Pretty good start for Chard

Who knows what Chard is? Well, I'll tell you then. It's a leafy plant in the lettuce family. It is more closely related to beets though. It is simply a bunch of leaves growing from a base of roots. Then you hack them off and eat them when they are about as big as the picture on the right.
They go great chopped up in a salad, or if you want you can stir fry it with bacon! yummy!

 Now dumb Me I did not get a close up of what chard looks like before you cut it. Only the single leaf up above. But each individual stem you see there was a full fledged chard leaf.

This is another view of what it looks like when you harvest it. The nice thing about chard is that you can cut it back and within about 1 week it will be ready to harvest again. The first harvest takes about 3 weeks to get going, but once it has a root system in place it just goes like mad!

 The harvest from this was a 18 Gallon Garbage bag full.  When I picked it up I would say it weighed roughly 15 pounds? Now that is a bunch of chard. The daft part of this was that I only took about 60% of what was growing. The other half will need to be picked soon. Then soon after that the stuff I trimmed back will need more trimming!

 A whole bag of that stuff... no idea what to do with it all... any suggestions?

To end on an even happier note, I found a volunteer Tomato plant. It is a cherry tomato and it is growing in one of the cracks in the cement. HAHA, crazy little buggers. It is not too big yet, but It's getting there!

Here is a point of reference for you folk out there, KunKun . oh, and if you look just below the tomato plant and to the left of my doggy is a snail. gross. LOL.

OK! thanks all for the reads! come back soon and I wont let you down!

My Grandfathers Garden Progress

For all you crazy folk out there who have been following along, this is my grandfathers garden. It has progressed from a few tiny plants into a very nice little place for lady bugs to rest.

 For those of you who have seen previous pictures of my pooch, KunKun, this will give you some perspective as to how big things actually are. This is my doggy showing off the tomatoes. There are four tomatoes, all a different variety, and all growing in 8FT tall cages.

Next in line is the Crookneck Squash plant. It is directly behind KunKun.

 . This is what the Crookneck squash looks like. It's still very small, and as the plant is suffering from White Powdery Mildew I don't think we will have much in the way of a harvest with them. Just gotta treat for it, and hope for the best. Although it does have a few squash already, so who knows!

Next in line for being shown off is my Green Bean plant. It is growing up the cage and I hope it will soon cover the entire thing!

Also in this picture you can see at KunKuns feet some Leafy Lettuce like plants called RED CHARD. Its great in a salad or stir fried with bacon. yummy!

Then directly above and behind KunKuns head is my Blueberry Bushes!

 Here you see my Grandfathers two varieties of blueberries. You need two of them because they typically do not self pollinate and require the cross breeding to form fruits and speaking of fruits...

The Blueberry bushes have already started to produce a tasty, if small, harvest! So happy. I already tried one and it was yummy!

OK! thanks everybody for reading! Next time I will go into more detail on a specific plant... probably the crawling green bean or the blue berries. Some come back soon! 

Because I dont have DIRT, or least much dirt.

At my house I'm stuck with about 3X5 Square feet of dirt to work with, but worst of all its not all in one place... Thank goodness for EarthBoxes. That is how I'm growing me a SINGLE tomato bush . oh well. Least I have something. But with the limited space I have to work with I decided to move my plants outside my patio. There is a nice big space of Dirt where a couple of trees used to be. But they were old and removed by the home owners  association.

So, I took over the space with some plants of my own. Really... I do not know the name of the HUGE plant in that is taking up most of the space , but it is very aromatic and looks pretty. It is also getting pretty close to flowering. That should be a nice sight!

 Oh, and that is my dog KunKun. You can see that the whole space I have to work with is kinda big... but the dirt itself is terrible, and needs to be amended. This winter I will cut back that big green varigaited bush thing, and add some soil nutrients.

As I get closer to the plants themself You can see what I'm gradually getting closer to. I must admit though, most of these plants were put here by my mother, so I really do not know the names of them.

 But as we get closer to KunKun you can now see a little better the dessert plants to the right.

Then as we get even closer and a little to the right of the patch of dirt you can see the main feature of this here fancy post. That small green bush thing just to the right of KunKun.

Have you guessed yet what plant I'm talking about? well, if you did not then I'll tell you. Its the Bush Bean plant. In the last pic it is between the planter and the dessert plant. I'll have to post another picture when the sun is not in my eyes. But thats it folks! My bush bean plant! with some luck it will grow to be a wonderful big Bean plant and produce a nice little bounty of Green Beans for me! Oh, and as parting words, if you look closly at the last picture at the dirt you can see TINY green sprouts, those are the second Platoon of sunflower seeds I planted. Next post will probably focus on them.

KK! thanks all, tune in next time for more pictures of Kun Kun!