Late Summer Garden

Late summer garden photo

With my planting window for the fall garden rapidly closing and the summer harvest starting to taper off, I thought I'd do a status update for the community garden. 

Squash vine borer hole at the base of my mystery squash

The summer squashes are still producing, despite evidence of both borers and squash bugs in the garden.  They seem to prefer attacking my mystery squash, which seems to be able to take the abuse.  It is also still producing, though I've cut it back a lot in the hopes of squeezing another watermelon out of the season.  The watermelon vines got a little overrun by mystery squash and basil, so they are limping along.  The basil has outperformed my wildest expectations; there is still some left in the garden after two large harvests!

My peppers are still doing well, but are under attack by some sort of stink/soldier beetle.  I've really never had problems with pests on my peppers before, but I suppose there's a first time for everything - especially bugs.

I've got five rounds of carrots in the garden right now.  Some that I planted in the spring, some from my June planting, and three rounds that I planted for the fall. The spring ones can be picked whenever I like, and the June carrots are filling out.  I planted an entire bed for the fall garden, hoping to grow some to leave in the ground for winter like last year.  It's been challenging keeping them watered, even with the weather's cooperation.

The cucumbers are just about finished, but I've been putting off pulling them out because I don't have anything else to plant in their bed and I'd rather not leave the soil bare.  The onion bed is mostly bare, and the soil there is as hard as a rock, even with all the rain we've been having.  The eggplants are just limping along as well, still under attach by the flea beetles.  It looks like I'll get at least two more rosa biancas, though.

Broccoli plant - see the half-eaten leaves?

I transplanted several broccoli back in July, and they have been under pretty serious attack by cabbage moths.  Four or five have survived, but comparing their size and vigor to the ones we had in the spring, I think any heads they produce will be disappointing.  I've transplanted a bunch more and covered them, so we'll see.  According to the almighty HG16 it is too late to plant broccoli, but I think I'd rather plant them and have them not produce anything until spring than leave the soil bare.

Tall tomato plants

I've pulled out four of the tomato plants, hoping the others would have a better chance at ripening their remaining fruit.  We've reached the part of the season when I pick a large bowl of tomatoes every time we go to the garden, and they sit on our table waiting to be turned into sauce.  There was something very odd about the way the tomatoes grew this year - when I look at them from the main path, both beds are shortest on the left, then get progressively taller and bushier as I look to the right.  Why?  I don't know.  Maybe the left gets marginally more light?  Less wind?

A wide row of beans

The green beans R and I planted in July are putting out their first beans!  Yay!  I do like planting these later much better than watching them rust and struggle through the heat and dryness and not produce anything.  It's also nice to have something just coming into crop at this time of year.

The snap peas are up - the first generation are about three inches tall, while the second are about 1 inch.  I've transplanted a whole lot of lettuces into the former potato bed, some simpson and some valerie, and one little romaine has reached survivable size, with more little ones to go in the bed this week.

I'm glad the fall planting is almost finished.  It feels like the fall weather is coming early this year, and I'm anxious to start cleaning and packing things away.  I've also decided to convert more grass to garden at the house, so it will be nice to have some more time to work on that.  (Funny how I'm even looking forward to picking less!)  But more on that project another time.

Canning...and more canning....

Tomato processing

A lot is going on right now in the garden, and in the kitchen.  I'm still working on planting the fall garden, while picking and preserving the summer produce.  In the last week and a half I've put up 8 pints and 2 quarts of tomato sauce (a laughably small amount, I know, but it took me soooo long!), 4 pints of peach jam, one gallon bag of sliced peaches, and 11 pints of dill pickles.

Pickle production

(Do you see my really impressive jug of vinegar?  I can't believe I never wondered what people did with so much vinegar.  And now I know.)

How's the Garden?

The community garden plot

June is a precarious time in the garden.  There's a lot of empty space around plants that aren't yet fully established - prime weed-growing real estate.  There's also (in my area) not a whole lot of rain falling, so many of the newly planted summer crops need water.  Add that to the relatively little harvesting and planting to be done and the human tendency to steer clear of heat and burning-bright sunshine and you have a real recipe for disaster.  This is when we lose a lot of the new gardeners at the community garden.

Luckily, I am behind schedule this year, so I have plenty of reasons to crawl out of bed and go take care of things.  Here's a rundown of the crops currently in the community garden plot:

• Potatoes - seem to have some sort of fungus or disease causing the outside edges of the leaves to blacken, but I think it won't seriously harm the yield.  At any rate there will certainly be plenty of potatoes this year.
• Tomatoes - Both rows are setting fruit, but the ones in the back row are larger.  Both rows also seem to have the fungal problem I was worried about in the spring, which I think is gray mold.  The back row really needs to be tied and pruned - I'll have to get to that this week.
• Garlic - some if not all of the garlic is probably ready to be picked.  The plants are browning and seem to be shrinking before my eyes as the energy from the plant slowly goes into storage in the bulb.
• Carrots - there are three rounds in the ground right now, with the oldest ones ready to pick and the smallest ones barely out of the ground.  I really should have put more compost into the carrot bed before I planted it - the carrots I'm harvesting are pretty stubby and crooked and split from the hard clay soil.
• The back peas aren't really producing much anymore, thanks to the heat, I just haven't gotten around to pulling them out yet.  I'll plant some beans there soon.
• The onions are so exciting right now.  It's my first year growing bulbing onions, so I'm trying not to get too excited, but it's really hard when they are clearly making onions!  I don't know when they'll be done, but I'm thinking at least another month.
• The asparagus seem to be loving life.  They could use some light weeding, and maybe some fertilizer soon, but mostly they seem to take care of themselves.
• The back pepper plants are starting to produce lots of peppers (bell and chili), while the front ones are still getting over being trasplanted.  Also I think the front ones are a little chlorotic.  I think the wood chips I added were not sufficiently rotted and now I'm worried there's not enough nitrogen in those two beds.  I watered them with some fish emulsion, and threw some more coffee grounds over the soil, so hopefully they will start to look better soon.
• The celeriac is bushy and I think I can see the tops of the thick roots widening below the soil.  I'm continuing to weed the bed, but other than that I leave them alone.
• There are little cucumber starts tucked between some of my pepper plants that look like they're starting to take off.  It's good because I'm almost out of pickles!
• The eggplants are all growing, although they're still getting torn up pretty badly by flea beetles.  The ones I started at home, which were horribly ragged when I planted them, are starting to close the gap with the nursery-bought transplant.
• The bed that used to have the broccoli in it is full of new little things whose outcome is far from certain.  There are two watermelon starts, a butternut squash start, a spare bell pepper plant and marigold that look pretty happy, and lots of little carrot and basil sprouts.
• The front bed is newly planted with summer squash: zucchini, yellow squash, and tromboncino (seeds).  There's also an extra 6-8 feet of space in there that I think I may use for beans.   I definitely don't want to plant extra summer squash!
• I haven't seen much action where I planted the parsley seeds.  I wonder if those seeds are no good any more.  I'll give them a little more time and then try some other seeds.

Whew!   The little bit of extra planning I've done this year has made a tremendous difference in how efficiently I'm using the garden space.  Can you tell I'm really proud of the garden?  Cause I am.

Refrigerator Dills

 

I don't actually grow cucumbers because I like them.  I grow them because I like pickles!  I made this jar of refrigerator dills with the first two batches of cucumbers I picked.  I searched the internet and cobbled together several recipes I found.  I didn't bother writing down what I done because I thought I'd remember.  

Well, I don't remember.  But whatever I did, don't do it.  I think it was sugar.  Definitely no sugar next time.

Cucumber Trellises

...are not very effective where the cucumbers get enough sunlight.  At least that's my current theory.

I named this blog "Bed of Cucumbers" because the first year we owned our house I put in a small garden and about the only thing that did well was the cucumber vine.  I planted a single vine at the back, near my neighbor's fence, which it promptly covered in vines and produced about a cucumber a day for a month.  I told my friend T they were the easiest thing I ever grew and of course have never had luck with them since.  This year I determined to put them in the community garden plot, plant a whole bunch all at once, and pick them easily from a 5-foot chicken wire trellis N built for me back in April.  Based on my experience at home I figured the large leaves that grew at the bottom would crowd out any weeds, and the cucumbers would grow at a reasonable picking height, all of which would make it possible for me to pick a great number of cucumbers for pickling while taking care of a newborn.

But my cucumbers this year stubbornly resisted all efforts to make them grow up the freaking trellis!  Where I did manage to force them through the chicken wire to the point that they could not escape, the pickles grew inside the chicken wire and got warped and/or stuck.  I'm now thinking that the cucumbers at my house just don't get enough light, and have been climbing every tall thing in sight because they are desperate.

My useless cucumber trellis

Anyone out there have any luck with trellising cucumbers?  I'd like to try it again - maybe with chain-link instead of chicken wire - because you just can't beat plants that produce fruit about three feet off the ground. 

A Week Worth of Neglect

Overgrown zucchini and an eaten ear of corn.

Last week my sister was talking to me about how her garden got so overrun with weeds during her recent vacation that she almost decided to give up for the year.  (You wouldn't believe how common that is right about now.)  "You can't garden on your free days," she said.  And that about sums it up.  During my recent vacation I lost another summer squash plant and two winter squash vines to the squash bugs, weeds absolutely overtook the last couple cucumber vines, and raccoons (or squirrels?) ate all but a few of my remaining corn ears.  Plus my zucchini got a little bigger than I like!

Lest you think my garden brings me nothing but grief, check out some of the corn we ate for lunch before we left:

We also took a few squash, a baggie of garlic, a basil plant (I potted it from my home garden) and a half a box of tomatoes with us.  What a tasty trip!

Almost Done Planting?

I keep thinking I'm almost done planting things at the community garden (and at home!) but then it always seems like there's room for a few more things.  Here's another update on the progress out there.

My potatoes are doing quite well.  Most of the chunks I planted have sprouted at least one plant, and the plants now range in size from about 2 inches (the one I chopped off by accident with a hoe) to about 2 ft above the original soil line.  I've never grown potatoes in the ground before, so when N saw me hilling them up and started asking skeptical questions, I don't think my voice quite had the ring of authority he wanted to hear.  He went and chatted with M, our community garden's helpful guru, who told him I should actually be hilling them even higher.  Suitably reassured, N proceeded to do a much nicer job of it than I had been.  (He really wants potatoes to come out of that garden!)

The tomatoes I transplanted a few weeks ago are doing really well - they've almost doubled their above-ground size since I planted them and several are starting to flower.  As an experiment I decided to cover the ground around them with the plastic bags my leafgro arrived in.  I've seen advice on several university extension websites about mulching tomatoes with plastic to conserve water, suppress weeds, and prevent potentially spore-laden soil from splashing up onto the leaves during heavy rainfall.  So far I have to say I'm really impressed; the soil around my tomato beds is visibly more moist than in other areas of the garden, and the upper leaves (those that grew in after I put the plastic down) are visibly cleaner than the older ones.  Yay!  Now I really must get to staking!

My corn (some of it anyway) has come up.  I think I'll have to go back sometime soon and re-plant in the places where it didn't come up.  I didn't do a very good job of watering it after I planted, or of mixing together the soil and the leaf mulch I put on top of it, so I guess I deserved poor germination rates, but it's important that my rows be filled in, since I only planted two rows and pollination is really important for corn.

I haven't seen any beans (green beans and lima beans) or cucumbers yet.  N helped me put up a trellis for the cucumbers and a net for the beans.  I'll have to post pictures because the whole bean structure is kind of hard to describe and I've already gotten questions about it from several other gardeners out there.  I always laugh a little when people ask what it's for, because I have no idea if it will work and I know it looks crazy.  I needed something around 6 or 7 feet tall and roughly 15 feet long and costing almost nothing to make - surely the kind of challenge that requires a creative and unique solution.  We'll see if it works, I guess.

I also planted pre-sprouted zucchini and butternut squash seeds, and a few yellow summer squash seeds that weren't sprouted yet - I just wanted to get them in the ground in case the baby comes.  (Any day now....) 

As it turns out I have a big blank spot in my community garden plan that was originally intended to be part of a shaded seating / water collection area.  My thinking was that in July when it's 100 degrees and 100% humidity it would be nice to have some shady spot to sit in and nurse the baby between gardening chores.  But there were a lot of problems with that plan, too numerous to mention at 11pm.  I also just happen to have a bunch of old seeds for large vining plants, given to me by my friend T because she doesn't have the space to grow them and wasn't really sure if the seeds were any good.  So, I may be adding some pumpkins and/or winter squash to my plot, depending on how much time passes between now and when the baby arrives.  I've recently discovered the seemingly obvious fact that garden space that has nothing planted in it still has to be weeded, so I am motivated to at least make it all useful!

Growing Things

I thought it might be fun to post some pictures of all the things growing in my garden. Here is a happy little baby squash.




And a vigorous cucumber patch busily trying to escape our yard for the neighbors'.


Here's a nice bunch of cherry tomatoes (carried off by squirrels before this photo made it to the blog).


And here I managed to catch one of my eggplants actually growing. I have found during the last two years that they just don't do well until it gets hot. Next year I'm not going to plant these until it's warm enough to plant them outside.