Growing Things on the Dryer

In case you are keeping score at home, I thought I should update you on what has gone in the ground here on The Little Farm and what is growing on the dryer in the basement.

Last Saturday, Farmer Ron and his hired hand Zach worked hard and planted swiss chard, 2 types of spinach, 5 different lettuces, a mesclun mix (you should really add this word to your vocabulary - you'll sound like a smart French chef), and Calypso beans. These seeds join the sugar snap peas which were put in a couple of weeks ago and are already 3 inches tall.

The Calypso beans are debuting in their rookie season on the Farm this year. We've never grown this variety, nor have we ever grown a bean that will be dried and stored. Should be interesting. We've been eating more beans around here lately because, well, they are cheap and they fill up the biggest young'un. Also, those black and white beauties looked so good in the seed catalog, I just couldn't pass them up.

Today, Farmer Ron put some hills of blue potatoes in the ground - another rookie veggie on the farm. He also planted Kentucky Wonder pole beans along one wall of our garage in our backyard. I made a flower bed there a few years ago and have some hostas and black-eyed susans growing. However, the wall of the garage is pretty bare. So, instead of planting some morning glories or some other climbing flower to fill the space, we thought we'd put in something that would be green, flowery and produce food! The plan is that the beans will sprout and start climbing before the hostas get too big. Just killing two birds with one stone here - beautifying the backyard a bit and saving some space in the actual garden for something else.

We've also got plants growing on the clothes dryer in the basement. The tomatoes, eggplants and pepper plants that we ordered from Seed Savers, were planted about a month ago. You can see from the photo above not all of the little guys made it. We've only got about 5 peppers and 5 eggplants growing, but the tomatoes are going strong. We've got at least 20 of those plugging away down there.

This is the first year we've attempted to start tomatoes and such inside from seed. We may end up buying a few plants to supplement what we've got growing. I've got a goal to can enough tomatoe-y type products to last the whole year. Also, I stopped by a greenhouse while out running errands tonight and some of those plants just looked so yummy! They have peppers called Pinot Noir sweet peppers. Oh my! How could we not grow one of those?

Here's the recap.

In the ground:
pole beans
sugar snap peas
swiss chard
lettuces - 5 varieties
spinach - 2 varieties
mesclun mix
calypso beans

On the dryer:
eggplant
peppers
tomatoes - 4 varieties

We're only about 2 minutes into the first quarter so stay tuned...