Attract Mode

Gardening in Renton

February 27th, 2007

I ordered my kitchen garden from Territorial Seed Company today. The gardening I did in Kirkland was really useful in picking stuff out this time around. From experience, I know that I just don’t like growing salad greens. In the space I have easily available, I just don’t think I can grow enough to feel like it’s worthwhile. I want enough of whatever I grow to fuel multiple meals!

So, this year I’ve ordered pumpkins, three varieties, to put in the ground in the remnants of a raised bed a previous tenant left behind. I’ll excavate it and refill it with a topsoil and soil conditioner mix. I think I should be able to fit six plants in without being too greedy. I grow pumpkins because they’re fun; I only regularly eat pumpkin in the seed form. So I have an ornamental variety, a carving variety and a seed-eating variety.

I’ve also ordered tomatoes. I don’t eat tomatoes from the grocery very much but they’re also fun to grow and I absolutely love fried green tomatoes. I have three varieties there as well, a sweet cherry tomato, a medium variety that supposedly grows very well in this area, and an heirloom variety that is supposed to be huge, tasty and ugly. They’re all going to go in some of the large pots I brought with me from Kirkland.

I also have a variety of zucchini and a variety of summer squash, which I grow because they’re fun and I love to eat them up. They also go in large pots.

Finally, I have two varieties of strawberries, an everbearing variety and an alpine. They also go in pots, although I got enough alpine seed to scatter in interesting places around the lawn; they make very very tasty groundcover and the feral ones held their own against the groundcover battle that stole our lawn in Kirkland. From experience, with the pots I have, there will never be enough everbearing at any one time for any amazing cookery, but a handful of them will make an astonishing breakfast picked straight from the vine.

I also decided to order a variety of early jalapeno. I’ve tried and tried to grow peppers every year I’ve been gardening and never succeeded but I had an unallocated medium pot and this was a variety I hadn’t tried before. Hope yadda yadda and maybe the local microclimate will be better!

The orange tree I got has a couple of fruit set, although previous sets all fell off. Since I purchased it a few weeks ago, it’s lost a lot of leaves and yesterday I trimmed off the branches it’d abandoned. The leaf-loss doesn’t worry me much because it was clearly sacrificing leaves and flowers that couldn’t get enough sunshine, from its greedy point of view. I know it’s greedy because the meyer lemon tree right next to it gets the lesser share of sunshine from that window and its pushing up new branches and preparing to bloom even on branches a foot away from the window.

I also have some basil, cilantro, parsley and chives seeded indoors at the moment. And we trimmed the heck out of the apple tree but hopefully it will still produce fruit.

Categories: Garden | Tags: gardens