Never before history of gardening has a competition that's so fierce. We're taking it to the next level as three contestants, each providing for their shots at the coming Golden Hoe.
Heather: So, if you have a yard that get at least a half day of sun, the great thing is you can plant anything you want. You can plant seeds, you can plant starters like these. So, I am going to start with a little bit of zucchini and some lettuce. When you go to the store to pick these out or if you are the farmer's market, you want to look for lettuce that looks really supple and nice and yummy like you would want to eat it if you were cooking.
This looks horrible, it's been sitting in the office for about two weeks, and not getting sun, not getting much water, so we're going to give it a try, and see if we can actually make it live.
Okay, so lettuce needs to be planted in a long straight line, you can plant them pretty close together, because these are already started. If you are using seeds, you just want to drop a bunch of seeds in and then thin it down to about this size and make sure you pat the soil firmly around the lettuce plant as you are planting it in, not really tight, but just enough to keep it in place.
Zucchini on the other hand, zucchini needs to be planted in a mound for some unknown reason, but this is what my mom always did. So, this is what I am doing. And zucchini, same thing, you want to make a little space for it, plant it and pat it down firmly. And then once you are done planting everything, you want to water it in really, really well. You want to give it enough water to really saturate the ground.
Now with floppy plants like this, it's kind of a problem because the plants themselves, the leaves are going to pack down into the soil, and get some soil on it, and as that soil dries out then it serves like, it creates kind of cement and cements it into the soil.
So, you want to make sure that, if your leaves are wet and fall down into the soil, that you shake them off, so that as the water dries off they plump up and you feel happy. And then once everything is planted in, and you've watered it, just make sure you keep it nice and wet for a couple of weeks, and voil?! You will have new lettuce and eventually some zucchini.
Okay. So, I did my job. I planted my lettuces, I have planted the zucchini in a little mound. I think that a lot of people have questions about fertilizer. And I am not going to fertilize these for three or four weeks and when I do, I am going to use organic fertilizer from the nursery. But you have to think about fertilizer a little bit like a vitamin. If you took a vitamin on empty stomach, it would really probably upset your stomach.
So, fertilizers are a lot the same for plants. When they are new and they are just rooting in, it's like they have empty stomach. They need to grow up bigger first and then you can fertilize them without burning them up. I'll probably do that in a few weeks.
So clearly, I would be wining The Golden Hoe, if all goes according to plan because, I know what I am doing, I have planted everything in, I am babying them. Unfortunately, my cat uses this as its litter box, so we'll see how that works. I am going to give it a try they don't. I am totally winning The Golden Hoe.
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