Since we bought Atmore Farm & Garden, we haven’t had time to do much gardening at home.
Yet I’m at the shop almost every day, and there are little bits of time here and there. And we have seeds and transplants.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been planting here and there. Some in pots, and some in the ground along the front wall of the store.
One of the first things we planted was the decorative planter box the town of Atmore usually plants out front.
One of my sons and I planted marigolds and a rosemary, then sprinkled lettuce seeds around the rest of the planter.
We got a good bit of lettuce from that planter! Enough for many salads.
Yet now the cold is creeping in, so yesterday I did a big final cutting of lettuce to give to my in-laws, then replanted it – this time with yellow granex short-day onions from the bundles Bonnie Seed sells out front.
They should look great in a few weeks. A local gardener came in the other day and said this variety outperformed all the other onions he ever grew, quickly making softball-sized onions.
That would be great, as we’ve not had much luck here with bulbing onions.
The next thing we planted was a few nursery pots of vegetables.
I’m going to cut some of that broccoli for dinner tonight.
You can tell it’s not sprayed because it looks so ugly.
These cabbages look pretty, though:
When they head up, we’ll make some purple sauerkraut.
Some of the pots in the upper picture were just planted. We are clearing out all our transplants right now so I’ve been sticking them here and there. If it’s a mild winter they’ll do okay.
The front wall of the shop is a south-facing wall.
You can see some little sugarcane leaves popping up about half-way back. They are honest-to-goodness “Blue Ribbon” cane, a Civil-War era variety with interesting markings. I’ll write more on those soon.
The rest of the planted is filled with cabbage, kale, broccoli and collards. The ones closer to the camera were planted first, hence the size difference.
I think the microclimate of this wall will help these grow well. In the future, I’d like to fix the wonky logs and plant a somewhat more tropical perennial garden here. I bet it’s a solid zone 9 at least, thanks to the wall and the parking lot. We could likely put in a lemon, a kumquat and maybe even a blood orange, so long as we put them flat up against the wall. We might even get away with a Surinam cherry.
I am a little concerned about lead in the soil next to the building; however, I read that lead contamination is really only a problem with root crops. We’ll stick to things that produce over above the ground and hope all turns out okay.
I really want to plant cassava against that wall, but I will try to restrain myself…
