Month: June 2015

When Things Are Not What They Seem

I’ve mentioned a few times, and shared pictures of the little strawberry patch in my Sunset Garden.   I’ve been rather perplexed about their slow-seeming growth.  Admittedly, I know very little about growing strawberries, but when I am harvesting strawberries elsewhere, my plants at least should have had some kind of blossom on them.

Well, I was working over there the other day, and I kept glancing over at the strawberries, wondering if moving them caused them to not blossom this year when I spied something I hadn’t noticed before.  On the very tip of one of the plants, there WAS a blossom.  Only it was yellow, and didn’t look anything like a strawberry flower.  I rushed home, and checked in with google, only to confirm that I was, in fact, duped.   My strawberry plants were actually potentilla, and were actually a weed.

I immediately headed to the garden center where I picked up eight new herb plants and a rhubarb, and then I went over in-between raindrops to yank those imposters out and plant something useful.  I planted Thyme, Greek Oregano, Chocolate Mint, Lemon Balm, French Tarragon, Marjoram and two Parsley plants, along with a Red Rhubarb plant.  This is what that corner now looks like.

So while I’m a little bummed about not having the fresh strawberries, at least I was able to make lemonade out of the lemons and get some more herbs planted.

I also now have all kinds of sprouts where I didn’t have them before!   My Buttercup Squash in a cage has sprouted!

As has my Bush Baby watermelons!

My tomatillos are doing great and sporting their first flowers.

The pole beans are up and getting ready to do business!

And finally, I found baby tomatoes on my Besser Cherry plant.

All of the tomato plants over there are thriving, and I have now managed to give all of them a cage to climb on.  Pretty much it is now a matter of weed management over there.  I have seen several rabbits when I’m walking over to the gardens, but I have not noticed any damage yet to my garden, so perhaps they are contenting themselves with the dandelion and clover.

Tomorrow I’ll update the home garden, as there have, of course, been changes in the last week.

One Week Later

I love how things change this time of year.  One day you’re harvesting your first radish of the season, the next week you’re pulling the rest of them out because they’ve decided to bolt.  While Andy will miss the radishes, it gave me space to sprinkle another patch of scallion seed.  I love having scallions on hand in the garden, and am looking forward to some getting large enough to use.

Here at the home garden, the beans and cucumbers are sprouting.

Here you can see bean sprouts in the bed right in front of us, and then as you look down the row at the next two boxes, you can see the lone row of cucumber sprouts.  Time is now ticking and I need to figure out what I want to do for a cucumber trellis this year.  I need to get the trellis up before I leave for ten days at the end of the month.

When I planted the cucumbers last week, I kept looking at the two packages of pickling cucumbers I had and wished I had the space to plant them.  I’ve been really pleased with the pickling cukes I get from the farmstand, but it sure would be nice to grow my own for a change.  I looked around, and found a corner to tuck them into.

See that wet line of dirt up there to the left?  Over which is placed a bright red trellis?  Yep, that’s where I’ve put a row of pickling cucumbers.  With that planting, I was utterly and completely out of space here at the home garden.

The tomatoes are doing very well here at home- there are blossoms on a few now, and I need to start making my plan for supporting them.  All the sudden I’m up against a deadline!  I don’t want to come home from our trip and find everything’s gone awry while I’m gone.

Oh!  Here’s the potato and bean patch.  It’s looking fabulous!

You can see some of the bean leaves along on the outside edges as the potatoes just get bigger and bigger in the middle.  We have a little bit of the compost pile left yet, and I plan to use that to bury the potato plants a little more.   This bed doesn’t have a fence, but my mom gave me a bag of dog hair that I plan to use as a natural bunny repellent.

Things have changed at The Sunset Garden as well.  I spent my morning over there with a hedge trimmers trimming away all the weeds around the edge of the garden.  I went back and forth on doing that, as it was mostly just clover and grasses, and I thought it might hide my plants from animals.  I decided to trim it all this once and see what happens.  I’m sure they’ll grow back, and I can decide if I want to trim again or leave things be.  For now, I am glad I took the time to do so, and it also enabled me to weed the onions very thoroughly.

Last week I did end up going to the garden center and picking up 12 heirloom tomatoes to replace the ones that had died.  I now have 65 tomato plants over there, and they all are looking great!

I noticed a few of the pole beans starting to just poke out, but no sign yet of the squash or watermelon.   When I was picking up the tomatoes last week, I was also enticed by celery, leeks, and a few more brussels sprout plants to replace a few that didn’t make it here.

I really had to get creative with the leeks, and now it’s safe to say there is no more room in this garden either!

As my plants are getting bigger in both gardens, it’s time for me to start thinking about mulching with some straw.  I have the straw, I’m just waiting on a little more growth before I use it.   Last night we enjoyed our first spinach and kale tossed with pasta, and over the weekend we discovered we liked collard greens as well, so we’re already enjoying the fruits of my labor.  Have to keep an eye on that spinach though, as it’s suddenly quite warm out, and it looks like it’s thinking about going to seed just as we’re finally enjoying it.

Busy In The Sunset Garden

It’s really been a great week in the gardens.  🙂  I think I am almost to the point where I can safely say the gardens are planted.  There may be a few things going in yet, but for the most part, now we just grow.

Here is a good overall picture of The Sunset Garden.

It’s definitely different from my last pictures!  My tomato plants really suffered right after I got them planted.  We had wind and rain all weekend, and I did lose several to the elements.  My initial plan for this garden was to use the Florida Weave to trellis the tomatoes, as that’s my favorite method for doing so.  But when we returned from a weekend away and I found tomatoes on their sides from the wind, I had to quickly change direction and started carrying over my portable trellis panels.

Here’s a good view of the tomatoes.

I think overall I lost about a dozen plants total, which isn’t bad considering I started with 100.   Later today I may stop by the garden center and see if they have any treasure left to fill the holes with, but as it stands, I’m pleased with how the tomatoes are doing.  I need to pick up some Tomato Tone to feed them, but other than that, they seem adjusted and ready to grow.

Back to the other side of the garden.

The fluffy green plants there on the bottom are the strawberries that were in the garden when I got it.  They are growing nicely, but don’t have blossoms yet.  I have no idea what kind they are, but if they were June-bearing I think I would be seeing some blossoms attempting to form.

To the left of the strawberries you can see my pole bean towers that I put in yesterday.  I used the tall red supports, and then push some bamboo poles into the ground inside the supports, and plant the beans around those.  I also added a layer of fencing around the outside of the red towers.  I just have no idea what to expect from critters.  I see veteran gardeners planting greens and lettuces with no barriers, so maybe the critters aren’t really a problem here?

For my part with the critters, my onions are coming up nicely all around the bed.

I keep accidentally stepping on them, but they are pretty resilient and spring back most of the time.  I need to give the onions some weeding TLC soon.  See that wet dirt pile there in the picture?  Today I planted some Bush Baby Watermelon seeds.  I was going through my seeds looking for what else I could put in the garden when I got to the melons.  This particular variety says they only put out 3 1/2 foot vines.  I think I can get that to run on the outside of my tomato plants and we could be in business.  There is another of these mounds on the opposite side of the garden.

One more picture from over there.

In this one you can see the second wet dirt pile that holds watermelon seeds.  In the landscape fabric closest to us you can also see the three brussels sprouts plants at the very end there.  At the far end of that row, if you look closely you can see my two tomatillo plants close to the strawberries- they are doing VERY well and are happy to be there.   Now look a little closely and you can see one lone circle of fencing between the tomatillos and the brussels sprouts.  THIS is a fun experiment, I hope.  I planted Buttercup squash in the exposed dirt there.  Then I stapled a “barrel” made out of fencing over the squash seeds.  The idea being that when the squash grows, it will grow up the fencing, and then down the fencing, and what grows on the ground from there will be a manageable amount of vines.  We’ll see.  Buttercup squash are my absolute favorite winter squash, so I’d love to find a way to grow them in a smaller space.

As you can see, I do have a small bit of room there yet that I could put a few things in.  We’ll see if the garden center has anything interesting yet to add.  Otherwise, I can always throw in a zucchini or summer squash plant.

Survived The Cold Snap!

My garden amazes me daily.  This past weekend we dipped very close to freezing, and it was quite cold over the weekend.  And yet… my garden is thriving.  I swear my plants actually liked the cool weather and the rain that came with it!  Let’s check out some incredible changes, shall we?

The herbs are doing well on the deck.  The dill has been expanding every day!

I love that large rosemary plant.  That was a steal of a find at the Minneapolis farmer’s market for only $5.00.  Sadly, I lost my parsley.  I forgot to punch holes in the bottom of the tray I’d started the seeds in, and a rainy weekend while we were away drowned every last one of them.  I’ll figure out a replacement soon.

The pepper patch is hanging in there.

Every single pepper I planted is thriving.  Most of them are here in this patch, but I also have a dozen of them planted in buckets as well.  It should be a great year for peppers!  The last two days have brought me some incredible surprises:

That is a Cherry Bomb pepper growing!  Next door to the cherry bomb my Purple Jalapeno is also sporting two baby peppers and a whole handful of blossoms.  He didn’t cooperate for a picture.  But this pepper plant did:

That is one of my Feher Ohon Paprika plants.  Both plants have baby peppers, as well as my Yellow Cheese Pimento plant.   It’s absolutely amazing to see so early in the year!  We’ll be enjoying our first tastes of peppers very soon, I think.

Let’s move into the garden a bit.  Here is a shot of one of the beds in the back.

I have lettuces planted along the back, and carrots in the two feet in front.  The carrots took forever to spring up, but now they are there, and it looks like I’ll get a nice harvest there this year.  Some of the lettuces either haven’t come up, or were scattered by critters.  I’ll replant a few in the next day or two, I think.

Here is the other back bed.

Again, I have lettuces planted in the back.  The Mizuna popped right up, as did one of the mesclun mixes, but the other lettuces are slow going.  The spinach and beets are doing well though!  The snap peas on the end continue to do their thing as well.

Here is the eggplant bed:

My big note for next year is that eggplants do NOT like being out in the garden in the cool spring weather.  They’re all still there, but they’re not doing very well.  Next year I will start them later than everything else, so that they get planted out mid-June, I think.  To the left of the eggplants in this bed I planted five varieties of cucumber today.  To the right of the eggplants I have four small basil plants, and today I also added a few lettuce seeds to maximize the space.  Again, snap peas on the end of this bed.

This next bed has six more varieties of cucumber planted at the back of it.

Yesterday I harvested some radishes for the first time, and I noticed today that my other variety of radish is looking good, so I’ll pluck those out for Andy tomorrow.  You can see my scallions are doing nicely, though the collard green plant is providing them with a bit too much shade.  The collard green may come out.  I think I don’t care for it, but I have one more thing to try with it before I have a solid verdict.  The rest of the brassicas are doing well there.  The kale plants are vibrant and healthy, and the broccoli and cauliflower seem happy as well.

At the bottom of that last picture you can see my bed with the Swiss Chard in it.  That bed’s been at a standstill for a bit.  I suspect rabbits dined on the Chard before I fortified the fencing.  The bare patch in that bed is where I planted three varieties of bush beans yesterday.

Check out this tomato plant!

Color me surprised when I walked out yesterday and found that my Sun Sugar plant already had blossoms on it!  Kind of hard to see in the picture, but it’s the second plant from the right at the top.   The tomatoes have been put through the wringer with excessive wind, rain and cold, but they have proved their resilience this year by hanging in there.

And one more picture of the bonus potato patch.  Check out what’s going on there!

I have potato leaves!  They’re coming up nicely from the rotting potatoes I tucked in the dirt.  We’ll see if we get a potato harvest this year.  The other day I also planted bush beans on either side of the potatoes- I think they’ll be a decent companion crop for each other.

I think tomorrow I have to spend time over at The Sunset Garden pulling weeds and putting up a few more trellises for the tomatoes over there.  I’ve lost a few over there, but overall I’m pleased with how things are going.  Hopefully all the cold weather is now behind us and we have no more dangers of frost in the mix.