Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet

[BooBooBearBecky]

Nice trellis setup benj1!!! I'm jealous.

Beautiful garden plots you have there. Got any more photos?

Being an optimist, I think I can get some lettuce while the peas are developing, followed by tomatoes braced up by the pea grids.

Sounds like a great use of space and plant sequencing to me.

[oakhick]

becky, you are a woman after my own heart. ;^)

i agree completely re: spacing recommendations. i packed my tomato plants in last year and it was a jungle but the plants grew 10 ft down the garden path. this year the peppers are getting a little chummier because they had way too much elbow room last year. ;^)

benj1, love your garden! i am using logs around my new garden beds as well -- love seeing it look so good!

[CincyGarden]

Well, my three sisters got railroaded.

About a month ago, just as the corn was getting to the point I'd put in the beans, my poison ivy rash got infected. It wouldn't have been awful, but it turns out I am allergic to something (besides poison ivy) and I ended up in the hospital.

Three weeks after the stay, I finally got out there, and saw a field of volunteer tomatoes surrounding my corn.



I couldn't bring myself to take them out, and they're acting as a great cover crop.

Unfortunately, they're doing a lot better than the tomatoes I planted

[benj1]

I'm a sucker for vegetable plants that VOLUNTEER to grow in my garden. There are always tomatoes where they weren't planned, and this year there is lots of cilantro making a nice garden screen (not to mention the sunflowers from birdseed).

[Equilibrium]

Bummer you landed in the hospital. That sucks. I hope they figured out what else you were allergic to so you can stay away from it. Lots of pasta sauce is what you're going to have!!! You know you can dehydrate tomatoes right?

[CincyGarden]

We're pros at drying, but I'm canning/saucing/stewing as many as possible this year. Every year I tell myself I'm building that solar dehydrator, but this may not be the year.

Turned out I was allergic to the antibiotics, which took a few days (and a few IV bags of the same stuff) to figure out. Fortunately, I wasn't "sick" enough to lose my ability to identify the rash I broke out in as "not poison ivy," which had (mostly) gone away and the rash I had was everywhere, head to toe, and happens to be a really common sign of drug allergy (FYI).

[Equilibrium]

I've seen that rash on kids.... know it well. Scares the H E double hockey sticks out of me. You know how to dry herbs? Do you put them in a paper bag with the stems left out to hang them upside down?

[CincyGarden]

I should of said "pros at tomatoes". I have a shed with windows I use to dry herbs, just bunch and hang them, but only do it with rosemary and sage. My mom used to do the same over the baseboard heaters. Do you save more with bags?

[Equilibrium]

I've never dried them before myself but I'm growing two different varieties of parsley and that's how I was planning on drying it. I saw them hanging upside down in paper bags from a clothes line in my friend's basement. I don't remember what all she was drying but that's how she was drying herbs. She said the brown paper lunch bags were cheap and they caught all the dried leaves. She had them hanging by clothes pins. I figured she knew what she was doing sooooo monkey see/monkey do. I thought she was hanging more than rosemary and sage.... I could be wrong. How do you dry everything else besides rosemary and sage... like parsley?

[CincyGarden]

The major thing with drying is that you want the air very dry. Otherwise, the stuff will start to rot. Growing up, we had it in the dining room and family room, hanging in bunches on strings.

I've never personally dried parsley (eat it raw! it's great in pesto and everything else!), but here (in the hanging to dry section) is the way I go about drying just about anything else :
How to dry your own sage, thyme and parsley herbs . Parsley would definitely be on the "high water content" side of things, I imagine.