Garden Goals

I’m making progress on my three garden goals for this year.

I was able to find chamomile seeds at the store.  I started a few seeds indoors and successfully transplanted three seedlings to the front yard.  They seem pretty sturdy at this point–they’ve been out for about two weeks–so as long as we keep them watered all summer I will be able to enjoy a cup of hot chamomile tea from my own garden this fall.

I spread a few more seeds around as well, so hopefully I’ll have some more plants too.

The beans are growing.  I found that it was more common to find bush beans, but I eventually found some vining bean seeds for the teepee.

They’re only about 12-18 inches up at this point, but soon they’ll take off and really get the teepee covered.

I was able to get luffa seeds from another blogger (thx!) and did some reading about the tricky practice of growing luffa.

They need a really long growing season so you have to start them indoors.  Apparently they can take forever to germinate, so I started by soaking them overnight.  I planted 10 seeds in nice large containers (for their roots).  8 of the ten germinated.  One of them grew its first set of leaves but never anything beyond that.  One of the ones that I transplanted outside didn’t make it.  I apparently can’t remember what happened to two of them–they must have died at some point indoors (sometimes I forget to water)– but at this point I have 4 luffa vines growing in my front yard.  They’ve almost reached the top of the 3 foot garden fencing I’ve got around my front yard garden plots.  Apparently the vines can easily grow like 13 feet, so I am going to put up a trellis to walk underneath between the two beds so the vines can grow up and over.

I’ve been doing a lot of soapmaking lately so I’m really excited about getting the luffa this fall to use with it.

I’m pleased with how my three garden projects are coming along.  Especially since these are all things I’ve wanted to do for multiple years in the past, and have just never made it happen.