Vegetable Garden Update

The garden is a good place for meditating.

Even though the sweet potato harvest was not so good, I still have high hopes for the fall garden.  Sometimes I think fall gardening is more a matter of luck than skill.  And I feel lucky!  No real bug problems so far, and believe me, I am knocking wood whenever I even think about this.

We decorate our veggie gardens!

I have these two little former square foot gardens, which have reverted to simply raised beds.  I like the neat look of the little dividers, but Mel and I have parted ways.  I think the mix he recommends is to peaty for our hot climate and I feel a little guilty about using up a nonrenewable resource like peat anyway.  Mixed in with the flowers, we have garlic, cabbage, fennel, oregano, two kinds of chives and marjoram.  Those are carrots hiding under the skirts of a calendula.

Mostly greens, onions and flowers.

Lettuce and onions mix it up with nasturtiums and sweet peas.  Almost time to pick that one row of lettuce.  Just in time for Thanksgiving!

The tomato forest with lettuce seedlings.

And speaking of Thanksgiving, it's always my hope that I'll have fresh tomatoes.  I'm getting a little anxious about that, though!  The tomatoes are probably 7 feet tall now and each one is covered with green tomatoes, but not a single one looks even remotely like it's beginning to ripen.  At the foot of the tomato forest, where the sweet potatoes were, I've planted more lettuce and carrots.

The frontrunners.

Will they be ripe for Thanksgiving?  I don't think so!

Harvest Day!

Today we harvested some of our spring vegetables!  This is the first batch of potatoes (White Kennebec), one small red onion, one ripe tomato (Early Goliath) and one cucumber (Straight Eight).  We also picked one little jalapeno pepper.  There are more peppers on the bushes, and more potatoes, but we didn't want to pick more than we could eat right away.  We made a salad with the tomato and red onion and we're saving those little potatoes for something (I don't know what!)

Did you notice the green tomato?  I wanted to write a little about a certain garden pest that damages tomatoes in this way.  The tomato has been removed from the vine, its skin punctured from the outside, and then left in the back yard.  Do you have trouble with this common garden pest?

Ours is Griffin, a &*%#& dog, who apparently thinks we are growing tennis balls on little bushes in cages, just for him.

Vegetable Garden Update

I guess I'm about halfway satisfied with my Square Foot Garden.  Everything I planted in there is growing like mad, except for the plants that are being outcompeted.  The Early Goliath tomatoes, planted in very late February or early March, are living up to their names.  The tomatoes themselves are huge, but so is the plant!  It's at least two feet taller than my tallest cage, and the whole affair had to be supported with a T-bar.  It flowered early and often, and all but the very earliest flowers seem to have turned into tomatoes.  This baby's supposed to be indeterminate, so there's no telling how tall it will eventually be.  I may be climbing on the roof to support it!

On the negative side, the spacing instructions provided in the Square Foot Gardening book were wildly inaccurate.  Basically I have a tomato/potato garden.  I planted seed potatoes in early February, right before the last freeze.  Now they are the biggest potatoes I've ever seen.  They've just begun to flower in earnest, so I'm hoping that the foliage will die down soon and I can harvest them in time to use those squares for a fall garden.  I always thought those potato Grow Bags were gimmicky and silly, but now I wish I had planted my potatoes all by themselves, perhaps in the next ZIP code.

You can't see anything else besides tomatoes and potatoes, but actually there are chives, carrots, cilantro and bulbing onions in the Square Foot Garden.  The chives are okay and the cilantro is bolting now, but I'm giving up on the carrots.  They've been overcome by potatoes.  It remains to be seen about the onions.  They're hanging in there...

Just outside the Square Foot Garden, in a more traditional raised bed, I planted a Grape tomato (from a plant) and Straight Eight Cucumbers from seed.  The grape tomatoes seemed to flower much later than normal.  They are way behind Early Goliath, but flowering well now, and I have one or two small clusters of fruit.  The cucumbers were planted much later, and are just now about 2 feet tall, scrambling up a bean tower.  Already several flowers, so cucumbers can't be far behind!

In the raised bed, around the time I planted the cucumbers, I also planted organic Red Velvet okra, from seed.  It's up and about 6" tall, but nothing much to look at.  Probably it was too early.  Probably I even told myself that when I was planting it! 

The jalapeno peppers were planted from a 6-pack right about the time the tomatoes were planted.  It was really too cold then. I had to keep them in plastic cloches at night, and they didn't get a good start.  But they're blooming now and it's reliably warm, so I'm sure they'll make it.  They're not really growing in the shade, by the way.  It's a weird camera angle.

I also planted a straw bale garden.  The Cocozelle Summer squash look wonderful.  No flowers yet but they can't be far behind.  The Purple Queen bush beans were planted from seed at the same time, and I do believe they are beginning to flower.  This bed was easy and inexpensive to create; it'll also be easy to dismantle if I get tired of it.  But the big drawback will be trying to keep it watered.  It's only just now beginning to get hot and already I'm having to water at least once a day.  The straw provides excellent drainage but there's very little structure to retain any moisture at all.  The past few warm, dry days have really been a challenge.  I can only imagine what July will be like!