know how to handle my garden correctly.

To kill the aphids, I tried this little recipe on my lettuce:

• 3-5 drops of a mild, fragrance free, liquid dish soap
• 1/2 teaspoon of cooking oil
• Fill the rest of a water spray bottle with water. I used a cheap small 12 oz bottle.

Shake it up and spray a stream of the liquid on your plants. It worked like a charm for me. They fell off the leaves and I haven't seen them since. Please understand that I have only used this method for a couple weeks...my methods may not be full proof, but it is working so far.

And the best part is my lettuce still tastes great after a quick rinse.

How to Plant Potatoes

In early February I decided to experiment with planting potatoes. I had attended a local gardening workshop where the class planted pieces of organic grocery potatoes in a sunken garden. It was cheap and easy enough to do. Why not give it a shot?

How I planted my potatoes:

1. Purchase one organic red potato (any potato will do) with lots of eye dimples. I should note that some gardeners say you should only plant seed potatoes, but I'll try these store bought red potatoes this year.
   
2. Cut the potato into a few pieces, making sure there are at least 2-3 eyes on each piece.
   
3. Lay the pieces in a sunny dry spot to scab over — I let them stay out in the sun for 2 days.
   
4. Prepare a bed for the potatoes. In the workshop they had dug twice the depth of the shovel head and added compost to the soil. For my purposes, I planted them in large pots using potting soil for veggies because I had already run out of room in my raised garden bed. I placed some small rocks at the bottom of the pots to aid in moisture drainage.
   
5. Plant the potato pieces. It doesn't matter if the eyes point up, down, left, or right — just toss them in! I placed one piece in each pot at a depth of about 8 inches. At the workshop garden, we planted them about 12-18 inches apart at a depth of 8-10 inches.
6. Water thoroughly, place pots in a sunny spot, and wait patiently. The leader at the workshop said I should be able to harvest in June.

I wasn't sure if this would work in my pots but, as you can see below, they finally sprouted after about 4 weeks.

And this is what they look like today....

The only thing I will do differently next time is plant in a bigger pot. These pots were only 16 inch diameter which will probably cramp the development of the potatoes. Next time I will find a much larger pot. I think a plastic storage bin with holes drilled in the bottom would work nicely. I will post more when I harvest.

Exploding Lettuce!

My husband and I tested out the new drip irrigation last week while we escaped to Las Vegas. We set it on a timer and tried to forget about it. My fear was that we would not water the garden enough or the soaker hoses would not be positioned close enough to the roots to keep the plants alive. The temperatures increased from the mid to upper 60's to the mid 80's and I had visions of dead and wilted veggies. Boy was I mistaken!

The most noticeable growth was the lettuce. When we left, it looked like this...

Tiny little plugs of lettuce that looked like it had a long way to go before we could enjoy a fresh salad.

The little puffs of green in the back row are iceburg lettuce which, as you can see, are placed in a shaded row. This stunted their growth a bit in the beginning, but the sun has since shifted and that row is getting full sun.

This is what it looks like today!

Amazing growth in just 7 days. And that is after eating three servings of salad two nights ago! I am so excited. We do have some critters (Aphids?) that have taken up shop on the red oak leaf in the front row, but I am sure the problem can be solved easily. I'll be researching that today.