How Does Your Garden Grow?

Waking up to a beautiful day after almost a week of the flu and rainy weather is enough to make anyone feel better. It feels like spring has arrived in January. I know that winter will return tomorrow but I am daydreaming about this years garden.

Marston and I enjoy gardening together. We both have lots of ideas for location, types of beds, soil preparation, varieties to plant, etc. Learning from our past mistakes and wanting to improve on our successes has been the focus of our plans. We want the new garden to be efficient, productive and fun.

In the past we have used tomato cages, stakes and string to train/provide support for the plants. We will continue to do use them but I want to spice it up some. Last year Marston wanted to replace the rusty tomato cages with new ones. I decided to give them new life with some leftover spray paint. This sounds tedious but it was easy. The result was a stack of red and a stack of yellow cages. They looked brand new and added colour interest among the green plants. This idea is definitely a keeper with plans to take it one step further. Add additional colours and use the colours to identify the type of plant. For example, we grow a lot of peppers and keeping track of what their ripe colour should be has not happened. As a result peppers often get picked when they are green instead of waiting for them to turn yellow and red. The new plan to colour coordinate the plants with cages should solve this.

The search for additional items of interest to be re-purposed for the garden has yielded a headboard and footboard of a metal bed (FREE) , and two large sections of unique hand railing ($20). The beans and cucumbers will undoubtedly love climbing their new trellises as much as I will enjoy looking at them.

Simply stack the desired number of cages one inside the other and paint. When they are dry flip them over and paint the opposite side.