Houston Lawn & Garden

Garden Bed Border in Place

I know you all have been waiting with great anticipation to see what I was going to do with all that wood we painted this past weekend.  Using the Moody Blues’ “Days of Future Past” album for inspiration I broke out the tools on when other than “Tuesday Afternoon” and got busy for a little 2-hour project.  I sized up the boards and placed them along the perimeter of the bed and found that I only needed to make 2 cuts to get them all fitting together.  A quick ‘zip-zip’ with the skill saw and that part is done.  The first part of the assembly is connecting the corner pieces using wood screws which I just happen to have laying around from the bathroom remodeling project which is another whole story.

Garden Bed Border Complete

I selected screws over nails to make the job easier for now and also for at the end of the season when we take it all apart.  The first step is to connect all of the corner pieces.  Next, for connecting the interior joints I cut a thin paint stirring stick into 4 small pieces to use as a connector on the interior wall.  The last bit of grunt work requires pulling back any of the St. Augustine runners that are too close to the exterior border using a weeding fork.  Then using about 1/2 bag of top soil I build up both the interior and exterior edge of the border.  This will help the garden bed to  retain water and it should prevent any external growth from creeping in (if I stay on top of my weed eating).

Early Girl Tomato Plants

We usually grow our plants from seeds instead of purchasing seedlings from the nurseries and this year we plan to do the same, but due to circumstances beyond our control we’re getting a late start.  Drastic situations call for drastic measures so to play “catch-up” we are going to cheat a little bit this time around.  If you’ve never been to the farmer’s market on Airline Drive just inside of the 610 loop, then you’re missing out.  There are lots and lots of individually run stands all under one roof with great products and great prices.  You can even haggle with the vendors if you’re into that.  We went down there to pick up about a dozen “Early Girl” tomato plants along with about 6 bell pepper plants.

Bell Pepper Plant

We chose these particular plants in order to give the garden a jump start with the hopes of the Early Girls living up to their names, and because we know how long it takes for pepper plant to grow in comparison to the other plants.  Last season the drought took its toll on the tomatoes overall.  We did get a BUMPER CROP of bell peppers that had an incredible taste that you just can’t buy in the stores.  Couple that with the price of bell peppers going through the roof lately and it was a “no-brainer” for us to get them going again this year…the sooner the better.  Unfortunately last season the freeze hit us before the peppers were done producing and we had to harvest a lot of them prematurely.

Now we are about 3-4 weeks overdue to get our seeds going.  In the past we’ve used the Jiffy planters that you can pick up cheap enough from most any store.  This time we wanted to try a little idea that my wife picked up off of YouTube for making planters out of newspaper.  GENIUS!  Finally, a practical use for the Houston Chronicle besides for clipping coupons.  Who was it that said “A person that doesn’t read the newspaper in UNINFORMED, but the person that does read the newspaper is MISINFORMED”.  How true!  So anyway, check out this video.

Pretty cool, huh?  We’re going to give it a try.  Next time you can see how it turned out and what we’ve decided to plant.

Tags: bell pepper plants, early girl tomato plants, houston farmers market, houston vegetable garden, newspaper planters