The Color Purple

I harvested purple carrots this morning! Cosmic Purple from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed. 

Seriously! Color me happy. I discovered an actual carrot had formed and not the just carrot thinnings that I've been doing for a couple of weeks. I could have let it get bigger, but I was too excited.

I decided to write a blog post about the color purple in my garden this year. 

Last year, I had shades of mostly yellow, red and green in my basket. This year I added purple.

It started with eggplant. I saw some plants at Lowe's. I'd never grown eggplant before, but decided to give it a try.I grew the long slender eggplant and the Black Beauty eggplant.

We did a presentation at the Sierra Club of OKC earlier this year. A couple bought some boxes from us because the man wanted to grow eggplant. I never did hear from them again. I hope he was successful. I know I was. Update: January, 2016...They stopped by our booth at the Home Show. They did grow eggplant and loved their GAB garden.

What surprised me was how fast the plant grew. About six inches in just three days. Another thing that surprised me was how prolific the plant was. I had so many eggplants this summer that I didn't know what to do. That's when I learned about "eggplant" bacon.   I love the internet. There is a wealth of knowledge at my fingertips. Who ever would have thought of making bacon out of eggplant, but someone did.

Here is another eggplant bacon recipe for comparison. It recommends salting your eggplant strips for a couple of hours to release excess water and then rinsing your eggplant before you marinate. That is what I did and my bacon was crispy

                                                                                                Eggplant bacon was one of my cool discoveries this summer. It is very easy to make. You can marinate it using whatever seasonings you are in the mood for. Spicy or sweet or both. Put it in the dehydrator to dry. When it's finished, it's crispy just like bacon. Make an "ELT" instead of a BLT. Yum! 

A fun discovery for me this year has been purple basil. I grew Genovese basil last year and made pesto. Toasted Walnut Basil Pesto to be exact. It was yummy. When I saw a purple basil plant, I wanted to add that to my garden.


Another purple addition has been Burgundy okra. It's not really purple, more of a red-violet. It's made a pretty addition to my basket, too. I have to say, though that I don't know if I'll grow it next year. It has not been as prolific as my green okra. I'll have to think about that and see if I want to give it another try. 

I recently planted Red Leaved Hyacinth Bean, It has lovely little purple flowers and purple seed pods. This is my first time growing this bean. We'll see how it does. 







I also have to mention Cherokee Purple , Black Cherry  and Indigo Rose tomatoes. I had good luck with them this year and look forward to growing more next year. I will also be adding Black Krim and Purple Calabash to the garden. If you look closely at the picture, you can also see some burgundy okra and a couple of eggplants to add to our purple theme.




I almost forgot to mention Kohlrabi. I only had one plant this year, but it did great. I am definitely going to grow more next year. 

So, here is my Magical Mystery Tour of purple in my garden this year. Hopefully, this will inspire you to add the color purple to your garden next year.

Still Learning

A dog at the farmers market trying
out our Per-PET-ual Pet dish

Let me just say again...I am NOT a Master Gardener. I've tried to garden for years, with limited success. It was not until we started gardening in boxes...specifically Garden Anywhere Box, that I could admit to myself that I might actually be a gardener. That is why I am so passionate about GAB. If I can be a successful gardener, anyone can. 

That being said, I am still learning. This year we experimented with putting clay pots in our Per-Pet-ual Pet Dish. Just like with the boxes, water would come up from the bottom. Since the dishes are hooked into our watering system, there will always be fresh water going to the pots. But, there would not be plastic on the top like with GABs. 

This method has worked brilliantly this summer. I've been able to harvest greens for smoothies and grow some of the tinier seeds like carrots, radishes and beets. Don't get me wrong. These seeds will still grow in a GAB, but the clay pots make it easier to broadcast the seeds. 

Peas

Beets

Carrots

Well...I learned something new...

I was worried about the pots getting the nutrients that they needed. I decided to try adding fish emulsion to my watering can to add to the pots. Big Mistake and a DUH moment. 

Red Romaine lettuce and radishes

Larry went out to check the garden this morning and discovered two of my pots had been dug up. I'd planted a pot with Romaine lettuce and radishes last week.  The little leaves were just sprouting. I planted another pot yesterday with some carrot and beet seeds. I could not imagine what happened. I suspected raccoons, but they do not ever bother the boxes. Then I figured it out. 

Fish emulsion + CATS= Digging in the Pots. I even found my watering can overturned and drained dry.

I replanted this morning and will keep an eye on my plants...and the cats.  So, lesson learned. I will still try fish emulsion, but only through the watering tube, so that the cats can't get to it. I'll just have to use something else to fertilize my little pots although, they've been growing just fine on their own. 

Vision and Perseverance

As you follow my blog and my Facebook page, I hope to share with you our adventures along the way with Garden Anywhere Box.

Today we were invited to a luncheon with members of the Oklahoma Venture Forum. For those of you who have been with GAB this year, we were invited to be guests at  the OVF meeting at the Governor's mansion in April. We entered a contest for new small businesses. We did not win because our business was "too" small, but we were invited as honorary guests to be recognized. We were very humbled and excited. We got to listen to keynote speaker, Tom Love, owner of Love's Country Stores, see the mansion grounds and meet the governor.

Flash forward to today...We again met with member of the OVF for a luncheon at the Oklahoma Boathouse. We were hoping to find investors for our business. Because of Larry's macular degeneration, he has not been able to work at his job in the telecom business. We have relied only on the income from the boxes that we sell in order to live, pay bills and try to buy more supplies for our company. We counted on Larry's job and income from his telecom business to help us get established with GAB. Without that income, we have been thrown into the deep end of the business and are treading water.

This is no different than many other small businesses, but we have come to a point where we need help to get to the next step of building our business. We are hoping to find investors who can see our vision for the future of Garden Anywhere Box. We believe it is a bright one, and one that will allow everyone to be a successful gardener and grow at least some of their own food.

We met some people today that we hope will be able to help us advance our business. This will include our DIY GAB kit and get us in a position to be able to distribute GAB throughout the country on a larger scale than what we are doing now.

One of the speakers at the luncheon was Michael Knopp. He is the Executive Director of the OKC Devon Boathouse. He shared with us how the boathouse district came to be. It has been ten years in the making and is recognized world-wide as a state of the art facility. Someone asked him how he kept his dream alive during the tough times. He said "Perseverance." I think that is key to any small business with a dream. There will always be set-backs. If you have a dream and a vision, you can overcome the hard times.

After the luncheon, he took us on a tour of the OKC Boathouse District.  We got to see the workout room where the rowers train. There is also a room for high altitudes. Mr. Knopp told us about how a couple came to the high altitude room to train for two months before their trip to climb Mt. Kilamanjaro.  This room is specially designed to draw oxygen out of the room to simulate a change in altitude. Very cool! 

The Oklahoma River is an Olympic-class training ground for Olympic competitors. Athlete's from around the world come to the Oklahoma River to train. Something unique to Oklahoma are statues of painted buffalo around the state. The boathouse is no exception.  This buffalo has signatures from the many athletes from around the world who have come to train at the boathouse.

We also got to see where the athletes train for their races. 

This glass room is where people can gather to watch the boat races. It is also where the auditions for American Idol were held. 

This will be the future home of the new Whitewater Park.  There is also a video of what went into designing the park. 

These are some of the boats at the boathouse. There are different colors for different schools. The blue one just happens to represent Oklahoma City University, my alma mater.

One of the things that Mr, Knopp mentioned was that the boathouse is for all ages and degrees of ability. Eight year old's train in the same area as Olympic-class athletes. There are no barriers. The younger children get to mingle with and learn from their elders. I think that is a great thing.

I hope that you've enjoyed this little tour of the Oklahoma Boat District. The area has come a long way from the boggy ditch that it used to be. It took vision and perseverance to turn it into something that the whole community and really the world can enjoy. If you ever make a trip to Oklahoma, take a cruise along the Oklahoma River, check out Bricktown, watch a Thunder basketball game and ,,,visit Garden Anywhere Box. We'd be happy to show you around.

Turning Brown Thumbs Green...

The daily harvest pics that I post are to show you that if I can be a successful gardener, you

can, too. :) 

I gardened for years with very little success. We did a traditional garden, raised beds, lasagne gardening and other assorted methods that people swore by (and I swore at. ;) ). The same thing would happen each  year. By July, my garden would die because I did not want to go out in the heat and weed the garden. Plus, I would either over-water or underwater, never seeming to get it just right. 

I don't know if it was Oklahoma or just my ineptness in the garden, but I could not harvest much at all. People have told me that they could grow anything...until they came to Oklahoma. I don't know about that since I've only ever gardened in Oklahoma. I only know that for me, it was a challenge...until we started gardening in boxes.

We tried Earth box and had success for the first time in a really long time. Larry wanted to try to make his own boxes. After working out a few design flaws and trial and error plans from the internet, he fine-tuned his boxes to be done to his satisfaction. I was a happy gardener because I had more boxes to grow veggies. I didn't have to weed the garden because the boxes were weed-free. I also was not over-watering my plants. I would fill up the watering tube daily and when the reservoir was full, water would come out the little drain hole. This truly was an easier and successful way to garden.




Here are some pictures of our early GAB garden. GAB on the left and Earthbox on the right. Thirty four tomato plants in seventeen boxes. We put the boxes right in our old gardening spot. We also discovered as the tomatoes grew, that we did not space them far enough apart.  

The pictures are of the tomatoes at planting, at four weeks and one days harvest of tomatoes. We harvested LOTS of tomatoes that summer. 

 

The problem arose when I was watering 20 boxes by hand. What started out as a few containers for a garden turned into...WORK. I asked Larry if he could come up with an easier way to water. Yes, I'm that lazy...lol.

Again, through trial and error and very little plumbing knowledge, Larry came up with a solution. He figured out a way to water all of the boxes at once and Garden Anywhere Box was born.

We felt that we had something useful to share. Surely, I could not be the only person who hated weeding a garden in the heat of the summer and who also

had two brown thumbs. We thought that other people might be interested in this easier way to garden. We are not the first ones to garden in a box, but no one else has a watering system like Garden Anywhere Box. The "no-weeding" part is the best, but the self-watering aspect of GAB is amazing. 

Now, when I go out in the morning (before it gets hot) to (not weed my garden) harvest what's ready, I can say that I really love gardening. I love being successful. I love planting new veggies that I've never tried. I love taking pictures of my harvests. I never did that before when I gardened in the ground. I was too hot from pulling weeds to even think about lingering over my plants to take pictures. Plus, there wasn't much to take a picture of. Garden Anywhere Box has changed all of that.

While we were talking about the boxes this summer and brain-storming about how to get the word out about GAB,  Larry came up with a slogan,

 "Garden Anywhere Box...

Turning Brown Thumbs Green."

I had come to accept my brown thumbed-ness in the garden, but now realize and am trying to accept that I AM a successful gardener. No more brown thumbs!

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I share my harvest pics to show others that if I can be a successful gardener, you can, too. :)