Back garden introduction

One of the nicer things about my apartment is access to a backyard which has two 4'9" x 7' beds built (and filled with soil) by a previous tenant. Admittedly I do have to climb out of the kitchen window and down a ladder to get to it, but considering that the landlords could just keep all the garden-y goodness to themselves (they live downstairs and have an actual door to access the space) it's a sweet deal. Below is the view from the tiny roof outside the kitchen window.

My beds are on the left, through the branches you can see two other 4' x 8' beds on the right, those were built by the landlords. The rest of the yard features: brick and concrete pathways, overgrown bushes, piles of cut up trees, a pink flamingo, holes dug by the landlords' dog, a bumblebee spring rocker without the spring, rose trellis, and a bright yellow back fence.

I'm keeping the edibles confined to the beds since the building is at least 100 years old so who knows what the lead the situation is. Below is a rough plan of what I'll be trying this spring and summer.

The layout uses square foot gardening spacing and is for two 4x7 areas, leaving a 4.5" strip on each side which will be planted with scallions, herbs, turnips, and the like. I still need to work out how to keep the squirrels and cats out with the roll of wildlife netting I have.

Indoor plant starting

This year I finally went out and bought a fluorescent light to start seedlings with. It's just the cheapest hardware store model and only has cool bulbs, which isn't ideal but it's what was available. Below is the set-up right now.

On the left is my desk and on the right my bookshelf; the light is wider than the shelf so it's hung over the bottom shelf and then extends under the desk whe it hangs from a hook I added. I turn it on when I wake up in the morning and off an hour or two before I go to bed.

Because the fluorescent light doesn't get hot it doesn't matter if the plants actually touch the bulb, which helps when you have seedlings of wildly different heights. All of the trays and such are left over from former roommates or buying starts at the farmer's market, with whatever potting soil I had on hand. So far it's definitely working better than putting the plants in the window, even though the window I use is south-facing with shelves directly in it for plants.

Street tomato

After finding a pile of ikea bed slats (which are just a bunch of 1x4s cut to 30" long; nice if you don't have a power saw at home) I came up with the crazy plan of building a couple of planters on the front steps, probably for cherry tomatoes since they'll get a fair amount of sun, and also because of this:

That's a photo I took last September of a tiny cherry tomato plant that grew in a crack of the pavement right out front. I had noticed earlier that one of the weeds out front looked remarkably like a tomato plant, but didn't think it actually was one until the fruit showed up. Anyway if that little gal can make it, plants in actual, fertilized soil should do even better, right?

(Be sure to check back next fall when I might have to admit that the concrete is a better gardener than I am.)