I planted my seeds 1 week ago today. Some are growing impressively well (green beans), and others are taking their sweet time (eggplants). As a whole, I’m quite pleased to see that my setup has the general makings of at least a reasonable operation. I’ve been pretty nervous about knowing virtually nothing and not having perfect timing to get a good yield this year.

I plan to start indoor seeding my fall crops in the coming days- cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, spinach and hopefully strawberries. Even though initially opposed to this idea, the problem I am concerned I’ll run into is the season not being long enough (especially summer) to have success with vegetables like tomatoes and eggplants, which require lots of time and sun.

It’s not so much that initially it just seemed so fake to indoor seed that bothered me, but also that I had missed the summer pre-seeding season. Fall season pre-seeding is right about now (probably could have been started a couple weeks ago), so I need to start as soon as possible.

Darth Vader composter.

I finally have a composter now, I got it from the County of Santa Clara. It looks like something out of Star Wars, but seems like quite a well designed and easy to use tool. Eventually, after harvest time, I will pull out the crops and add home-made compost in their place. Having finished the square foot gardening book, I am now on to “The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible”. It seems like the next step I need to take with learning crop rotation, more about seeds, and just more specific growing science. I can’t wait to learn more…

Box 1

The tomatoes are coming around very slowly. Only the small stem and leaves can be seen.

Box 2

Eggplants and peppers needs about 19 weeks to harvest, very little can be seen here so far.

Box 3

Most promising box. The green beans with their big dark leaves, and the smaller greens are the beets.

Box 4

I was hoping for a bit more out of the lettuce, but at least the swiss chard is coming around.

Box 5

This box has quite a variety, but only the cow peas (black eyed peas effectively) and cucumber are showing promise so far.

A few years ago, Tobia read an interesting book called Square Foot Gardening (by Mel Bartholomew). I remember her sharing much of what she read with me, and I was most impressed and intrigued.

I decided that one day, when I owned a house with a backyard, I’d have to try it. We moved into our home about 2 weeks ago, and despite it not being finished, I decided it was time to garden, before I miss out on the season.

For starters, we had a lot of weeds in our backyard. They ranged from a few inches tall to a few feet tall. I decided to rent a roto-tiller to turn over my soil and dispose of these nasty weeds. After calling around for a little while, Home Depot in San Jose had one I could rent. These machines are huge so I needed a sizable car to move this machine around. We went down to Tobia’s parents house, where her dad, Cho, gladly let us borrow his awesome beat up van.

About to start my long morning of roto-tilling.

The machine was really strong and heavy; this was no easy job.

3 hours later, I was done. I thought it looked much better.

My left elbow was in pain and swelled up. I got some medicine and a sling.

Back at the house with the machine about an hour later, I got started making roto-tilling noise at 9am. This was a difficult beast to tame, extremely powerful and heavy, but damn effective. 3 hours later I was done with the back yard. I returned the machine and while doing so at Home Depot, inadvertently hurt myself on the ramp used for the machine. A couple days later this turned into an elbow infection that hurt miserably and also inflamed my left elbow severely.

Working on the box perimeter.

Finished assembling the 5 boxes.

After raking the land to level it out, I went to buy some Douglass Fir boards for the square foot garden boxes to be built; and while at it got deck screws, and borrowed a drill, and drill bits from Cho. The boxes came out roughly 4 feet long by 6 inches high by 2 inches deep, the work was pretty easy.

Next, I needed to get some compost. I drove down to Morgan Hill to get some mushroom compost. This was followed by going to the Sunnyvale SMART station and getting some redwood and fir tree compost. I had to purchase the rest of the compost for variety, and also the other ingredients necessary for the soil.

The Mel’s Mix soil material all mixed up on the tarp.

Tobia’s mom helping me move the heavy mix closer to the boxes.

Finished putting the mix into the boxes.

With all the ingredients waiting in the garage, Tobia helped me put on the weed cloth at the bottom of each of the squares. The following day I mixed all the ingredients on a large 12′ X 16′ tarp and filled the boxes with this Mel’s Mix material.

I had to prune the neighbors’ tree after setting the boxes down because it was sticking into my property, but more importantly, creating an unnecessarily early afternoon shade for my boxes.

This is what each box looks like.

My back yard layout, these boxes look like they’re ready for seeds.

Tobia had a good idea to stick in some evenly spaced nails to create the grid the book discusses. Without the grid, the author claims you can’t call it a square foot garden- which makes sense to me. It helps create a visible division and separation, which in turn allows one to grow various vegetables comfortably beside each other. I hammered in some evenly spaced nails, then wrapped some twine in a clever pattern Tobia devised.

I finally started planting! I started with green beans.

After that, the only step that remained was to plant the seeds. On Saturday, July 5th, I finally put in all of the seeds. Due to this year’s late start, I did not have a chance to do things properly by seeding indoors and taking all the necessary pre-outdoor seeding steps. Not everything requires a lot of pre-planting setup, so I hope to get a nice yield from my 5 boxes, each with 16 squares for a total of 80 independent sqaures to plant.

I have planted the following:

Green beans, beets, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, swiss chard, lettuce, mesclun, onion, chive and basil. Having four more squares available, I will put some more peppers (variety), cucumber, artichoke and some cowpeas. I am really excited and can’t wait to see how this all turns out.