Category: In the garden
Squash Babies
… and an eggplant baby
August Check-In
I took advantage of the cooler temperatures yesterday morning and spent two hours weeding my garden plot. My cucumbers are on their way out. They have started to wilt, I think I might have over-watered them. The green beans never made it. The seedlings are eaten by something/someone right after they emerge from the ground – I suspect the resident rabbit. The parsley died again. Like last year, the leaves turned reddish and pale and the plant basically disappeared. I ripped it out. I did some research and found that it might be due to a phosphorus deficiency. I will have to seriously amend my soil this fall. The greens are doing very well and the squash is looking good as well. The eggplants are growing nicely and the tomatoes and basil are also doing well. The first dahlias will bloom very soon – I am super excited. Soon I will put in fall greens and beets.
Summery Green …
… and today’s harvest:
First Cucumber
… and last lettuce (for now). I also pulled some more onions. The garlic is almost ready. I spent a couple of hours in the garden this morning weeding and trellising the cucumbers. I also planted more beans. Only a few came up and most of them had their little leaves nibbled off. I am blaming the woodlice, of which I have many in my plot. It is probably all the decaying wood from the plot borders that keeps them happy (as apparently are my tender seedlings).
4th of July
Spent some time in the garden this beautiful Saturday morning harvesting almost all of the remaining lettuce and planting pole beans, more rainbow carrots (some I sowed earlier have actually come up, yay!) and three more tomato plants (Paul Robson, Jaune Flamme and Black Krim). The garden plot is getting there, but most plants are still small because I did not really plant anything until we had water about a month ago.
Left side: dahlias, rhubarb, cucumbers, nasturtium, lettuce, pole beans, butternut squash, zucchini, onions, Swiss chard, kale, eggplant, carrots, borage, leeks
Right side: cosmos, dahlias, asparagus, tomatoes, marigolds, nasturtium, basil, parsley, kale, hot pepper, delicata squash, garlic, leeks, beets
June Harvest
I harvested a nice bunch of overwintered leeks, a big head of lettuce and some volunteer hard-neck garlic that grew in the wrong spot. The strawberries are from a plot neighbor.
I spent three hours in the garden this morning weeding and pulling the mint that had taken over the better part of the back of my plot. I tied the asparagus and planted more Chiogga beets and a few dahlias, marigolds and cosmos. I also had meant to sow pole beans, carrots and more lettuce (in between the tomatoes so it can grow in the shade) but forgot, ha!
The garlic will be ready in a few weeks and I will need to harvest all the lettuce very soon. I also need to take out all those volunteer onions. The squash and cucumbers have settled in nicely, the chard and beets are looking good as are the new leeks. The kale is being eaten by something, but seems to manage to survive. Quite a few nasturtiums are coming up as well. The tomatoes have some flowers but not very many. I am worried that I overfertilized again, despite only using seaweed emulsion (once!) and sparingly so. Fingers crossed.
Lettuce
It has been a good year for lettuce. I have about a dozen heads still in the plot. The weather is supposed to be hot the next ten days – upper eighties with hardly any rain, so we will have a lot of salads for dinner.
Early June
I had a very late start gardening this season. We only got water in the community garden a couple of weeks ago and I delayed planting fearing COVID-19 might prevent us from gardening this year altogether. I have most things planted now, however. But because the seedlings spent their time in pots on my porch until now, they are still very small. Plus, I grew all of them from seed, minus the leeks and some herbs. Today, I put in more squash and more eggplants. I also fertilized my plants with seaweed emulsion (and repaired the water hose).
