UberlootsGardening with a Gaming Perspective

Hard to believe it is May already, it just sort of snuck up on me. We gardeners have a busy month ahead of us depending on our personal flavor of Gardening.

Now is a great time to trim back spring flowering bushes. The Houston area has some wonderful resources for learning how to prune things. It can be a little tricky to get a hand on but once you get the hang of it, it takes only a few minutes for most plants.

Also now is the time to fertilize any trees you have not fertilized as of yet. I know I have mentioned it before but I highly recommend using MicroLife fertilizer. It is an organic fertilizer available locally from many locations. Feel free to send me an e-mail with your general area and I will let you know of a nearby supplier if I know of one.

1Up Basil

The various planting charts I have been researching for my vegetables suggest planting: asparagus bean, basil, buckwheat, chives, collards, cucumber, eggplant, Malabar spinach, peppers, luffa squash, okra, peanuts, pumpkin, rosemary, sesame, southern peas (like limas), squash, sunflower, sweet potato slips, cantaloupe, and watermelon.

That is a lot of food to get into the ground. For many of the above listed the first half of May is the best time of all to plant them. I am planning on starting a lot of the above from seed in the next couple of days. I know now more than ever a lot of us are trying to learn more about gardening. Especially not knowing what the future may hold for the economy. Victory gardens are becoming more and more popular. CNN even mentioned the victory garden as more Americans are starting gardens, for the first time in many cases.

I actually see this as a good sign, as we grow more of our own food we will be saving ourselves money. I have put a lot more money into this than I really needed to. Some of it because of not knowing better and some of it for convenience sake, like the irrigation system, which will in time pay for itself. Watering without it is certainly easy enough, just finding the time or if you plan on being gone for an extended time you need to make sure you have a back-up plan of some sort, a neighbor or an irrigation system, or pay a gardener to water your plants because a vacation could be devastating to your plants without planning their care into your trip. I still travel back to Missouri a lot and so my irrigation system means I do not have to worry about being gone.

With time moving so fast it is easy also to get behind. Projects we plan to do can keep getting put off, sometimes indefinitely. Now is a good time to start writing your plans and thoughts down. Even an online journal like this can help you remember events that happened in your garden. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or even full sentences. Simply the plant type, date planted, location planted, and productivity or healthiness of the plant. Then next year you will know which ones should become annuals and which ones not to try again without changing at least one of the variables.