Gardening

For this last day of January, it was time to get the garden seedlings started.  Last year, I bought a few bags of a Burpee seed starter mix at Menards while it was on sale – that way I would have some ready to go this year.  Usually, Menards does have their gardening items out on the shelves by this time of year, but I wanted to still get a good price on the seed starting mix.

In year’s past, I usually just went out to the garden and scooped up some soil.  That has worked very well for me in the past and I can’t say there has been any problems with it.  I know a lot of avid gardeners say to never use soil from the garden for seed starting, but I personally haven’t had an issue with it.

The biggest thing for me – water from the bottom, not on the top.  This has greatly  helped me in preventing what is known as ‘damping off’ disease where the seedlings get started – then perish.

I use the black trays as seen below.  I then have some 16-ounce cups with holes in the bottom – so it slowly starts to soak up the water from the bottom.

So, I have prepared the containers for the Ventura Celery – which are the red cups.

This year, I revisited doing onions in one large tray.  I have always done two large trays of onions with the actual black plastic containers that would separate them.  It was very tedious and took up twice the space.  However, when I have mixed all of the onions together (like I am doing again this year), it was somewhat difficult to separate the onion roots.  Guess I will just hope for the best!

I didn’t want to reach out to Fedco Seeds to purchase only one packet of onion seed this year, so I am hoping that the onions will germinate from one and two year-old seed.  The two-year old seed is my favorite standby – Copra Onions.  These can grow to be very large.  They are a yellow onion and if dried properly, they can last for months in storage.

The other onion I tried last year is a purple onion – Red Bull Onion.  That onion seed is only a year old.  I guess I won’t know what kind of onions I get until they start to bulb up in the summer time, but any onions work for us!

I have had a container of liquid fertilizer for several years – so I got it back out and mixed that with some water when getting the mix started.

With the Ventura Celery, I didn’t sow them right away – but will be doing that tomorrow.  I always soak them in a little bit of water before hand.  I also did the same with the onion seed, but I only let them soak for a few hours.

Another long period without a garden post!  Amazing to see that the last time I posted was around Memorial Day.

In about a month and a half, the garden has completely transformed.  The weather this year has been very nice compared to other years.  There has been some nice days where the humidity was low and it was nice to be working outside.  We are also getting rain just about the perfect time – that way I don’t spend extra time watering the garden.

So far this year, I’ve watered the garden areas maybe five or less times.  The rain barrels continue to stay full.  When I use any water, it seems to be fully replenished within a day or so.

Last time I wrote, I was picking radishes and lettuce.  Well, the radishes and lettuce have already been pulled out.  Same with the Cascadia snap peas.  They were pulled out a few weeks back as they were deteriorating.  We got about a gallon-sized bag of peas from the garden this year.

Didn’t help that we went on vacation at about the peak of the peas maturing.  So when we returned, many of them were already past their prime.  Once the pea plant is able to mature some seeds, they will typically stop production.  That is why it is important to pick them before the seeds mature.

Onions are starting to be harvested.  About eight or so have been pulled thus far.  Look how big they are now!

We have also harvested about half of the Ventura Celery.  Makes a nice treat with some ranch dressing.

What about the broccoli?  Well, it was another one of those things t hat I planted too much of.  I did get a few heads of broccoli cut upon our return from vacation.  Some of them were already flowering with yellow flowers – so they had to be thrown out.  But after they were cut, we had about a gallon bucket of broccoli.  Another tasty treat with some ranch dressing!  Over in the side garden, there are four more that need to be picked (along with two cauliflower).  Three of them are past their prime and just need pulled out.  You’ll also notice that the peas are all gone.

There are two curds of cauliflower in the front garden that are doing very well.  These also need to be harvested.

The back garden is an absolute mess.  We had a company come in last year to take care of our lawn to see what could be done.  Well, we didn’t hire them back this year and the weeds have been absolutely crazy!  The worst year ever for weeds!  So the back garden looks to be in very bad shape.  After I took this picture, I did go through and pull out some weeds – but definitely not all of them.  The Kennebec potatoes back here are still holding onto their footing, but they have also declined.

The potatoes down by the road in the front yard are doing OK.  But they show the same kind of yellowing as those in the back garden.  Not too much longer and it will be time to start digging potatoes.  It just really seems this year that they matured faster.  Typically mid-August is when I harvest them in prior years.  But maybe they will hold out for another month.

The grape arbor is looking very good this year.  The pavers under the vines got a make-over this year.  There were all kinds of weeds growing up through the pavers and the Zoysia grass was starting to encroach into the area.  So all of it was pulled out.  Two layers of weed barrier was put down (fabric and plastic) to provide double the protection.  A plastic edger was also put around the perimeter too.  Then the pavers were put back down with sand.

In the front garden, the plants are doing very well.  My wife got out and picked most of the green beans last week – and we had some huge containers full of green beans!  It has been many years since we got a decent supply of green beans – all because the deer would get into the garden and eat them to the ground.  This year, I had to put up the old green snow fencing around the perimeter.  Still, it sags in some spots and the deer have been able to get their heads over and chew away.  What I don’t understand though – as you can see below – is that the green beans down the middle row look to have been completely eaten back too!  So maybe it isn’t the deer getting in but another animal.

The tomato plants are also doing good – but we have yet to have our first red tomato.

Finally – the peppers.  The peppers are not doing well this year.  They keep falling over and seem like they need extra support.  But, we have already picked our first pepper of the year – and it was partially red and partially green!  That is the fastest ripening pepper we’ve had yet.  Only three pepper plants remain out of the four that were planted.  In years past, I’ve put eight plants out – so this year it was cut back by half.

Well, until next time.  Might be another month but hopefully less!

This weekend we visited some family and then I spent Monday doing a little bit of gardening.  Mostly just giving everything a good drink since the temperatures have been in the 80’s and will be so this week.  At least there is a chance of rain tonight and tomorrow morning so really hoping we get some.  Don’t know how much I’ve depleted the rain barrels but I’ve used a lot of water lately since we’ve not had an abundance of rain.

We did have a short rainfall on Monday as I was watering everything – but was just enough to make it humid outside and wet the ground just a bit.

I also picked some Easter Egg radishes.  Amazing – last week they were not bulbing at all – and then poof!  They all of a sudden bulbed up in just a matter of a couple of days and needed picked.

I planted more radishes in place of the ones that were taken out – plus put more in the second strawberry pyramid to fill it up.

The Kennebec potatoes along the road are growing great as well.  They are starting to push against the deer netting and do very well.  The potatoes were planted closer together this year – about 8 to 10 inches apart instead of a foot.  Hopefully that won’t crowd them too much – but yield more in the potato area.

But the front garden by the road is filled with potatoes – and there is also a row in the back garden.  Last year, there were some “volunteer” potatoes that came up in both the back garden and side garden – although they were not harvested.  We had enough just from the garden by the road – and still ended up not using all of the potatoes.  So the left over potatoes were what was used this year as seed potatoes!

The Cascadia snap peas in the back garden left more to be desired.  The germination was poor – with maybe 25% of them coming up it seems.  But over in the side garden, it looks as though 100% of all the peas sprouted.  Just a matter of the ground temperature.  The side garden is next to the house – so the ground will be warmer – than the ground in the back garden behind the garage.

You can also see the row of broccoli and cauliflower in front of the peas.  They are doing well – although they are trying to reach for more sunlight with the way they are leaning a bit towards the south.

This week, I also planted some Straight Eight cucumbers and some eggplant.  I put two seeds each in some cups – used three cups for cucumbers and three cups for eggplant.  As of today, NONE of them have sprouted yet, so I am wondering if there is a problem with the seed or why they haven’t germinated.  With it being in the mid-80’s, it is more than warm enough.

The lettuce in the old carrot bed is dong well – along with the onions.  The lettuce has grown so much already that it is starting to crowd out the onions.  Unfortunately, I have lost a Simpson Elite lettuce plant somehow.  It is near the front of the bed (can’t see it here) but it wilted up and is now a goner.  We still have plenty of lettuce though – and it needs picked!

It is also that time of year where the trees start putting out there pollen and junk.  Not sure what kind of tree it is, but there are brown stringy pollen ‘droppings’ everywhere.  Easily seen on the picture above of the lettuce and on the driveway.

The patio garden also shows that the Ventura celery is growing well – and so are the onions.  There wre a couple places where two onions were planted right next to each other – so those were thinned out and three green onions were pulled for a tasty treat.

Well, what is left?  Just the front garden.  But before that, our pink peonies in the front have opened up with full blooms.  There still are several more that haven’t opened up yet.  Just amazing how large these flowers are.  Shame that they only last about a week or so.

And finally for the front garden.  Below is the row of broccoli and a few cauliflower – with Bush Blue Lake 274 green beans flanking either side.  There are also some California Wonder peppers planted in this row – although they are up in the front of this bed and cannot be seen below.

And for the tomatoes.  A mix of Roma tomatoes, one Red Cherry tomato, and Best Boy tomato.  After having the Best Boy packet of seed for about three or four years, I finally used all of the seed this year and had to pick up another $1.50 packet of seed for next year.  Still have plenty of Roma and Red Cherry tomato seed that is 6+ years old.  The seed packets back then really had a lot of seed.  Now, you are lucky to get maybe 30 seeds in a tomato packet.

Just like the picture above, the one below also shows that there are green beans flanking both sides of the tomatoes.  They are doing very well and I was surprised at the great germination rate of the green beans this year.  I’ve always seemed to struggle with this – but out of approximately 160 seeds, only about 25 – 30 needed to be re-seeded.

The garden has now been fully planted – well, short of starting the cucumbers which I’ve not done yet!

The germination station was disassembled this week and everything is now outside.  Of course, what is going to happen now?  Well, we have a frost advisory for this evening so I hope it doesn’t cause any damage.

I took some pictures of the garden back on April 27th, but never had an opportunity to post them.  So I’ll start with those photos first.

That weekend I spent some time getting the garden put together.  The irrigation system needed to be put in the front and I also had to make a few extra 1/2-inch PVC pipes with holes every six inches for the front garden.  After drilling the holes (used a 1/16-inch drill bit), I then hooked it up to the water from the house to ensure all of the holes were free and clear.  It looks like a big sprinkler on the driveway!

After that was done, I got the front garden put together:

In other areas around the garden, here is the patio area (4 x 8 raised bed) with the Ventura celery planted (and mulched using dead grass from the yard) and the onions:

The lettuce – which made it’s home in the old carrot bed – is doing well too.  With onions planted on either side:

The back garden looks pretty bare, not too much happening:

The side garden is doing well.  Broccoli, peas, and potatoes are showing some life:

Radishes – they are using the spot where the strawberries once were in the pyramids.  I’ve been planting a little bit about every two weeks to have a rolling supply:

And finally – the potatoes that are in the “flower” bed beside the road (which has basically been claimed for growing potatoes):

So that takes care of the photos from April 27th.  The photos from today – May 16th – shows remarkable improvement across all of the garden beds.  We’ve had some really warm weather during that time – in the high 80’s – which really helped to get things moving.

The front garden has had everything planted – even the green beans were planted about a week ago.  Very hard to see in the pictures below, but there are rows of green beans on either side.  The tomatoes are all in a row down the center:

On the other side of the front garden has broccoli, cauliflower, and peppers – with the green beans flanking on both sides:

Radishes in the old strawberry pyramids are showing quite a bit of growth:

The patio garden is doing very good.  We used a little bit of lettuce this week for sandwiches as well.  The Ventura celery and onions seem like they have doubled in size:

And the lettuce is ready for harvest (plucking leaves at a time to keep them growing):

Early this morning, I got out and put the deer netting over the potatoes by the road.  In two weeks, they have considerably grown.  Late last night I mulched them with leaves that were mulched up from last year:

The back garden – compared to the other picture of it above – shows dramatic growth as well for both the potatoes (on the right side) and the peas (on the left):

And for the side garden, same thing.  Peas doing well and the broccoli is much easier to see compared to the previous photo:

And the final picture – is a grouping of strawberry plants.  Several years ago when I got strawberry plants for the first time, I had one or two extra that I didn’t have space for in the strawberry pyramids.  So I planted them back by the patio door.  In that period of time, they have realy started to take off and take over the area.  There is an area right by the strawberries where I’ve planted watermelon before; maybe I’ll just let the strawberries take it over so we’ll have a small strawberry patch again:

That takes care of this garden round-up!

It was a great Easter weekend for transplanting some of the veggies out to the garden.  That also means a 50% reduction in the power usage in the germination station.  I setup four fluorescent light fixtures this year (usually do five) and after moving items out, I was able to shut off two of them.  Sometimes I wonder with the fact that the lights run for 13+ hours a day for three or more months if it would be less expensive to buy the plants as opposed to spending the amount on energy usage.

Anyways, temperatures got to over 80 degrees on Sunday and were in the 70’s on Saturday.  I spent most of the day outside on Sunday transplanting and also cleaning up the yard a bit – such as doing the first mowing of the year.

This year I’ve opted to not plant any carrots.  In the year’s past, I’ve planted a lot of carrots and then they mostly just go wasted by the time they sit in the freezer.  The problem with the carrots is that they seem to be mushy when you get them out of the freezer and thaw them out.  I’m not sure how the big veggie companies can freeze their veggies and still keep the carrots crisp when they are cooked.

So instead, the lettuce and some onions were planted in the carrot bed this year:

The onions are planted on either side of the bed above – very hard to see since they are still small but look like little twigs.

Since the lettuce was moved to this area, that leaves the garden bed by the patio available.  So the celery was planted here along with the bulk of the onions.  When mowing the garden, a lot of dead grass was bagged up (since we have the Zoysia grass that likes to hibernate for 8 months out of the year).  So it looks almost like straw, and this was put around the celery to help hold moisture in.

Over beside the house, the peas are coming up.  They were planted a couple of weeks ago.

I also planted several broccoli and one cauliflower in the side garden as well.

And here is the view of the side garden.  PVC pipe for the irrigation is already in place and this garden bed is all ready to go!

I still have some more broccoli and cauliflower to plant – and those will have to go in the front garden.  I don’t want to put up the fencing just yet, so I am holding onto those a bit longer.

Finally, I am starting to have some doubts about the potatoes that were planted.  It still is a bit early yet, but some of the potatoes that were left in the ground from last year have already come up and are full of leaves.  I saved some seed potatoes from our batch of potatoes last year (since we didn’t eat them).  Those were all planted a few weeks back – and not one of them has come through yet.  So this will be an experiment to see if the potatoes that I saved will work.  If not, then I know they need to be purchased each year.

In the last post, I commented on making lettuce more reliable with a technique for seeding.  This entry just shows the germination area a bit to see how things are going.

I have ran into a few problems with growing from seed this year – namely germination issues.  However, the seed is also getting older.

For starters, the onion seed did very poor.  I did purchase new seed this year, but I found some older seed that was about two years old.  Therefore, I opted to use that first.  Out of the almost 100 onion seeds planted, maybe four came up.  Very bad.  Onion seed just doesn’t seem to stay good for very long.

So I opened up a pack of seed that was about a year old and planted those.  Much better.  Out of maybe 150 planted, around 60 or so came up.  Just guessing since I didn’t count.

The celery did very well – with almost all of them sprouting.  That seed is three years old.  the celery is all the way on the back right – somewhat hard to see in the picture above.

The peppers and tomatoes did poorly as well.  Out of about 20 seeds, only four came up.  We seem to always have a plethora of peppers at the end of the year when I plant eight outside, so this year that will be cut in half.

Broccoli and cauliflower also did pretty good with almost all of those seeds germinating.  However, I planted about twice as much as I did last year – so I have a feeling there is going to be some that will be wasted.  Each year in my calendar, I note what I plant what week.  Well I had already planted the broccoli and cauliflower before referring to that.

Below is the lettuce.  You can see it is going very well now that I re-seeded them.

On to another topic – cleanup!  We had a pretty nice Saturday (yesterday) and so that gave me the opportunity to go out and do some cleanup.  A week ago, I also planted all of the Cascadia Snap Peas and the Kennebec Potatoes.  For once, we actually had quite a bit of potatoes left over that we didn’t eat – and so I was able to use those for seed potatoes this year.  Just hope that they come up!

Anyways, I took the opportunity to clean up the area around the rain barrels.  I had all of the 1/2-inch PVC pipe that I use for irrigation all over the place on the ground.  Looked like crap.  And, the PVC pipe has small holes drilled in to allow the water out – and some of the PVC pipes had them drilled every six inches, eight inches, 12 inches, and more.  So I had to go through the big stack and organize them so it would be easier for me to easily find the right ones that I need.

After organizing them, I got out some wood to make some supports to go between the rain barrel platform and then neatly put all of the pipes on them to keep them organized.

Somewhat hard to tell in the picture above, but all of the PVC pipe is now horizontal over on the left side of the picture.  I also got the leaves all removed from under the platform.

That is all for this installment of the garden blog.

First gardening blog post for 2014! I actually did start with the “germination station” back in January and it is going very well.  But with my very busy schedule, I’ve not had the opportunity to take pictures and write about it.

But, I felt that there was an important topic to cover here – how to grow lettuce from seed.

I’ve been gardening for years – but have somewhat of an issue with the low germination rate of lettuce seed.  I’ve grown Simpson Elite, Buttercrunch, New Red Fire, Parris Island, and Red Salad Bowl over the years.  Primarily, I grow Simpson Elite, New Red Fire, and Red Salad Bowl now and that is what I’ve done for a few years.  Just a nice variety and colorful between the green and reds/purples.

Anyways, whenever I plant lettuce seed, I would plant about three seeds of each.  I might be lucky if one of them came up – sometimes two.  Other times, none at all.

This year – now that the seed is a few years old (although it is kept in a ziplock bag in the freezer), I thought the seed was starting to go bad.  Germination rates on lettuce seeds were horrible.

Already this year, I probably used 20 seeds of each of the three varieties of lettuce.  With all of those (60 in total), only about four came up.  Very bad – and it has actually set my planting schedule back.

Well this past weekend, I tried something different – and it has had absolute success.  How much success?  To the tune of every single lettuce seed I planted – germinated!

So here is how you can grow lettuce from seed – and have much better germination results.

1. Fill up your seedling container with a seeding mix (even very well screened soil will work too)
2. The seedling container should allow water to seep in from the bottom.  Place the container in a container of water to allow the soil to completely get wet.  But don’t let the water come in from the top – only from the bottom.
3. Now, put your lettuce seeds right on top of the soil and gently push them in so it makes good soil contact.  DO NOT COVER THE SEEDS.
4. After gently pressing into the soil, make sure that you can still see the seeds.  It seems that the BEST germination is when the seeds have light and are not covered
5. Ensure that the soil continues to stay moist and that the seeds are getting moisture from the soil.  This is important.
6. After a few days, your seeds should start to germinate and burrow their way into the soil!

Yep, that is it.  Where was my mistake all these years?  Actually putting the seeds into the soil and then covering them up.  Well, the seed packets even said to do this – said to cover with about 1/4-inch of soil.  Don’t follow those directions for starting lettuce from seed.

In the picture below, it is clear to tell which seeds were planted a while ago – versus the new seeds.  Notice how many more there are.  I simply re-planted new seed in the areas where the previous lettuce seed did not germinate.

Sometimes it is good to do trial and error with growing plants – and this time it definitely paid off.  I went from planting about 60 seeds and only getting four to come up – to planting about 30 seeds and all 30 of them coming up!

Well, this most likely will be the last garden blog post for the 2013 year.  A great deal of time has passed since the last time that I made a post on here.

In fact, back on September 14th, I went out into the garden and took some photos – but failed to ever get the post made.  So, I will do that now.

So, let’s take a trip back to a little over a month ago!

First off – let’s see what the cherry tomato plants look like.  They absolutely LOVE the spot that they are put in.  A couple of years ago, they were put in this same spot and grew to be just like this.  At least off of just one cherry tomato plant, we got a bounty of produce for salads.

In addition, back behind the big cherry tomato plant was some potatoes that were both planted – and some volunteers from last year.  So the final amount of kennebec potatoes were picked.  The five gallon bucket is about half-way filled – so we got another decent amount of potatoes on top of the 80+ pounds from the front garden.

Out in the front garden, I was finally fed up with the deer.  I tried the deer netting.  In some places, it works.  In others, it doesn’t.  If you are using the netting to cover something up fully, it works well.  But if you are using it in a fence-like manner to try and keep the deer out, I’ve had major failure.  Well, I had a huge roll of “snow fencing” that is plastic and pretty heavy-duty.  It is mostly always in a construction orange color and you see it around construction zones.  So I took down the deer netting and put this up.

It certanly doesn’t look nice, but wouldn’t you know it, there was absolutely NO more deer that got into the garden area after that!  Because the fencing was put up, we managed to get a whopping one-gallon freezer bag full of green beans this year.  Not a lot – but that is a whole bag more than last year.  So going forward, I have learned my lesson – only use the heavy duty fencing up around the front garden if we want any green beans!

Do you know what the green bean plants looked like before the fencing was put up?  Just look below.  They look awful and eaten down.  At least they did come back and put on some beans for us.

Speaking of the front garden, the California Wonder peppers are doing.. alright.  Not great, but they were growing.

And finally, around September 14th, there was a decent supply of tomatoes picked.  This year was nothing like the previous years with tomatoes, however.  In previous years, we could bag several gallon-sized freezer bags of tomatoes.  We didn’t bag any this year.  Just barely had enough to eat.

Fast forward to today, October 22nd.  Well, we had a frost last night.  Everything looked dead and droopy on my way to work this morning.  I had every intention of getting things picked Monday night but I just got too busy to get outside.  So after work, I went outside and went to work.

The green fencing was taken down around the front garden and I then picked the rest of the viable peppers.  Wow, there was a bell pepper extravaganza!  At the end of the season, we always have a huge amount of peppers to pick.  Mostly because I try to let them “ripen” up on the plants and turn red.  So at the end of the year, all of them get picked.

Wow, that is a sink full of peppers!  But wait, there’s more!

That is a lot of peppers!  Probably more than ten pounds worth.  I’m not sure, I quite weighing and counting everything a few years back.  Just was too tedious.

Well, there you have it for the year.  A lot of preparation and garden cleanup needs to be done now – and I’m not looking forward to it.  A lot of leaf mulching, tilling, and cleaning of everything that is left.  I did open the valves on the water barrels this evening to start letting the water out of those, so that is a small step in the right direction.

There has not been much of anything going on in the garden.  We have picked a lot of cherry tomatoes – but everything else has just been surviving the drought we’ve had.

We had a great deal of rain in the spring and early summer – but we’ve not had hardly anything in the past month.  This morning I woke up and saw that the driveway was wet – but we got very little rain – not even enough to make a drop more in the water barrels because it all evaporated from the roof before getting to the gutters.

Let’s get into some pictures.

Below is the basil.  Sadly, I’ve not even picked any of it.  All of that basil and it just has went to waste.

In the side garden is where the tomato plants are performing.  The first one in the front is the red cherry tomato which is definitely producing.  In the back is nothing but dead stems from the Kennebec potatoes.  They all still need dug up.  Just been incredibly too warm lately – and I’ve not wanted to get out and do that task.  Maybe next week when the temperatures finally drop a bit.

A closer view of the chery tomato plant:

In the back garden – things are abysmal.  I did go through and spend a good 45 minutes fully cleaning the area of all weeds.  That was shortly after my last post on my blog.  Since then, some weeds have popped back up.  But back here, the tomatoes are not doing well at all – it seems that they may have gotten some kind of disease.  Only a few of the plants still remain – and they are not doing well.

Over on the left side by the fence is one Straight Eight Cucumber plant.  When I watered everything this morning, I did go ahead and pull off the one cucumber that it has produced.

Moving to the front – the California Wonder Peppers have certainly had a growth spurt recently because of the high heat.  I did just go out there – right before taking the photos – to pick two red peppers off of one plant.  The green beans are still somewhat growing – and they have a lot of blooms on them – so maybe we’ll finally get some green beans on our second attempt.  Unfortunately, I woke up one morning about a week ago to find that one side of the deer netting was tore down again.  So either some deer or other animal got into the patch and mowed down about 25% of the green beans – which are luckily making a little bit of a comeback.

A closer view of one of the California Wonder pepper plants:

And finally – a photo of the grape arbor.  When we went up to visit family near Chicago several weeks ago, we came back to see all of grapes were gone.  Yes, ALL of them!  Well, not like we ate them anyways because they have seeds – and we were sent the wrong grape vines in the first place.  But it is just amazing that we had dozens upon dozens of grape clusters – and within a matter of 36 to 72 hours, the birds and wildlife had eaten every single one of them.

That takes care of this garden update.  Going forward, we may get some green beans and some tomatoes – and from the looks of it, we may have a decent amount of peppers to harvest near the end of the year.

Well as expected, I got very busy over the past couple of months and wasn’t able to get on here and make a post.  It didn’t help that I sent my camera to a friend for another project – so I wasn’t able to take pictures of the garden.

Without pictures, no one can see the progress of how things are going!

Well, since the last post, we no longer have any lettuce.  All of the lettuce started bolting and grew to be extremely large – almost like mini-trees!  We had a good run of lettuce while it lasted – and now we have went back to the dreaded iceberg lettuce from the grocery store.

What else has happened?  All of the green beans in the front were completely eaten.  Deer got to them.  Pretty amazing.  I only put the deer netting up half-way this year – thinking it would look better in the yard.  Well, that was bad to do.  I’ve since had to raise the netting to be the full seven feet tall.

Even that didn’t stop the deer!  I left the pathway open down at the end of the front garden – and the deer found out they could walk up the path and get to the green beans!

So about a month ago, all of the green bean plants were pulled out.  They were nothing but the stems anyways.  New green beans were all planted.  Below is a photo taken a week ago of the new green bean plants – along with the pepper plants in the front.

Not much left in the front garden after everything was taken out.

Here is a closer look of two of the pepper plants.  These photos were also taken on August 4th:

This past weekend, I cut most of the peppers off of the plants.  I did leave a few on one plant because they were doing exceptional and hopefully will turn red soon.

The big story for last week was potatoes!  Yes, all of the potatoes that were planted along the road were all dug out.  This was quite a task though – and planting potatoes should only be done unless you have a lot of time to dig them up.  It took about four hours total to dig through and get all of the potatoes.

The bucket above was just from HALF of the row:

You can see in the photo above that there is netting over the potatoes that still needed picked – and further towards the back everything was already harvested.

After a break, I went back out and completed the rest of the row.  It is about 50 feet.  All in all – this was definitely one of the best years for potatoes – I think it is because of the new area that they were planted in.  Having full sun did very well for them.  We got four five-gallon buckets full of potatoes.

There still is more potatoes to pick in the side garden and I am debating whether to dig up the potatoes in the back garden where volunteers came up.

What else was done?  Well this past weekend, I also started harvesting the carrots.  This was a photo from a week prior:

I went through and pulled out half of the carrots:

Some good-sized ones, others not-so-good.  Chopping and cleaning carrots is another one of those very tedious processes.  Just for doing half of the carrots took another four hours to do!  That included pulling them out of the garden, cutting the tops off, rinsing/cleaning them, peeling them, and then cutting them into pieces.  There has got to be a low-cost alternative to doing all of this by hand.  I searched online and found industrial-grade carrot cutters but they are very expensive and out of reach for the home gardener.  Just even some kind of tool that has several blades spaced 1/4-inch apart or so would be very helpful.

Next – we have had a handful of tomatoes.  This year has not been great for tomatoes compared to previous years.  It has been fairly cool this year and I think that might be part of it.

And that takes us to just some general photos of around the garden.  First up is the grape arbor.  It is loaded with grapes and they are starting to be ready for picking.  I bet the birds will get to them before we do though.

Then we have a Rose of Sharon tree in the front.  There is another one down by the road – but this one near the sidewalk to the front door has been growing exceptionally well for the past few years.

The side garden – doesn’t look very appealing.  There are a few tomato plants here and all of the potato vines are over the walkway now.  One of those areas that needs some attention with getting the potatoes dug out.

The back garden is even worse.  There are weeds growing everywhere.  I’ve sorta just let this area go this year.  Each time I look at the build-up of growth, it is discouraging knowing what needs to be done to clean it up.  Not to mention – there are tomatoes and potato plants all intertwined together.

Although it can’t be seen above, there is one cucumber plant that managed to sprout and grow.  It has a couple of flowers on it – so we might get a few cucumbers this year.  None of the eggplant seeds sprouted.

Well, that is all for this posting!