My First Garden

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In January I decided I wanted to grow some plants. At this point in my life, I hadn’t successfully produced fruit of any kind from any plant in my care. Growing up I specifically avoided my mom while she was “playing in the dirt.” I guess her example rubbed off on me despite my efforts to avoid gardening and “getting dirty.” I don’t do dirt or bugs. I can handle dirt while camping and doing activities and stuff, but absolutely no bugs. Kinda funny huh?

Anyway, I had no idea what I was getting myself into or how I was going to do it. I did some google research and decided on container gardening because I live in Las Vegas and the soil here sucks. Besides, I’m renting a townhouse, so there’s not a lot of gardening space on the ground for raised beds. And, I like the idea of being able to move my plants around. I first decided on trying out cheap plastic buckets I could get for free from the bakery at Whole Foods. I even drilled holes in the bottoms for the water to drain out of. (I planted a few things in them, but they weren’t thriving in the plastic buckets.) I started researching other containers and learned about felt grow bags.

Then I started researching what could I actually grow here. Surprisingly, a lot. I got this book which helped me narrow down what I actually wanted to try to grow. Then I went to Home Depot and picked up a “few” seed packets (lettuce, tomato, sweet pepper, pumpkin, watermelon, sunflowers, green onion, yellow onion, canteloupe, cosmos candy stripe, forget-me-not, carrot, artichoke). Then I ordered some peat pellets and seed trays off Amazon. Once they arrived I went to work, sowing seeds with a ridiculous amount of ignorance. I figured, I plant the seeds, make sure they have sunlight and water and they will grow. Not hard, right? I did know from a biology class to sow multiple seeds in the same hole because not all seeds will sprout. You thin them later, whatever that meant. I’m serious when I tell you I didn’t really know what a lot of gardening jargon meant.

After a few days and over the next couple weeks, so many of my seeds sprouted and I was so excited! My seed trays were on my kitchen table right next to the sliding glass door. “They’ll get lots of sun here,” I told myself. Haha! NO! My little seedlings got all tall and spindly, and once I googled that I realized I made a beginner mistake. They needed more sunlight to grow their first few sets of leaves. I got some grow lights and set them up. My little plants grew their first couple sets of leaves so fast! I had to make a special trip to Home Depot to get peat pots so they would have more room to grow their roots. I caught a few pumpkin and watermelon plants growing their roots into another plant’s peat pellet, had to fix that problem real quick.

At this point I had done research about oxygen in the soil and water retention, which is super important here because it’s so hot and dry. So, while I was at Home Depot getting peat pots I grabbed a bag of Perlite (to reduce soil compaction and allow oxygen through the soil) and some Sphagnum Peat Moss (water retention). I also picked up a bag of composted steer manure as my fertilizer. I like to keep things natural, but never in my life had I ever thought I’d buy a bag of poop.

At this point I was trying to find reasonably priced grow bags on the internet. I ordered some off Amazon, which balanced quality and price. I wish I had ordered more of those because they were out of stock when I realized I needed WAY more than what I first got. In fact, at this point the COVID-19 closures were well underway, and every online outlet I looked into was out of felt grow bags. I did find a some sellers on Ebay, so I quickly got more grow bags from Ebay. They weren’t quite the quality I was looking for but I figured a slightly lesser quality was better than none at all. At least I could transplant more of my plants now. Oh, I got a few different sizes, mostly 5 gallon, but also 10 gallon, and a few 25 gallon. I didn’t know how big they were going to be or how big I actually needed them to be.

The 25 gallon grow bags were gigantic, however the perfect size to mix up my potting soil with perlite, peat moss, and manure. Another thing I like about the grow bags is that I can store them compactly when I’m not using them so they don’t take up so much space in my garage.

Back to my plants. Once I put the peat pellets into peat pots, I took them outside. Kinda hardening them off, but really just throwing them into sunlight. Here in Vegas the sun’s rays are really strong, so at this point it was survival of the fittest. I only lost 5 seedlings out of my 65 this way. Not bad.

The next step was to plant the peat pots directly into the 5 gallon containers, except for the green onions, I planted the peat pellets directly into their pot. I started with my pumpkin and planted it into one of the 30 gallon grow bags. It used 2 bags of Vigoro to which I added lots of manure, some perlite, and some peat moss. I learned that pumpkins are heavy feeders, so lots of manure was good. I didn’t go over 20% of the total potting mix and did the same with one of my watermelon plants. I got some wire fencing and made my own little arch for them to climb up as they grow. Honestly, I think it’s hilarious that I thought it would be enough space for them to grow. It’s been just over two months since starting the seeds at the end of February and my pumpkin plant has already outgrown the fencing arch I gave it. I’ve cut back a few vines to, hopefully, help the plant grow nice big pumpkins instead of tons and tons of extra green matter. We’ll see how it goes. This is just one big experiment for me! The other day one of my female pumpkin flowers opened and I was able to pollinate it myself with one of the male flowers. Thanks Google for that info!

I put my strawberries (one of the few plants I bought at the store) in 5 gallon grow bags with lots of perlite to try to simulate sandy soil. Apparently strawberries like sandy soil.

I also put my tomato and sweet pepper plants in the 5 gallon grow bags and gave each one it’s own tomato cage. My tomato plants have been flowering for the last couple weeks and I’m finally seeing some tomato growth! I’m so excited! Not that I like tomatoes, but my husband does, so he’ll be the judge of how good they are when they are ripe.

My lettuce died, courtesy of the evil caterpillars. The lettuce wasn’t doing well anyway because of the heat. Oh well, I tried. I’ll probably try lettuce again another time, maybe when it’s cooler.

My artichokes are doing well too. I know the weather here isn’t exactly what they prefer, but they are doing better than I expected. The evil caterpillars made their way across the garden from the lettuce to the artichokes, I killed one today. If there are any more caterpillars, I hope the birds will eat them.

Oh, and my sunflowers! I almost forgot about them. I got a dwarf variety and they are doing pretty well. I planted 4 of them in a 5 gallon grow bag, because my therapist told me that sunflowers like friends. I like friends too, and sunflowers seem like the extroverts of the plant world, so that sounded good to me. Ruby fell and broke one yesterday, but I wrapped some twine around the broken stem and a bamboo skewer, so hopefully it won’t die yet. I have two more that need to be transplanted.

Only a couple of my Poppies and Cosmos Candy Stripe sprouted, they are waiting to be transplanted.

All in all, I’m having success in my garden. I know I have a lot to learn, but it’s been fun learning as I go. I learn much better by doing than by reading or listening. I’ve made many mistakes, but I hope that as I learn more I’ll be able to have a healthier garden and someday be able to grow the majority or all of my family’s produce. This is my first step in that direction. For now I’ll stick with a limited number of containers, and eventually when I buy a house I’ll be able to have a larger garden. And maybe even a greenhouse and an orchard. Can you tell I think and dream big?

Have you grown a garden of some kind? I’d love to hear about your experiences, what did you grow? And what did you learn?