Things coming up...and things coming down

Things are coming along pretty well. I've been making a few trips out to the garden every day with a big watering can, and giving a drink to anything that looks like it needs it. It looks like one of my Red Acre Cabbages is starting to show signs of heading up. My other one, that I thought I was going to lose, actually looks great - only much smaller.

My English peas are beginning to bloom...

As are some of the curcurbits...

The beans are up...

And the rye is coming down...

And tonight I'm having a turnip and a kale salad with my dinner. Yum!!!

A Quick Garden Tour

Wow, has it really been almost a month since I've posted anything here? I've got a lot of catching up to do. I haven't been writing about the garden, but I sure have been working it. I'm trying to get a jump this year on weeds, so I've already hauled in a fair amount of straw for mulch, and a few of my beds are "weedless" beds, although they still have a few weeds in them, as Lee Reich predicted that they would, in his book Weedless Gardening. You'll see in some of my shots that I have a few areas that are just weed nightmares, mostly around tiny plants that are planted close together. Other areas are not in too bad of shape.

On Friday, 30 April, I planted all the seedlings that I grew this winter (above and towards the back), along with three jalepeno plants I picked up a few weeks ago from a big box store, and my tomatos and peppers from The Tasteful Garden. I had been intending to wait until the first of May, but it was so hot and georgous on Friday, and I had the day off, and it wasn't supposed to get below 60 Friday night (it got down to 54 here) and I figured with that being the case, what difference would another day make? So in they went.

I have two large areas for tomatos this year, with space for a few nasturtiums in between, which are not there yet. The tomatoes below are Italian Sweet Beefsteak, Brandywine, Beauty, Rose de Berne, Box Car Willie and Arkansas Traveller, all heirloom varieties, and I am not familiar with any of them. I look forward to seeing how they turn out!

Most of the tomatoes I did myself from seed are on the other side, and I still have space for three more, which I will pick up this weekend from a local garden store. They are either Long Keeper, or Roma, or some combination of the two; I had the two different seeds in the same little pot so I'm not one hundred percent sure what came up. That's rye growing tall in the background. More on that later.

I have 10 pepper plants this year. Below are Orange Mandarin, Italian Yellow Bell, Sweet Banana, Anaheim and Chili de Arbol.

Below are Carmen, the three Jalepenos, and one mystery pepper to be named later. Reason - I bought a mix of hot pepper seeds and managed to get one to grow into a nice looking little plant - I have no idea what kind of pepper it is. But we love peppers around here, and we had such wonderful luck with our jalepeno last year, and we loved the Carmen, Anaheim and Serrano from The Tasteful Garden, so we decided to up our pepper production this year. And this year I won't kill them off early by trying to transplant them into pots and bring them inside.

The next two shots, respectively, are four watermelon plants and five muskmelon plants that I did from seed.

Below is one of my four potato beds (in one of the "weedless beds" I made). This particular one, I think is the Yukon Gold. My potatos went in on 7 April, and are coming up quite nicely. I also have a similar bed of Red Caribe and Banana Fingerling. I want to be keeping my own potatos around this winter!

I have a little patch of red-speckled romaine coming up.

In the foreground are my brassicas - broccoli, cauliflower and brussel sprouts on the right; turnips and kale, a few heads of Red Acre cabbage and some spinach on the left. Nothing in the middle but a coming onslaught of weeds, that I'll have to do something with. This is the area where I did the sheet mulching last fall. In the foreground is one of the areas I have set up for composting. In the back of the picture is where we're heading next. Those bamboo pyramids are going to be my trellises this year for climbing plants. More on that later.

Here's one of the turnips, coming along nicely. I can't wait to have turnips again!!!

Below are my English Peas, which are doing well so far. I would like to have one nice big Ziploc bag full of them in the freezer - I have no idea if I have enough planted for that. my daughter and I like to have a handful from time to time and my husband won't eat them, so the one bag should do us for quite some time.

Here's the cucumbers. I'm going to trellis them this year. The bamboo actually has some holes drill in it, so I can run wire around it to provide support and something to cimb. Same with the peas above, though I have only put in the first level of wire, closest to the ground. Last year I had three cucumber plants; there's more going on this year, though I suspect that due to a labelling mishap that one of the plants below is actually a squash...

Here's one onion bed, doing great, and way better than the other bed where I have onions planted. I think it might get more sun. Last year I let my onions go too long and didn't get as many as I should have. I won't make that mistake this year.

Here is the garlic I planted last fall, no further rabbit damage to report. It is HUGE! I didn't know how it would do - planted upside down (duh) and left under about five total feet of snow this winter - but it's doing just fine!

Here's my summer squash, two varieties, whose names escape me at the moment, but they're not yellow crookneck...For the moment I'm not trying the zucchini this year. We've lost it the past two years to vine borers....

Below, to the right are four eggplant plants of two varieties, I think Listada de Gandia and Black Beauty in some combination. To the left are some herbs - rosemary, thyme, basil and oregano.

Here's some various little things nestled amoung the weeds; beets, carrots, baby lettuce mix, the other onion patch, one radiccio plant which is a mystery to me. It doesn't look like I expected it to. I'm not sure what to do with it. Have I researched this? Um...no.

Here's my strawberry patch in the foreground. We've already had three strawberries this year. I want to put a few more plants in. In the back, under the trellises, are two different kinds of winter squash, Delicata and Winter Squash. Never done these before. Hope it goes well.

And finally, I'm trying to get a little more exotic and whimsical with my flower planting this year. I have a few pretty things going on. I still have a lot more to put in, now that all the veggies are in.

I also planted yellow wax beans, jade bush beans, asparagus beans, scarlett runner beans and white runner bush beans. But there's no picture because right now there's nothing to see but dirt.

I'll be addressing sweet potatoes in another post. I'm still working all that out.

And the rye, you ask? What's up with that? Pretty, isn't it?

We originally put it in as a cover crop with the intention of harvesting the grain. Then I learned about some possible dangers of that, and decided to till it under this spring. Obviously we didn't get around to that, and now my husband is making noises about keeping it around to harvest later this year to make a small batch of biodeisel to run our lawn mowers on. In the meantime, it's my daughter's playground.

So here we are, at the top of May, and waiting to things to grow in and get lush, and a heck of a lot further along than we were this time last year.

Um.....I was right about the rabbits...

I started moving some straw around in the garden today and I unearthed a rabbit's nest - IN THE GARDEN! That's not good. There were 4 babies. No sign of Mom. I suspect that Mom may not have been around for a few days, since I plugged up the hole in the fence. I took another walk around the perimeter of the rabbit guard and I don't see any obvious entrance point, and nothing else has been eaten.

I took these out of the garden and put them on a bed of straw at the edge of the shed where we have rabbits every year. Maybe they'll reconnect with Mom. Or maybe not. But it's the best I can do for them. I SURE don't want them in my garden.

Unwelcome Nighttime Visitors

A few days ago I went out to check on the state of things in the garden, and I was dismayed to find that something had not only been chomping on the leaves of my strawberry plants...



But had also gone fussing through my garlic....

And not only apparently ATE several garlic plants that had been in that muddy, track-marked spot above, but had also started to burrow there...

My guess is rabbit, especially as I know I have them in the yard. I poked around the fence some and I think I found the spot where they must have come in, some rabbit guard with about a two-inch gap between the bottom of the wire and the ground. I plugged it up and have gone around to inspect the fence perimeter. It all seems okay. There was no further damage the next night, so hopefully the buffet is now closed.

Of this I am exceedingly proud...

Here is my first set of seedlings, having already spent a few nights outside. They are Black Beauty Eggplant, a pepper of indeterminate variety, Red Acre Cabbage, cucumbers and 5 little tomato plants.

Inside under the Aerogarden lights I have a TON of curcurbits doing fantastic. Watermelon, muskmelon, summer and winter squashes. I will have plenty to put out on 1 May.

A definite goal for the next winter - to expand my seed-starting station to do more at one time...

What's going on in the garden this week....

A lot, actually! The weather has been just beautiful. My first plants from The Tasteful Garden arrived this week. The "test" peas that I put in the ground a week or more ago began to sprout, so I went ahead and put them all in. I'm going to try growing them up a bamboo pyramid. I can see evidence of kale and turnips sprouting - and I realized this week that one thing that has changed dramatically from last year is that this year I recognize when a seed that I have planted is sprouting, as opposed to just being a weed!

No evidence yet of the beets or turnips. Though I may be seeing my leeks sprouting. I put pansies around in various places, because they're the first flower available to go out in the spring, and because I absolutely have to have something blooming out there to soothe my soul.

The cauliflower I put in became a buffet for slugs immediately - no lie - OVERNIGHT.

After a day or two of this I went on a hunt for the little buggers and found and killed two. I also sprinkled a little salt on the ground around each plant. I may replace them. I'm going to see if they start to perk up any.

I started making the weedless gardening beds that I mentioned in my last post. And I've decided to really go for it laying down the stone paths. One thing I learned last year, when gardening with young children you just cannot do enough to make it obvious where little feet should be stepping and where they shouldn't.

Onions are still...onioning. I got a little concerned because they seemed to be getting yellowish around the outside, but the inner shoots still seem green and strong so I guess they're doing okay.

Ah, and here's the best part of the week. The Wall-E garden my daughter planted.

And finally, last but not least - brussels sprouts doing fine. They're planted in the same place as the cauliflower, but I guess the slugs don't like them. I didn't get any brussels sprouts this fall, so I'm trying again. Hopefully we can get some this summer.

To Till or Not To Till....That is the Question

My husband and I have been going a few rounds around here about whether to till up the new garden space that is currently grass. I got it fenced off this past week and he promised to till it by Sunday. He's a till and straight row kind of guy; while I find myself feeling increasingly wild and whimsical on the subject of gardening.

The truth is, I don't want it tilled. I've been doing some reading about all the benefits of NOT tilling or digging, and quite frankly neither one of us have any desire to be running off to the chiropractor, so no-till sounds like a good option to me.

I was doing some nosing around on the web this weekend and I came upon a blog called In Lee's Garden Now which was really interesting to me. And I kept thinking, Lee Reich, Lee Reich, why is that name so familiar to me?

Because I already own one of his books, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.

Duh.

Check out his website. His garden is GEORGEOUS.

So much so, in fact, that I bought his book, Weedless Gardening, and it arrived promptly today, autographed, no less, which was really nice.

I went straight to the chapter called, In the Beginning: Readying the Ground for a First Time Planting, where I found this comment - "On the other hand, a sorry patch of lawn will quickly expire beneath less than four layers of newspaper".

Boy is this the book for me.

Encouraged and armed with a book saying that this is the way to go, I headed outside this afternoon and broached the subject with my husband again, and this time he expressed his reservations, but agreed to let me go the "weedless gardening" route this spring.

Turns out the answer is "not to till", so I am psyched.

In preparation this afternoon, I gathered up a bunch of scrap lumber that had been laying around and started kind of marking out where I want to have paths and where I want to have beds for the large area of grass that will be potatoes, melons, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, corn and lots and lots of flowers later this summer. I'm going to start bringing home materials tomorrow and working on one bed at a time, starting with the potatoes, which will have to go in about mid April. Gives me about a month to kill of the grass....