Get your salad bowls ready. You've got 70-80 days.

It's official - the Alcone Garden is finally more than 4 boxes full of dirt. Thanks to a small gathering of agency folks, the Seeds of Change seeds are in the ground and I assume germination is underway. It was surprisingly cold this weekend so... I'm not too worried though, I fully expect to see some activity next week.

Short stuff in the front. Tall stuff in the back. Every garden needs a good plan. Only time will tell if this garden had one.

How many CDs does it take to plant lettuce? Looks like 3.


Sharon's taking care of the carrots.

Arugula has Heather to thank.

That's me pushing in the peas.

Carlos coming in from the east.

Griffin giving each seed a word of praise and a gentle pat on the head.

Griffin and Heather - chilly, but proud, farmers.


Giving it some water just in case that 100% chance of rain doesn't come.

Thanks to everyone who could rearrange their schedules to get their hands dirty. I hope you enjoyed it.

All hail the Minifarm Boxes

Meet Conor Fitzpatrick from Minifarm Boxes. He's the owner of the company, a maker of beautiful planter boxes, and an all around hell-of-a-nice guy. I contacted him about getting some planters for the Alcone Garden, and when I told him about the project he was really enthusiastic and helpful.

I urge you to check out his site and start a garden of your own. Minifarm boxes really make it easy. The boxes are very sturdy cedar and were really simple to set up. And he's got everything you need: different types of boxes, soil, plant food - he's even setting up kid's birthday planting parties. He's doing a great job of cultivating and passing on the gardening way of life.

Let's take this up a notch or four.

The stairwell garden has been fun and all, but I've been itching to take this thing outside for a while. So with the blessing, and funding, of agency management we're doing just that; our own little Alcone Garden. Actually, I'm happy to say, it's not going to be that little.


The first thing to do was pick a proper site. The Alcone building is on a large piece of property, but there was really only one spot that would give us the 6-8 hours of sunlight we need. So that settled that.

The site needed a little work though. In order to get proper drainage, the raised beds would need to be level.

This meant there was going to be a little digging involved. That's all right, digging's good for you.

The next thing was to put the boxes in. I got these really nice cedar boxes from a company called Mini Farm Box. It's the product of Conor Fitzpatrick, a really nice and helpful guy in L.A. More about him and his beautiful boxes in a future post.

Getting everything in place was simple enough. A little elbow grease here...

a little cow manure there, and next thing you know...

It's planting time!

In order to make sure there would be enough veggies to go around, I went with two 4x4x18" and two 4x8x11".

Planting starts tomorrow. Stay tuned.

All is well at home

The home garden is taking care of business. Lots of good stuff coming out of there.


If you've never had a snow pea right off the vine, you don't know what you're missing.


If I don't get to them soon enough my daughter eats them all.


Not sure when to pull the beets, I've never grown them before. They sure look nice though.


I can't wait for the coleslaw I'm going to make with that cabbage.

If you love something set it free.

Well, the stairwell garden is struggling. And unfortunately I could point my finger to about 10 different things causing it: UV coating on the windows, lack of fresh air, rapidly changing temps, cups are too small, poor drainage. Hell, it could even be the bad vibes caused by people sneaking off to the stairwell to make personal phone calls. Who knows? But I'm sure it's human error, caused by the human writing this.




Regardless, I decided to move a couple of them outside, throw up a trellis and continue the experiment. Turned out kind of cool, no? I feel kinda bad though because Regular Bean has to watch Worm Bean have all the fun right outside the window. He'll probably end up with depression now. Great.

Here comes Bean

Just wanted to take a moment to recognize the effort being displayed by Regular Bean. (golf clap)

Family shot

So far everybody is still growing, some are doing better than others. The Morning Glories are still much smaller than I thought they would be, and all of the beans are more of a pale green than bean green. Not sure if that's normal at this stage or if it has something to do with being indoors and getting somewhat filtered light.


Regular Bean is still reaching for the stars though. And Worm Water Bean hasn't caught up. Yet. Compare this with where it was a couple of weeks ago. You can also see how much greener it was then.