I've uploaded 10 new pictures, complete with various comments, some of which I'll mention in this blog post.

http://picasaweb.google.com/rick.root/YardAndGarden2010#5477489948381492226

Of the most interest I think is the continued growth of the cantaloupe.  It got so big over the weekend that I felt the need to expand my trellis.

Wow!

My cantaloupe grew a foot last weekend!

That picture is from Monday morning.  It's actually a few inches higher now but it definately did a ton of growing this weekend.  It's been cloudy and rainy all week, but the sun is going to shine today and tomorrow so I suspect everything will burst again.

Yesterday, I planted a couple of Stevia plants, just because the idea of growing my own sugar sounds like fun. 

I also decided I need more than 5 basil plants, so I bought a $6 herb garden at Lowe's that has 36 little containers.  It came with 6 different herbs but I only planted Basil, Sage, and Chives - 12 of each.  It's sitting in the kitchen corner window where it gets light but no direct sun, a fine place to germinate seeds.

I also seeded 8 "small" sunflower plants (a colorful variety that only gets 4-5' tall), and 9 perennial lupines.  I did these in 2" Jiffy Pots.  The lupines will probably take 3-4 weeks to germinate because I didn't follow the "hastening" instructions.  I didn't feel like chilling them in the fridge, then nicking the hard seed shell and soaking them overnight.

Garden Number 3
Three canteloupe and a Big Boy tomoato.  The trellis is made from 6.5' steel T-posts and something I found at Home Depot called "Mason Ladder", which is made of a fairly heavy guage steel wire.  It's meant for re-inforncing concrete.  I also spray-painted it a dark green so it would be less noticeable from a distance.

Garden Number 2
This is the one that doesn't get enough light, or so I believe.  Maybe 5 hours.  The zucchini and onions seem to be doing very well, the mesclun lettuce was great.  The roma tomato plants look okay but aren't growing very fast - same with the cucumbers and muskmelon.

Insects Already?
Several of my eggplants have leaves like this - I haven't seen any insects on them but this sure looks like insect damage.  I took the opportunity to apply some Bayer Advanced Fruit, Citrus, and Vegetable Insect Control.  The instructions say to apply at transplanting - most of my stuff has been in the ground for 4-6 weeks, but hopefully it will still work to prevent future damage.  No, I'm not growing organic.

Roma Tomatos in the Topsy Turvy planters
I have two roma tomato plants in these upside down planters.  Both purchased at the same time, both about the same size and similar in their looks.  Both transplanted into the planters at the same time with the same Miracle Grow potting soil.  Both receive the same amount of water and sunlight.

One of them looks much better than the other, don't you think?

In mid-March, I bought a burpee garden seed kit at Home Depot.  It came with seeds, soil pellets, a container for the soil, and a little plastic container that would act as a greenhouse.  I thought it would be fun for emily to grow some things from seed.  The kit came with roma tomatoes, oregano, basil, cilantro, squash, beans, carrots, cucumbers, and canteloupe.  We seeded on March 21st, the first day of spring.  Amazingly, I only had to bring the garden inside once or twice due to frost.  I also put some bean seeds in a planter on the patio. 

While Emily found it to be marginally interesting, it actually gave me the garden bug.  So now, I have FOUR raised bed gardens, three in the wild area out front, and one in the back near the fence.

The first two are each 3 feet by 6 feet and made of 2x6 lumber.  I didn't really do any prep of the ground below, just filled them up with about 5" of miracle grow garden soil.  In garden #1, I tranplanted 4 bean plants and 2 squash that I'd planted from the seed kit, and also four eggplant and 2 "rainbow mix" bell peppers.  I'll probably end up removing 2 of the eggplants.  Garden #2 currently has 5 cucumbers and a nice trellis ready for them to climb, though they're still quite small since I grew them from seed.  I also planted some mesclun lettuce (which we've already eaten some of!), 2 muskmelons, a zucchini, 2 roma tomatoes, and some green and white onions (same thing really, the "green" onions are planted about 3" deep, while the "white" onions are planted at the surface).  Garden #1 only gets about 6-7 hours of sunlight, and garden #2 really gets only 5-6 hours of sunlight.  The zucchini, onions, and mesclun all seem to be thriving here, we'll see how the romas, cucumbers, and muskmelon do.

Garden #3 is one that I added just this weekend, it's 8 feet long and 2 feet wide, and made with 2x8 lumber so it's a little deeper than the other two.  I needed a place to put my canteloupe that I'd grown from seed and needed a sunny location.  I have a lot of trees around my hard to sunny locations are hard to come by.  I put in a couple of 6' steel posts and threw some heavy guage "Mason Ladder" wire between them to make a nice trellis for the vines.  I'll probably train two of them up the trellis and let the other trail out into the mulch.  The other resident of this garden is a Big Boy tomato, which was transplanted from a planter that Adrienne had originally planted from seed.  The canteloupe were also transplanted from a planter, but they'd been seeded in the burpee seed kit, so this was their second move.  They're doing pretty awesome.

Garden #4 is a 4 foot diameter raised bed garden made from a kit I bought at Walmart.  Essentially it's just about 10" of edging.  Also filled with miracle grow garden soil, I have a cayenne pepper and a jalapeno pepper plant here, both purchased at the farmers market and at a fairly good size (each about 15" tall when purchased).  In fact, the cayenne pepper already has 2 peppers on it, and both are covered with flowers.  I also have about 7 sweet corn plants growing in the other half of this garden (there wre more but I thinned them out a bit, and may have to thin a little more).  Behind this garden, in the ground by the fence, I also sowed another row of sweet corn, which I'll probably thin to 4 or 5 plants in a week or so.  I built another trellis here as well using steel T posts and heavy gauge mason ladder wire.  On the trellis, I planted a Himrod grape vine (a variety of white seedless grape).  We'll see how well that works.

We have some container gardening going on - we have several Topsy Turvy planters, one for strawberries (it has 15 strawberry plants in it!) and 2 for roma tomatoes.  We also have 2 roma tomatoes in a large pot, and 2 big boy tomatoes in pots as well.    And finally, we have 5 basil plants (planted from seed) that are in a planter on the porch and doing awesomely.

Oh, and we've got a blueberry bush on the porch, still in the pot we bought it in because it had flowers all over and and we figured as long as we keep it watered it'll produce better than if shocked it by transplanting it.  We'll put it in the ground in the fall.

Fun!

So, I have a banana tree in my front yard.  I can do this in North Carolina because the winters aren't cold enough to freeze the ground.  Banana trees aren't very tolerant of freezing - in fact, they're not at all tolerant.  The slightest frost will kill all the leaves, and a good freeze will kill the entire tree right down to the ground.

I wouldn't have thought about growing a banana tree here in North Carolina, except that there's a large grove of banana trees in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens up on campus.  I asked my coworker George, who has what you might call a green thumb, and he has some in his yard, and kindly gave me a sproute last spring.

Anyway, last night's low was going to be in the mid 20s.  A record by a long shot - the previous record was 28, and it was supposed to be 24 last night.  My little banana tree had sprouted several leaves and was a good 18-24" tall already, as we've had lovely spring weather, and no frost for over a month I'd say.

Well, I don't want it to have to start over - from the ground up, so to speak - so here's what I did.

I have an unused halogen desk lamp in my garage.  It gets quite hot when it's on, though the bulb is only like 10 watts or something.  Anyway, I ran an extension cord out to the banana tree, and plugged in the halogen lamp and sit in right next to the banana.  Then I mounded up some mulch around the base of the banana, as high as I could get it, and covered the tree and lamp with a 30 gallon plastic garbage can.  Finally, I mounded more mulch around the base of the trash can to keep the warm air inside.

This morning - about a half hour ago actually - I went out to remove the garbage can.  Success!  Not only was the banana tree nice and warm, but the inside of the garbage can was wet.  I think I created a miniature rain forest!  Hah.

Tonight the low is supposed to be in the low 30s, but then after that I think we'll be safe from future frosts.