End of April Update

The strawberries are doing fantastic!  I read somewhere online that I was supposed to mow them early in the spring.  I don’t know what the purpose of mowing is, but that’s what I found out.  Anyway, I didn’t do it.  When I read it, it was already too late.  My strawberries were already flowering and I was not going to cut the flowers off.  I have them with the netting to protect them from the squirrels.

The veggie garden is coming along great.  I’m just having problems deciding where things are going to go.  I’m trying to create some sort of crop rotation but I don’t think it can be done when one has such a small space as I do.  I have to see how it goes and decide whether is worth trying or not at the end of the season.

Today I planted in the ground the tomatoes!  I checked the soil temp and was at 60 degrees already.  Also the forecast says the night temps should be above 50, so I just went ahead and planted.  I have some backup seedlings just in case.

Gardening with Allergies

It is very difficult to be outside when one suffers from seasonal allergies.  With my gardening tools I keep my protective gear:  clear, protective glasses; a mask to cover my nose and mouth, and a hat to cover my hair from the pollen.  When I’m wearing all these, practically my whole face is covered, but still is not enough; the sneezing, the itchy eyes, the wheezing, all come to ruin the moment.  When the days are the most beautiful, sunny and breeze and just warm enough, a perfect spring day, I cannot go outside.  I pace and pace inside the house, go to the basement to see my seedlings, and come back up to stare at the wonderful outdoors thru the windows.  It’s torture.   I hope that not that many gardeners have to deal with allergies.

Hey, I remember I have a blog!

It’s been so long since I posted anything on this blog, I just don’t know how to do it anymore, but here it goes, an update on the veggie garden.

On March 19 I planted my peas, favas, spinach and onion sets on my raised beds.  I covered everything with straw.  The straw has done wonders protecting against the freezing temperatures we had at the end of March.  Everything is doing great.  I also bought two sets of lettuce starters, I just couldnt resist them.  I have been covering them to protect them from the weather, including the HAIL storm we had yesterday!

The favas, which are delicious but take forever to produce are going to be pulled as needed.  I planted them as cover crop and well to eat some too.

My strawberries are doing great, some of them are already flowering!  Cant wait for the first strawberry!

The blueberries are doing ok too.  One of the bushes is not looking too hot, thou.  I just dont know what the problem could be.  The city is threatening with putting sidewalks on our street, that would mean moving the blueberries, Im not too happy about that.  My only hope is that they put the sidewalk on the other side of the street.  We should know more in the next few months.  Progress….Im supposed to like it but not really.

The blackberries are coming back too.  I only have two plants, so this year I got another one at the big box store, and I guess, one gets what one pays for.  The poor thing is just sitting there not doing anything.  Im so tempted to pull it off the ground and replace it with a real plant from the nursery.  I’ll give the poor sticks another month or two.

June Update

June has been a hectic month for me.  I was out of town for the first two weeks of the month, back for a week, and then gone for another five days.  I was desperate to get back to my garden as you can imagine.  But in spite of my absence, the garden survived, imagine that!!!  I got lucky that it rained so much, eventhough I had my husband ready and willing to water in my absence.  When I got back everything had grown so much, I was taken back by it.  In my humble partial opinion, it looks wonderful.  Here is a picture.

When I got back, my husband helped me building the trellises for the cucumbers and the melons.  They turned out to be quite simple, we used electrical conduit and then I sprayed painted them in green so they would look a bit better in the garden.  Now, the only thing pending is building a cage around the tomatoes to prevent any squirrel attack.  My husband has already a design in mind, so that’s coming, I really dont know how he is going to build it, so it will be a surprise for me, yay!

So the peas did really good, my small makeshift trellises did ok, at the end they started to lean over and looked a bit like the tower of Pizza, but they did their job.

Another one that did good were the spinachs and the lettuces.  We have been  eating salad greens from the garden since the end of May.  My original idea of the peppers shading the spinach did not work out too well.  While I was away the spinach did not get cut down or trimmed so they grew like crazy and started actually shading the peppers, I had to do some major trimming when I got to the garden to rescue my peppers.  So we ate tons of spinach for a week.  Now I already pull them out since it’s getting a too warm for them and they were starting to bolt.  The lettuces, buttercrunch, on the other hand are still sweet.  I have them under a cover to shade them a bit.  The little ceasars got already bitter, so I have to finish pulling them out.  I will replace them with some Jericho which is supposedly heat tolerant, we’ll see.

Now I’m waiting for the next batch of veggies to mature.  I have some baby cucumbers, the carrots are still to small (I pulled some just to check, they were so sweet), the zucchinis are huge and have lots of female flowers but still yet to set one.  The melons same story, lots of flowers, but still nothing.  I have been checking them daily because I have cucumber beetles galore, and I yesterday I caught two squash bugs, ohhhh, they have found me.  The plants are still ok, but I already planted a couple of replacement plant where the broccoli was, just in case.  Here is a picture of the squashes (zucchinis). One of my original concerns with the squashes was space but they seem to be doing ok.  They are starting to spill over into the path.  They have taken like half of it, but there is still plenty room for walking by.  Now, if only they would start producing.  They other experiment I did was with the sunflowers and the pole beans.  Well so far so good, everybody seem very happy.  The problem I see is that I’m going to have problems reaching the beans, they are climbing up from the netting I set up for them onto the sunflowers that are as of now over I don’t know 7 feet tall, there is no way I can reach up there unless I get my stepping ladder, lol!

Update on the Garden

This is an update on my potager.  All of the beds are planted and are starting to look a bit full.  I’m happy with the layout so far.  The paths at this point seem to be wide enough.  I hope that by the end of the summer I can still say the same the thing.  Here is how it looks so far.  

The paths are 3 feet wide, mulch over newspaper/cardboard.  It has worked great, at the beginning of spring I had some wild violets trying to come through, but I just pulled them out and so far so good.  Later on the oak tree seedlings started to come out too and I did the same.  Since I’m in the garden several times a day, I just pick whatever is trying to come out.

This other picture is of the larger bed.  Something that I have learned so far is that the cooler weather crops are not ready to come out by the time I have to plant the heat loving crops like peppers and tomatoes.

For instance the peppers where supposed to replace the spinach, but the spinach is not done yet, so I just planted the peppers in the middle of the spinach.  Eventually the spinach will be done, and if anything, I think that the peppers may shade the spinach some which should be good when it starts getting too hot.  Another experiment I’m trying is planting my pole beans in the squares next to the sunflowers.  They may try to climb the sunflowers which may work although I’m still going to set up posts in the squares of beans for them to clim.   Also, I  planted nasturtium at the foot of the sunflowers.  I read somewhere that the nasturtiums will not give too much flowers in a soil that’s too rich, so I figure the sunflowers are heavy feeders and will leave just a bit for the nasturtiums to prosper enough.  I don’t know if it will work or not.

Going back to my space issues, I had to plant my cucumbers among my little ceasar lettuce.  Again, I think in a month those lettuces will be spent and the cucumbers will be taking over.  Another issue I have encounter so far, and this one is out of my control, is the weather.  I planted everything the first week of may, but since then we have had so many overcast or/and rainy days that all my heat loving plants have been struggling.  I hope they get better soon.   Here are other shots of the potager. 

I want to include in this post shots of the other beds in my garden.  Here is my broccoli-cabbages-lettuces bed. I am going to use it for veggies that don’t

require much sun because I only get like 4-5 hours of sun here.  This year I planted broccoli, cabbage, beets, lettuces and radishes.  I have to say none of them did too well.  The broccoli starting making a head and then we got 90 degree weather so that was the end of it.  Some of the other broccoli and the cabbage I started them too late, then got attacked by cabbage worms and I really don’t think they are going to give me anything this season.  The beets were at total disaster, they took forever to sprout, then I think the slugs eat them in spite of the Sluggo I used.  So I just planted some cauliflower in the middle of the few seedlings that survived, just for the fun of it.  The radishes did so so, I just don’t know if I’m not planting them deep enough, or I just pull them too soon, but they were so little.  The lettuces are actually doing good.  My question now is what I’m supposed to do when summer gets here.  I may try to create a shade umbrella or something and keep going with the lettuces or plant some flowers, the spot just doesn’t get enough sun for beans or tomatoes; maybe some carrots.

And here is my herb bed.  This bed is going on its third year and half of it it’s doing handsomely.    Half of it were lavenders, and they just did not make through the winter, so I had to replace them.  Here is how it looks now, a little lopsided, but oh well.

I have sage, thyme, oregano, parsley, chives, baby basil, baby cilantro, lemon verbena, taragon and rosemary here.

May 14

Ok,

So I’m almost done with all the planting.  Today I planted the foxgloves in the backyard by the hostas.  The idea is for them to give a background to the hostas and give some color during the summer.  It’s going to take another year for the flowers to come, but that’s the story with gardening, patience!!!

I also finished planting the hycinth beans in the pot by the driveway.  And today I started the irrigation project.  Have to reinstall the soaker hoses in all the beds. (silly me, I removed them last fall).  Today I did the bed by the driveway were the Japanese Irises and the Peonias are. 

On the Potager, the beans are out, really quick considering I planted them on Monday.  I got four kind of beans: Yard long, Kentucky Wonder, Tavera and Edemame.  Here are the Yard Long and the Kentucky Wonder.

May 13

Update:

On the 5th and 6th I moved all the tomatoes and peppers to the raised beds.  The peppers are doing fabulous, but the tomatoes are looking sickly.  On Monday, after finishing planting the beans,  I fertilized everything with a shower of fish emulsion, but the tomatoes seem to be lacking something.  Today I added some Tomato Tone to see if that does the trick.

The eggplants were doing great until 2 days ago when I noticed they are being attacked by what I think is flea beetles.  I covered them with a Rotenone Dust by bionade to repel the fleas.  Also used it on the broccoli, cauliflower and cabage because they were being attacked by cabbage worms.

Other than that all the plants are growing really slowly.  I’m still waiting for some flowers from the peas, and for the spinachs to grow a bit more.  Slow progress….