A Beautiful Spring

A. inspecting today's strawberry harvest

This evening I went out the the Cherry Hill garden to water some of the seeds I planted earlier this week.  But before I could do that, I had to spend about 45 minutes picking strawberries.  Then I found that most of the seeds I was there to water were already coming up, the ground having passed some magical spring/summer temperature divide that seems to tell the seeds to run.  The tomatoes I transplanted last week have set their first flowers, as have the sugar snap peas I've been drooling over.  The air this spring has been cool and dry, the rain has come in regular downpours, instead of days of drizzly drips.  Even the cabbage worms seem to have just fizzled away.  This must be the best spring I can remember in the garden.  

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.

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.

Putting Away the Spring Garden

Broccoli plants forming secondary flower stalks

This year I am aiming for a true 3-season (spring-summer-fall) garden.  My goal is to keep every bed in continuous use, or at least to not let them grow any crops of weeds.  So far my only complaint is that I really dislike pulling out crops that are still producing food, no matter how slow that production might be. 

The broccoli plants above had to go, despite the fact that they were producing some nice side-shoots, because it really is time to get the winter squash going if I want to have any before the squash bugs overrun me.  The same thing applies to the lettuce heads I pulled early so I could get the peppers and eggplants in the ground.  I have noticed the bottoms of the peas in the front bed are starting to yellow, so even though they're still producing well, I'm confident I'll be able to re-purpose that space soon as well.

R was a little confused when he came back to the garden earlier this week and the broccoli was gone.  It's been one of his favorite crops this spring.  I don't like to see him disappointed, but this is one of the things I like about gardening with him.  I like showing him the changing of the seasons.  I don't want it to be like switching a backdrop; it's a real, visceral part of his life.  The days of broccoli and strawberries are finite and precious - maybe shorter than we expect.

Harvest Notes

The good news is that the harvest this year is really great so far.  The bad news is that it's really been all I can do to pick it, clean it, and fit it into the fridge.  Weighing and even counting have been out of the question!  Here is my best guesstimate about what I've picked since the last harvest note:

• 12 broccoli heads (20 total for the spring), plus several small side-heads
• 14 spinach plants (I planted 27 total for the spring, but 1 died after transplanting)
• 5 heads romaine (12 total for the spring, minus 1 still in the garden)
• 14 heads loose-leaf lettuce (I planted 27, lost 5, and still have 8 in the garden)
• 4 gallon-size bags (cleaned) of pac choi
• 3 bowls of sugar snap peas

I remember when N and R helped me plant the loose-leaf lettuce.  It took up such a small space in the garden, I was tempted to plant more!

Harvest Notes



Celeriac, romaine lettuce, loose-leaf lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and strawberries

The harvests the last few weeks have been great!  I'm starting to clear out the spring crops to make way for summer ones, so suddenly we are eating fresh produce every day and not keeping up with it.

8 broccoli heads

1 celeriac root (small)

12 spinach plants

6 heads romaine lettuce

3 heads + lots of trimmings loose-leaf lettuce

handful of strawberries

1 sugar snap pea (of course this didn't make it home)

There is another round of spinach in the garden still, plus more lettuce and broccoli, and the peas are just starting to produce.  The strawberries are not doing well this year.  I've done a lousy job keeping the irises under control in the bed, so they aren't getting much sun or breeze and the botrytis and slugs are running amok.

Spring Progress

 Some (more) not-so-quick bullet points:

Potato seedling peeking out at the world

Happy broccoli

Pea seedlings at the community garden

• The broccoli is looking utterly fabulous.  Even the poor little sacrificial lamb that didn't fit under the cover looks beautiful, no sign of cabbage worms since I picked off some eggs a few weeks ago.  I put coffee grounds all around the plants, hoping to mask the scent - maybe it's working?
• The potatoes are up.  I have some rogue viking purple potatoes at home in a recycling tote, plus German Butterball and Yukon Gold (N's choice) at the community garden.  The ones in the tote are already a little nibbled in one spot, but I can't see anything that might be causing the damage, and it seems to have stopped.
• Peas are up at home and at the community garden.  I actually replanted some of the empty spots at the community garden last week, so hopefully those will be coming up soon, too.
• Last week I went ahead and planted seven of my poor little tomato seedlings at the community garden, filling one of the two beds I'd planned to use for tomatoes this year.  They are not looking any better out there than they did in pots, so Tuesday I went ahead and planted the second bed with seeds.  The trouble is that now I don't want to re-plant the first bed with tomatoes this year, in case it's contaminated.  Sigh.  I'm working on a plot to rearrange the garden, but it's going to take some significant machinations, since I planned everything so well in the first place.  Drat my cleverness and my black tomato thumb.
• I planted some  ginger in my home garden.  I don't know if it will come to anything, but I had the space and thought I would try.
• I have given up weighing the lettuce.  There is so much of it!  Yesterday when N saw the salad bowl on the table he gave a deep sigh, then sat down manfully and began dishing it out.  I grew a lot this year, thinking that I just wanted to use all of the garden space during the spring, even if that meant giving away a lot of it.
• The romaine leaves seem very thick to me, compared to those I've grown at home in the past, and even compared to the ones I buy at the store, although it's hard to tell because mine are all open, with shorter leaves.  (Am I supposed to be doing something to make them grow in a tight head like the store-bought ones?  I don't know!)
• I'm trying to diversify the herb garden, which has been somewhat neglected since I installed it.  (Herbs are just never a priority, but really they should be, since they are so easy once started!)  I transplanted some lemon grass that I grew last year, and some potted chives that have been on my back step for at least three years.  (They promptly tried to bloom.)  I also added some lemon balm and a new cilantro seedling.  (More on cilantro in a later post, I hope.)  In the home garden I also planted cumin, basil, and dill - just a little of each.  I think this year I'll try to plant a new round of basil every few weeks, rather than try to prevent the plants from flowering all summer.
• Over the last two months I've been stealing 30 minutes here and there to work on a major undertaking by the back fence.  There is an area there where we have been letting volunteer trees and at least three different kinds of ivy just take over.  I've been working to clear it, which has taken a lot more effort than I expected.  There is still a stretch behind the shed that needs to be done, plus a lot of little volunteer trees on the other side of the fence that I need to go around the block to cut.  But I can finally set all my little potted plants and seedlings over there and imagine how it will look when they're in the ground.

Planting Update

The weather last weekend was gorgeous, and I transplanted the first round of onions.  N and R also helped me get some lettuces and spinach in the ground.  I had hoped to do more, but I really got too much sun as it was, so I suppose it's good that my potatoes didn't arrive until Monday.  (At least, that's what I'll tell myself so I don't have to be angry.)  Unfortunately, Tuesday brought rain and clouds, and the soil at the community garden has been too soggy to do much in the rest of this week.

Here's how the plot looked after last weekend:

The curtain is covering my cabbage plants, as well as all of my broccoli seedlings.  The cabbage worm moths have been circling for a couple weeks now, and I'm hoping this will stop them from laying eggs on my plants.  The problem, of course, is that the curtain is just not nearly big enough to cover the broccoli once it's planted!

Since that photo was taken I've spread some additional mulch on the paths (trimmings from the shrubs in my yard), weeded and harrowed that front bed, and hauled in some fallen branches from the woods nearby to sort of fill in that trench at the front a little.  That front bed is supposed to be planted in peas right now, but I haven't gotten around to doing it.  Hopefully I'll get around to it tomorrow, although I'm starting to think this will be a disappointing pea season because of the heat.  If the ground has dried enough I also plan to plant the potatoes tomorrow.  Yay!  (Why to I get so excited about planting the potatoes?  I just don't know!)

State of the Garden

Community Garden Plot

 I haven't been spending enough time at the community garden the last few weeks.  There's been plenty of work to do at home, and, er....I've been sewing.  Fortunately the weather has slowed down the weeds and the bugs and the harvest enough that I'm sort of getting away with it.

Anyway, R and A and I went out there the other day and did some pea picking and work and poking around.  I keep meaning to go ahead and set up my tomato bed for next year (more on that later...) but I am waffling now about where to put it and wether I should stick to the same bed layout as last year or narrow the paths and/or widen the beds.  I'm being seduced by the idea of planting just a little more of...everything.  Meanwhile I've been clearing away weeds and squishing bugs - cabbage worms, to be precise.  You can see the kind of damage they do in the photo on the right.  I keep hoping the damn moths will die already, but no such luck.



Two cauliflowers growing side-by-side



Cabbage patch

The broccoli and cauliflower are fighting the good fight, but the cabbage is clearly winning, just as it did in my home garden in the spring.  Is it the purple leaves?  I don't know.  The garlic is coming up, both here and at home, and the peas are producing quite a lot.  R has always been reluctant to eat sugar snap peas, but this time he spent a good hour bringing me pea pods to break open so he could eat the tiny peas inside.  After he painstakingly picked the peas out I would eat the pods (frost damaged and oh-so-great!), until finally curiosity got the best of him and he (after licking, scrunching up his face, holding it cautiously between his lips, etc) crunched through the pod whole.  And I didn't get a single speck of pea after that!

R sorting through pea pods to find the "nice, fat ones".

Pea Sprouts

Pretty little pea sprouts

The sugar snap peas I planted for fall are coming up in my garden. This is the first time I've planted these in the fall, and I was surprised how fast they came up. I'm not sure if the difference is due to the warmer weather, the excessive hurricane rains, or both. I planted them every 4-5 inches in two rows the entire length of the former corn bed, so I am hoping for a lot of peas. I need to get some fence posts out there, though, as the package says they need a 2-ft high trellis.
The broccoli and cauliflower sprouts are up, too, but they're just not as photogenic.

Harvest Notes

If anyone got excited by long blogging hiatus, I'm sorry to let you down but there is still no baby.  I am now officially "overdue", though our due date was determined by ultrasound at 10 weeks, so who knows?

Meanwhile, we've been picking things in the garden that haven't been reported on the blog:

2oz cilantro
10oz celery
~1 lb sugar snap peas
~4 pints strawberries

I'm really guessing on those last two, as they almost never make it into the kitchen to be measured.  My strawberries are doing really well this year, and I'm not sure if it's because I followed the extension service advice to cut them down to the crown last year after the main crop was produced, or if it's just because of our unusually cool spring.  In any event, I am losing more berries to bugs than to borytritis, and that makes me happy.  I didn't even spray for bugs this year, figuring that R is big enough to get into the berries sometime when I'm not looking and not quite big enough to understand why we have to wash them before eating.  Of course, we are keeping them awfully well-picked this year (they get checked at least twice a day!), which I'm told helps discourage the bugs.

Over the holiday weekend N's brother and sister-in-law brought their two girls over and we all enjoyed fresh pickings.  Sometimes I forget that I used to be uncomfortable eating unwashed produce straight out of the garden, and that others may still be.  This is one food hangup that kids never seem to suffer from, which reinforces my current opinion that the things we usually wash off of supermarket food in our kitchen sinks didn't come from the ground.

Garden Update

I was just sniffing around the garden blogosphere and realized I'm not the only slacker who's gotten too busy with spring craziness to keep her blog up-to-date!  Here's some of what's going on:

1) R and I transplanted basil, dill, and eggplants into our home garden plot.  I have completely abandoned the original planting plan in favor of just getting things in the ground quickly.
2) The azalea bushes and irises are in bloom.
3) The potatoes are up in my backyard container as well as in my community garden plot, which was planted almost three weeks later.  (They're a little smaller.)
4) The first planting of peas are more than a foot tall.
5) Both of my gardens are covered in little sprouted weeds.
6) N came out to the community garden plot with me last week and helped me move a bunch more compost from the pile out there onto my plot, and turned over the soil in the zucchini bed.  I'm ready to plant the corn and put out some tomatoes, I think.  (More on tomatoes in a second post.)  We've had an odd spring, with lots of thunderstorms and cold weather, and geese still flying overhead even yesterday, so I've been a little reluctant, but the rush of all the spring stuff blooming lately makes me feel like it's time.
7) Also a couple weeks ago N brought two of last year's been teepees out to the community plot and we set them up at either end of what will be the bean bed.  From a distance it makes my plot look as though someone who knows what they're doing is working in there!  And, none of our recent thunderstorms have been able to knock them over, so that's good.
8) My neighbor at the community garden set up a fantastic fence around his three plots, with a neat little gate and everything.  He took down the pieces of small plastic fence that I'd stretched along that side of my plot to keep R out of his cauliflower, and rolled them neatly around my fence posts.  What a sweetie!
9) I'm still debating about how to stake my tomtoes.  I've been hearing a lot of good things about the "florida weave" method lately, but the upfront costs are awfully high.  You need a 7- or 8-foot metal T-post for every two or three plants (I think I could get away with 6 of them at about $8 apiece).  It's true that you can reuse them for many seasons, but I've told myself that about the staking methods I used for the last three years and here I sit, debating trying something new, again...
10) The strawberry flowers have opened and are just starting to turn down.  I'm in a hurry for them this year because I feel like I need to pick them before I go into labor or we might miss the whole season in post-baby sleep deprivation.
11) Lots of flower buds are forming on my unruly raspberry vines.  I hope we get to eat a few raspberries this year!
12) My spinach is starting to grow upward, letting me know its time is limited.  The seeds I planted this spring are still tiny, which makes me think I may not get anything out of them before the heat hits.  We'll see!

Hmm, I think that's it for now.  I'm going to try to get an updated photo of the community garden this week, which - despite the fact that I haven't planted anything in there except one short row of potatoes - is starting to look like a real garden!

Planting Potatoes and Peas

Viking Purple potatoes.

St. Patrick's Day is the traditional time to plant peas and potatoes in our area.  (Like you needed another reason to love St. Patrick's Day, right?)  I planted both over the weekend.  I've only grown potatoes once before, so I was really surprised when I opened the box I received from Park Seed last week (right on time!) and found a sack of potatoes, instead of the bags of fingerling potatoes I received last time.  I found some random websites that told me to cut the larger potatoes into 1.5-2 oz pieces with at least one eye each and dry them for 24 hours before planting.  I found this more challenging than it sounds, but I persevered.

Recycling bin turned potato planter.

Next I dumped out the soil I used to grow my carrots in last year from this old recycling bin, and filled it with a mixture of 1-year-old and new potting soil to 7".  Then I planted the potatoes and covered with three more inches of potting soil.  Hopefully they will do a little better this year than in 2009, because I only put four pieces in there instead of 6 fingerling potatoes.  They were definitely too crowded last time.

Inoculating the peas.

Since the trellises were already up, the most challenging part of planting the peas was inoculating them.  I've never purchased inoculant for my peas before, but after last year's legume troubles (No Nodules!) I thought it might be worth it.  The instructions give two methods for inoculating the peas; one of them instructs me to combine the 6 oz package of inoculant with 454 ml of water and 55 lbs of seed.  Since I buy my seed peas in 2 oz packages and had less than half a package left, that means I should have used approximately 0.007 oz of inoculant.  Even I'm not pedantic enough to measure that, so I dipped the peas in water and rolled them around on a small saucer of inoculant and called it a day.

ETA: For an explanation of what inoculant is and why someone might want to use it, check out this article at Dave's Garden: To Inoculate, or not to Inoculate.


R helped me plant the peas, which was the most fun I've ever had planting anything.  He helped me reach between the trellises (which was harder than anticipated due to my ever-increasing size) to poke holes in the ground and put peas in them.  He really liked helping.  Afterwards he helped N measure some wood for his ongoing workbench project.  What a cutie.

R helping Daddy measure.

Harvests

Lest you think my garden brings me nothing but trouble, here are some of the things I've harvested over the last month or so. Mmmm!

Pea pests

I took this picture over the weekend because I think leaf miner damage is just really neat looking. (Probably this is because I've never had any serious damage from them before.) This wasn't a very serious infestation, just a couple leaves on one plant.

Then yesterday I was out picking peas (mmmmmm!) and found a single leaf covered in aphids. The aphids have been odd this year (well, odd in my limited experience). Usually a massive population builds on my rose bushes, then hordes of predators swoop in and take them out. I think I upset the balance this year by cutting down that big rose bush. Right after that I found a bunch of aphids half destroying my beloved stargazer lilies (I sprayed them off violently with insecticide and a garden hose!) I have never seen them on those before. Now they are on my peas?

Probably all these pests on my peas are just telling me that I planted too late. The plants are stressed, which many books claim makes them more attractive to pests. I hope they won't nurture big insect populations that can then invade the rest of the garden.

Pea Harvest

Nick and I finally had some peas to eat on Sunday. So yummy! I planted all Sugar Snap Peas because they're my favorites. They never make it to the kitchen. Of course we've only gotten a handful so far, which is about all we ever get at one time. I wonder how commercial growers ever produce enough to fill a can for $1.20?

Pea Blossoms in June

I just love peas. Not only do they taste great, they are really beautiful plants. These pea blossoms are just starting to bud, hopefully not too late for me to get a few pea pods. We are supposed to have 90 degree (F) weather here this week, so they will be suffering, but I am trusting in the will of plants to reproduce!

Pea Sprouts!

Yay! My peas finally came up yesterday after a nice long day of spring rain (finally). I just love newly sprouted plants!

The lettuce in the cold frame bed is looking pretty happy now too.

Incredible gardening weather!

What a beautiful weekend we had! I don't think I've seen two more gorgeous days put together in six years here in MD! Of course, I took advantage to get some planting and garden work done. N helped me lay out and establish my paths, and made me three more bamboo teepees, which is all I need according to "the plan". I'll take pictures of the whole thing once I get the last teepees in place. I need to decide how to stake them so I can make sure they don't take out my neighbor's fence. Any suggestions?


Among the many other tasks checked off this weekend, I planted peas and carrots. The peas should have been planted at least two weeks ago, but I think I will still get a few to snack on in the garden, which is all I ever do with them. I'm not sure how anyone grows enough peas to can. There must be a way to grow them in quantity, right? There are so many of them at the supermarket!


Next weekend is our last frost date!