Inadvertent Hippie The riveting tale of converting my front lawn to an edible garden (and other epic adventures)

I started my some of the cold-hardy vegetables on Sunday because it was (finally) nice weather.  Until they germinate I’ll have the black plastic sheet over them so they stay moist and warm.

The wildlife in our neighborhood cannot be trusted to do the right thing, so each of my garden beds will need to have some sort of fencing around it.  I have yet to go pick some more tiny fencing up, so chicken wire is filling the gaps until I get around to it.  One thing that I discovered makes a quick make-shift fence structure around a plant is an upside-down tomato cage that I set chicken wire around:

This is a grape vine that I just planted Sunday in the back yard.  I placed the upside-down tomato cage over it, then cut a piece of chicken wire that was in a roll, so it wrapped around the tomato cage naturally.

In the front I used the tomato cage contraption over seeds I planted for raspberry spinach, mascara lettuce, arugula and kale, which are also protected by the plastic sheet mulch.

I also started a couple of experiments, because I have seedlings coming out of various orifices.  I cut the bottom off of a couple juice/soda containers, and planted an okra seedling and a watermelon seedling.  The bottom piece that I cut off I’m using mini-hot caps to speed up germination of some of the seeds.

If it’s cold I can leave the cap on, and if it’s sunny I can take the cap off to allow heat to escape.  If it gets really nice out I’ll take the whole bottle off the plant so it doesn’t get too hot.

I also started to harden an okra plant and a ginormous Cherokee purple tomato plant that is getting too big for its britches…and the grow light.

It got down to 40 degrees last night.  After day 1, the transplanted watermelon is looking pretty weak but the okra seems to be doing well.  When I got up for work this morning I thought the tomato was dead, but when I got home it had sprung back up and just as chipper as ever.  The container okra is doing fine.

watermelon plant on the boulevard

The start of a boulevard melon patch

Planted Okra