Spring Update

It’s about time for what has become a quarterly post… We’ve been busy with the regular garden stuff. Seed starting began in the basement in early February, there were light harvests of overwintered plants (many died due to the very cold conditions we experienced this winter in NC), and all of the preparation/planting that comes with spring. We harvested a few overwintered cabbages, including red cabbages, so she made the ever-popular rouladen with “rot kohl” – recipes on front page. For the first time ever, nearly all of our radishes have made actual radishes! We’ve also gotten a respectable amount of asparagus and we pulled the overwintered carrots, although we’ve been using them for juicing rather than for direct eating because their quality suffered from the cold. But, we have no pictures of these things as taking pictures of harvests started to feel too much like a chore.

Recently we pulled up the overwintered beets and mustard along with some early-spring planted kales and made braised greens, which we froze for later.

We’ve gotten almost all of our late-spring/early summer plants in the ground. The only things being hardened off now are some zucchini and charentais melon plants.

We planted our eggplant and pepper plants out a few days ago and put them under cover because nighttime temperatures are still a bit cool for these plants and also because we have flea beetles which can kill young eggplants. We’ll remove the cover from the peppers as soon as night temperatures are higher and from the eggplants once they get more mature (a foot or so tall).

We’ll leave you with a few pictures from the garden:

Volunteer Parsley Plant

Summer Squash

Sugar snap peas behind red cabbage

A productive radish box with other things

Potato patch

Onion patch

Thyme container – we sprouted the seeds in the basement

Mustard & Kale

Lettuce and snow peas

Leeks

Haricot vert box

Garlic

One area of cucumbers – we have two more

Cabbages

Broccoli behind tomatoes – the broccoli will be done once the tomatoes get large enough to need more space

Asparagus box

It’s May, It’s May!

…the merry month of May!

We’ve taken quite a hiatus since September, and done a lot of work on the garden as well.  Doing the posts each week had become as much of a chore as a pleasure, so we rested.  Now we’ll be doing posts again, but probably more like once a month than once a week. So if you want to subscribe or follow the blog to catch when we update, you are welcome to do so.

To start with, we replaced the vast majority of our boxes.  The old 12′ 2×12 yellow pine boxes had started to rot last year quite quickly (5-6 years).  We investigated a number of treated lumber types (and other products) and found a treated 4″x4″ that we liked.   The new boxes are a full 3′ wide and come in 10′ long sections.  The shortest box is 10′ long, the longest one is 30′ long.  While we reduced the number of “boxes”, we actually increased our total square and cubic footage that we have in raised bed boxes.

And we cut down some more trees in the back and side yard, partly to protect the septic drainage field area, and partly to get more sun and make more room.  So naturally we came behind that and planted:

3 nanking cherry bushes

2 pears

2 plums

4 more apple trees

4 more blueberry bushes

This brings the fruit total to 7 apples, 2 pears, 2 plums, 3 fig trees, 3 cherry bushes, 6 blueberries, and our raspberry and blackberry boxes.

The seedlings she started this year overall did extremely well; and look healthier and better than ever before.  At this point most of the garden is planted out for the next succession planting.  We also got the new boxes in last fall in time to do the annual garlic and winter crops: greens, radishes, carrots, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, etc.

The asparagus this year was our best year so far, as we were more coordinated in harvesting it.  Most of it is ferns now already, but we had almost 3 weeks of multiple meals of asparagus this spring.

And now more pictures:

February:

February – lots of snow

March:

Iced Azalea in March

Ice encrusted blueberry bush in March

April:

Tomato box after planting out end of April

Raspberry box at end of april

Potatoes, end of April

Late April Garden

Late April blackberry box

Garden – Late April

 

May:

Tomatoes with some cauliflower in front

Summer squash, with tomatillos & broccoli in rear

Sugar snaps up the trellis – garlic in rear box

Overwintered carrots before harvest

Oregano clump with lavender plants

Onions

Mustard & Kale in front of tomatoes

Garden View1

Garden View 2

Garden view 3

New apple trees

Lettuces in porch box

Front yard apple trees and flower plants

Kale box with shelling peas in rear

Happy garlic!

1st Potato Bloom!

Porch box Cilantro

Celery Area

Cabbage box

Asparagus

Asparagus box

Arugula

4 Eggplants shortly after planting out

2 4’x4′ boxes replaced: pepper plants in the foreground

 

 

9 June Weekly Update

Dill & Peas

This week’s pickings were: the first summer squash (two patty pans), a good bit of lettuce, two green cabbages, multiple harvests (and the last) of sugar snap and shelling peas, the last two garlic scapes, a bit of dill, broccoli, a few test carrots, and potatoes (two Yukon Golds we dug for and a small Kennebec that had surfaced).

Patty Pan Squash & Peas

Last peas, cabbage, broccoli, and dill

Lettuces

Peas

A day of harvest

The yellow squash, which is in the same box as the patty pans, is making lots of female flowers but they’re not getting pollinated (some of the patty pans aren’t either). We removed 9 unpollinated squash this week; they start to rot from the blossom end if pollination hasn’t sufficiently occurred. We’re hoping this is going to get rectified soon since we see pollinators in the garden, although not in the quantity we’d like to see.

Zucchini & tomatillo box

On Monday we saw the first hummingbird of the season! We had put the feeder up over a week ago and thought we were a bit late. But it seems like many things are late this year, including the hummingbirds. She reviewed last year’s blog postings to prepare for upcoming events and concluded that just about everything is at least a couple weeks later (in terms of development) when compared to last year. One of the good things about keeping a blog – you can easily go back and check what was happening when.

Yellow squash, some pollinated

The last pea plants were removed on Saturday. We worked and weeded the areas and planted the purchased watermelon starts in their box and seeded more field peas (Monkey Tail and Purple Hull) in a different box. The purple hull field peas we seeded last weekend were all up later in the week, as were the butter beans. The haricots verts are flowering so we should be getting beans soon! The first tomato flowers have also happened (on both the slicing and paste varieties).

Winter squash

We decided to try germinating lettuce in porch boxes in the basement and placing them on the front porch (which doesn’t get direct sun) after germination. We had read that the biggest challenge of growing lettuce in summer is getting it to germinate because it won’t if soil temperatures are too high. Since our basement doesn’t really get above 65 degrees, we put three porch containers in the basement for a week (to hopefully bring down the soil temperature if it was too warm) and we seeded three different types of lettuce on Sunday morning. We’ll report future results.

Surreal Red Cabbage Photo

Cauliflower

and Another Cauliflower

After complaining about the lack of rain in last week’s post, we got plenty this week! It rained on Monday (about ½ inch, which enough to fill up the rain barrels and give everything a drink) and we were on the edge of the tropical storm that moved up the east coast later in the week. From Thursday morning until Friday evening, we got 2.5 inches of rain. This has caused us to put off pulling up the garlic since the soil is wet and stuck to the test bulb we pulled on Saturday.

36 Hours of Rain

Butternut Squash & Cucumber

Broccoli – later harvested

Basil

Asparagus Ferns

Three Blackberry Plants

 

2 June Weekly Update

Patty pan squash

Harvests are slowly getting more plentiful!  This week’s pickings were:  a small cabbage, all the cilantro we had left (if the recently planted seeds in the porch container produce, it’ll be a bonus, but we’re not expecting much from them…), kale and mustard (removing all of the plants late in the week), garlic scapes (twice), peas of various types (multiple times), a bit of broccoli, lots of lettuce, and beet greens with little nubbins of beet root.

Beet Greens & Beet nubbins

Cabbage & peas

Cilantro

Garlic Scapes & peas

Kale & Mustard

Last of the Kale & Mustard

Last snow peas of the season

It’s amazing how many missed pods you find when removing pea vines.  Since many of the snow peas are filled out, we’ll shell those and eat them as shelling peas, not pods.

Lettuces

More peas, garlic scapes, and broccoli bits

We removed most of the various pea plants late in the week.  They were winding down in the 80+-degree heat and we needed the space for other things.  I expect the rest of the peas will be removed sometime in the next week or so.  We also pulled up most of the beets because we decided to plant the remaining sweet potato slips in the box they were occupying.  Since beets rarely make a big root for us, we decided to “sacrifice” them in order to better use the space.  The greens with roots attached will be going through the juicer this week.  This was a mid-season modification of the planting plan as some things needed to go in but other plants weren’t ready to be removed  – you gotta be flexible in gardening!

We also removed the mustard and kale plants in order to prep the box for the blackberry plants.  We still have one broccoli plant (with a small head, even!) growing at one end of the box so we left that portion of the box alone.  On Sunday morning, we mixed more compost and vermiculite in order to top off the box (since the blackberries are a permanent planting) and then we got the three plants we purchased last weekend planted.

Amazingly, all three cauliflower plants in the front yard box have started to form a head!  While checking out the plants, I noticed that caterpillars had recently hatched, so I squished the ones I could find and I sprayed all the brassicas with BT.

Sweet potato slips

6’+ tall paste tomatoes

We also got some seeding done in the newly vacant areas.  We seeded a section of purple hull field peas (more field pea varieties will be seeded after the garlic and onions are harvested, probably in a couple of weeks) and we sowed Blue Lake Bush Beans in the former lettuce box (which still has a little bit of later-sowed lettuce in it).  Later today, we’ll sow more butter beans (aka lima beans) where the snow peas used to grow.  More butter beans will be planted after more box space opens up in mid-June.  We also purchased a couple of French Tarragon plants at the farmer’s market and transplanted them into the permanent herb box.  We’re going to look up how to grow French tarragon so that we can save our own in the future; I know that it can’t be grown from seed so it must be from cuttings.

Rosemary – French Tarragon – Sage

We also planted a couple of cucumber seeds in the space opened up by removal of the tomatillo plant that had partially broken in windy conditions shortly after we planted it in April.  It recently finally gave out, but not before it had at least produced a few small “lanterns”.  It’s actually amazing that this scrawny, broken plant was the first to produce lanterns in an attempt to seed the next generation.  The plant didn’t have much of a chance after it broke, but its innate drive to reproduce was fully intact.

We’ve gotten no rain in over a week so we had to spend some time hand watering everything from the rain barrels this week.  The barrels are almost empty now so we’re really hoping the rain forecast for Monday comes through!

Parsley gone to seed (so it will reseed itself for us) and Dill

Melon plants with recently planted cucumbers behind the trellis

Mostly harvested lettuce box with blue lake bush beans seeded in succession

Yukon golds approaching harvest

Butter Beans

26 May Weekly Update

Peas & Broccoli

Harvests this week were:  multiple pickings of sugar snap, snow, and shelling peas; kale and mustard; garlic scapes; lettuce; radishes; a little bit of broccoli; and lots of herbs (oregano, mint, sage, rosemary, and marjoram), most of which will be going to work with us to share with co-workers.

Kale & Mustard

Peas & Radishes

Peas & Garlic Scapes

Shelling, snow, and sugar snap peas

The short pea season we tend to have is rapidly coming to a close, especially for the snow peas, some of which we removed over the weekend to make room for cantaloupe melon transplants.  Although we didn’t get great germination on the pea seeds sowed in February (and re-sowed in early March), the ones we sowed in *January* did great and produced a satisfactory pea harvest.  Just goes to show how subtle patterns in winter weather coupled with the growth stage a plant is at can make all the difference!  A relatively warm January followed by a colder February & March meant that the January peas that had sprouted were able to hold on during the cold in February and March but the seeds sowed during those months just weren’t warm enough to even sprout.  Sometimes it’s all about taking a risk coupled with some luck – a few degrees of soil temperature can make all the difference…

We pulled up all of the radishes in the garden boxes (we still have some in a porch box).  We figured that if a plant hadn’t made a radish yet, it wasn’t going to since the seeds were planted in mid- and late-March.  The weather over the weekend was glorious so she spent several hours doing a good bit of hand weeding in most of the boxes while enjoying the beautiful days outside.  It was good for the soul to feel the warm sun while a gentle breeze blew and the birds sang to the squirrels scampering in the woods.  She also hopes her efforts will pay off with fewer weeds in the summer when weeding in the heat and humidity is pretty low on the priority list.  We also gave most things a fish emulsion bath; this was the last fertilization for the onions and garlic before they are harvested next month.

We can see that the onions are starting to bulb up and the ones in the full-sun boxes are much more vigorous than the ones in a box that gets a bit of shade during the day.  We also removed all but two of the broccoli plants to make room for new “crops”.  The plants we removed were producing side shoots but we couldn’t keep them in the ground any longer because we needed the space they were occupying.

Herb box *before*

Herb Box *after*

We also worked on the permanent herb box.  We had removed the horseradish earlier this year because it never produced useable sized roots in the 4 or 5 years we’ve been trying to grow it.  We also removed the lemongrass stump that we had left in the ground last Fall in hopes it might still be viable in the spring (no such luck).  The box needed to be filled more so we mixed 2-1/2 bags of composts with vermiculite, azomite, and chicken manure and topped off the box.  We also seeded thyme and dill and we left space for French tarragon plants which we hope to buy at the Farmer’s Market next weekend.

Sweet Potatoes

We purchased some seedlings.  After researching how to do it, we decided to grow sweet potatoes for the first time this year.  I (the “she” of “us”) didn’t know until recently that sweet potatoes are an entirely different plant family from white potatoes.  We also didn’t realize that sweet potatoes are *really* nutritional powerhouses (although we did know that white potatoes are pretty much devoid of nutrition other than calories).  We purchased a 9-pack of “Beauregard” plants (this was the only variety available locally).  We planted the first two in a front yard box that had contained broccoli and will plant the rest out as things in the other front yard boxes finish for the season.  As part of the seasonal transition for the front boxes, we decided we’ll remove the soil from the box and put down a layer of gravel (apparently might be helpful in deterring the voles from burrowing in) and fresh weed barrier (a double layer).

We also purchased watermelon, cantaloupe, cucumber, butternut squash, and sweet banana pepper starts.  All but the watermelon and some of the cucumbers starts were planted out over the weekend; things are still growing in the future watermelon box so I’ll plant them out next weekend (at the earliest).  We currently have cucumbers growing but we have space for more once all of the lettuce is cut so perhaps these younger ones will provide for a longer cucumber season for us.  We also have butternuts growing but some of the other types of winter squash we tried to grow are apparently dud seeds so we’ll be growing more butternuts in their place.  And when I saw banana pepper seedlings for $1.99 for a 4-pack, I just had to get them since I knew we had available space in one of the pepper boxes.

Raspberry Box

Lastly, we picked up three blackberry plants that will also be planted next weekend.  They are going in the side yard box next to the raspberry box.  We decided last year to convert these two boxes over to berry production (which are permanent plantings) when we figured out we had plenty of growing space for the quantity of vegetables we need to grow for ourselves.

Will Cauliflower make heads?

Summer Squash

Front yard Potatoes

Melon plants with 1 broccoli & shelling peas behind

Overwintered Red Cabbage is *finally* making a head

Haricot Verts

Cut sage, oregano, marjoram, rosemary & black peppermint

Butternuts with Cucumbers

Broccoli, Mustard, & Kale – will become Blackberry box

Basil

Late spring Garden

2 Spring planted red cabbage – both have started to form heads!

19 May Weekly Update

Sugar snap, snow, and shelling peas

More of them

Harvests this week were: garlic scapes, sugar snap and snow peas (three times!), kale and mustard (twice), radishes, lettuce, shelling peas, dill, broccoli, the last of the overwintered cilantro growing in the porch boxes which had bolted (we put it through the juicing machine along with other good-for-you produce that we’ve been drinking for the past month or so), and Spring-planted cilantro which went into a carnitas-like dish we made.

Shelled Peas

Dill

Garlic Scapes, peas, broccoli, radishes

Kale & Mustards

And a second time

Last overwintered cilantro

Lettuces

Spring cilantro

The broccoli heads were rather small but we went ahead and cut them because they were on the verge of flowering (one had actually begun flowering).  The weather lately hasn’t been conducive to growing broccoli – it got quite hot really fast this week.  We actually woke up to 38 degrees on Monday morning and by Thursday morning the overnight low was 62.  Highs were in the mid-80s by the end of the week.  That’s quite a spread…  The broccoli harvest was the majority of the plants we have.  I think we have only 4 more very small heads in the garden.  We left the plants in their boxes though because the overwintered plants we harvested earlier this year kept producing a lot of offshoots.  Maybe these plants will too and since we don’t need the beds quite yet, there was no reason to remove the plants.

The garlic scapes will primarily be going into hummus since we’re trying to cut back on things like yummy cream cheese spread.

The asparagus seems to be done for the season.  As we mentioned in last week’s post, the asparagus bed has been a bit disappointing.  We expected to get much more asparagus for the number of crowns we planted.  We will likely plant some more crowns in the box next Spring.

We noticed a cabbage looper on one of the broccoli plants so we went ahead and sprayed all of the brassicas with BT after hand-picking the one caterpillar.  We also seeded one of the porch boxes with cilantro after removing the radishes that never wanted to bulb up (a common problem for us).  It’s getting a bit late for cilantro (which likes cooler weather) but since it’s on a porch that doesn’t get full sun all day, it might be OK.  We also seeded more “Bouquet” dill.  We grow two types of dill in containers (the other is “Tetra”) and most years, they reseed themselves and start growing again in Spring.  This year, only one Bouquet dill plant has started growing so I roughed up the surface a little, threw a few more seeds into the container, sprinkled some compost on top to cover the seeds, and patted it all down before watering.  Hopefully they’ll sprout!

Finally, we hardened off the last of the peppers in the basement for several days and planted them out on Friday.  For whatever reason, NONE of the various melon seeds we started indoors on April 21 have germinated.  We’re having a less-than-stellar success rate with seed starting this year!  We’re going to go ahead and purchase melon starts next month when the boxes they’ll be going in are open; right now, the various brassicas are occupying the future melon boxes.  Yes, we run season successions pretty tight in order to maximize the *potential* productivity of our garden.  (Actual productivity being a whole ‘nother matter entirely…).

Training tomatillos

Potatoes in Bloom

Onions

Lettuce Box

First Summer Squash Flowers – one is female

Eggplants

Training Cucumbers, blooming

12 May Weekly Update

We’re a bit worried about our slicing tomatoes.  The plants just don’t look very healthy.  First the lower stems looked a sickly green with some yellowing so I removed them since the plants had enough upper stems and you eventually want to remove any stems with leaves that touch the ground.  But then the next set of stems up the trunk started looking the same way.  They don’t look diseased, just sickly.  So I went to research it in one of my gardening books and concluded that the most likely problem was a nutrient deficiency of some sort.  I spread Azomite (see last week’s post for info on Azomite) generously among all the tomato plants, not just the sickly slicing ones, and gave them all a good fish emulsion bath early in the week.    But on Saturday, we decided to go ahead and replace the worst looking Early Girls with some purchased starts.  Tomatoes are one of the main reasons we garden and we want to make sure we have plenty this summer!!  If the Better Boys aren’t looking a lot better by next weekend, we’ll likely replace them as well.

Asparagus & First Sugar Snap Peas

Radishes

Sugar Snap & Snow Peas

Mustard and Kale

Harvests this week were: the first sugar snap peas and snow peas of the season!, kale and mustard (twice, for juicing), asparagus, and radishes.

The garlic is starting to make scapes.  We’ll soon have this once-a-year treat.  And several of the potatoes have flowered with many more blooms set and ready to flower soon.

Yukon gold potatoes – so tall they’ve started to topple over

Other garden tasks accomplished this week was a good bit of hand weeding in various boxes, raking up and redistributing the mulch that washed down the center aisles during heavy rains, reseeding some of the various seeds we’ve sowed lately that didn’t sprout, giving everything (including our various fruit trees/bushes) a fish emulsion bath, and researching/fretting over how we’re going to convert the wood boxes on the slope to some sort of masonry later this year.  We want to make sure we really like what we end up with since it’ll likely be permanent, or at least not trivial to change!

We also dealt with all of last year’s garlic heads that were stored in the basement.  This year’s crop will be harvested next month and we still had *many* heads from last year (at least 35 or so), many of which weren’t really good anymore.  So we peeled all of the good/pretty decent cloves and processed them in the food processor along with some olive oil.  We then transferred the minced mixture to a pint-sized freezer container and put it in the freezer for use as we need it – the olive oil should help it keep from freezing all the way so we can scoop out what we need.  We plan to start saving most of our garlic harvests this way in the future since the heads start to deteriorate quite a bit after being stored in the basement for a few months.  We’ll save out only the heads that we expect to use over 4 or 5 months (plus our seed for the next crop).  And we’ll likely be growing less garlic in the future as well.  We went through it really fast one year but I think our cooking has changed a bit since then and we just don’t use as much garlic in our cooking nowadays.

Some of you may have noticed a change in the countertop colors of our pictures – we recently had new countertops installed and we’re very happy with the result.  Here’s a picture of our “new” kitchen.

Kitchen

Yellow & Patty pan Squash, sweet peppers in lower box

Tomatillo Lanterns – even the partially broken one on the right keeps trying!

Swallowtail Butterfly Caterpillar on bolted Parsley

Cauliflower Plant

sad Better Boy tomatoes

newly planted Zucchini starts

Blueberry Bush with lots of blueberries forming!

happy Amish paste tomatoes, potatoes in box behind

Fig trees

A fig, forming

Cucumbers on Trellis with 1 ground-level bloom

Cabbage-Cauliflower-Sugar Snap Pea box

Broccoli in front yard box

5 May Weekly Update

Those Dang Voles!!

We continue to have vole predation despite our poisoning efforts.  They got about ½ of our Danver’s carrots and about ¼ of our Little Finger carrots.  We reseeded the Danver’s in the bare areas but it’s pretty late in the season for us to be seeding carrots.  We didn’t reseed the Little Fingers because we need that box for field peas before the carrots would mature.  The box the Danver’s are in is slated to be a Fall planting box so the carrots will have time to mature before we need it.  We are not amused with the voles.

Harvests this week were: a huge head of cauliflower (!!), beets and beet greens, kale, mustard, lettuce, asparagus, radishes, the last of the overwintered purple mustard, and mung beans sprouted using the mason jar method.

Asparagus & Mustard

Cauliflower, Kale & Beets

Mung Bean Sprouts

Radishes & Purple Mustard

Lettuce

When I pulled up the cauliflower plant after cutting off the head to take it over to the compost pile, I couldn’t believe how much it weighed!  At least 20 pounds.  The plant was huge.  Out of curiosity, I weighed the head:  3.23 pounds!  Wow!!  Since we’ve had so much cauliflower lately, I took to the internet to find some recipes and we made this on Saturday evening:  http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/cauliflower-curry  It was quite good so we wanted to share the link in case others are looking for some cauliflower ideas.  I wouldn’t exactly call it a “curry” in the way I think of curries, but the flavor was quite good.  Our only deviation from the recipe was that we decided to wedge and then roast the tomato before adding it to the dish.

I also went ahead and pulled up the beets since we need the bed they were growing in for hot peppers and I wanted to get to them before the voles did.  Only one of the beets could even be considered a real beet (as in size) and a few could be called “baby beets” but others were just nubbins.  Most of them are going into the juicer whole along with the greens, so we’re not unhappy with them.  But something that we are a bit disappointed in is the asparagus bed.  We expected to get much more asparagus from it than we have this year.  We planted 2 year old crowns in March 2011 so they’re 4 years old now.  Several of them must have died since a portion of the bed has produced no spears.  But I thought each crown would produce many more spears than we’ve gotten (we’ve cut only about 2 spears per crown – about ½ of the spears each crown has produced).  I’ll have to do some research to figure out if this level of production is typical or whether we have underachieving plants.

Transplanted Peppers

Other tasks accomplished this week were transplanting out the four eggplant (and covering them with a lightweight garden fabric until they are large enough to better withstand flea beetles) and butternut squash, starting another large container of parsley (we really like to make a chimmichurri sauce with it), fertilizing the garlic and onions with fish emulsion (we’re trying to be diligent about doing this every 3 weeks this year!), seeding basil, and planting out most of the pepper plants.  A few of the pepper plants are still in the basement until they size up a bit more.  We ended up purchasing a total of 12 pepper plants from the local garden center since our seed starting success this year could have been better.

Transplanted Butternuts

While browsing Southern States’ website for fertilizers, I discovered a product called “Azomite” which is an organic trace mineral product.  I went ahead and bought a 10 pound bag because it probably won’t hurt and might help.  10 pounds won’t quite do all of our boxes but it’ll do the vast majority.  Trace minerals are things that regular fertilizer doesn’t include so it may be something others may want to check out for soil improvement purposes.  Azomite has a website – just goggle the term.

 

Spring-planted leeks

Lettuce Patch

Half-runner beans

Broccoli head forming

 

28 April Weekly Update

Transplant casualties.

We lost one of our Amish Paste tomato plants to voles – they chewed off the roots and the plant wilted – and one of the tomatillo plants partially broke near the base of the plant.  I think it just couldn’t hold up to some windy conditions we had.  I stood it up and piled soil around it in the hope it might grow new roots since it wasn’t completely broken off.  Time will tell.  Later in the week those dang voles also got one of our cucumber plants.

Cilantro for Juicing

Leeks

Mound of Kale

Mustards & Cilantro

Greens & Parsley

Parsley, Cauliflower, & Cilantro

Radishes & Asparagus

Pickings were: kale and mustard (the large mound of kale in the picture is the leaves from the last two overwintered Red Russian kale plants which have now been removed; later in the week we also removed most of the overwintered purple mustard), parsley and cilantro (multiple times; removing almost all of our overwintered cilantro as the last picking), asparagus, a few small radishes, the overwintered leeks, and another head of cauliflower!  (Although this head of cauliflower was not nearly as large and perfect as the one we got last week).

We’ve been fairly busy in the garden.  The removal of overwintered stuff meant that more Spring crops were going in.  We seeded 2 zucchini seeds in the space the cilantro had been in.  Hopefully they’ll germinate since starting them in the basement last month failed dismally.  In the space the leeks had been growing, we seeded winter squash – both Long Island Cheese and Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck.  We also filled in some of the lettuce squares of types that didn’t germinate well with the seeds of other types of lettuce that are doing well.  I think I’m going to cull some seed packets soon…  Of course, after we remove plants, we work the boxes well and apply fertilizer so it’s *work* to get these tasks done!

Another big Cauliflower

The growth rates on the potato plants is impressive; they grew over a foot in the past week.  And three of our Spring-planted broccoli plants are forming the beginnings of a head!  I hope they’re able to produce decent heads before it gets too hot for them.  We started hardening off our pepper plants on Saturday and plan to plant them out later this week.  I keep looking anxiously at the places we seeded last week (various beans) but so far, nothing has broken ground.  Earlier in the week, I was delighted to see that our third overwintered cauliflower has formed a good sized head!  Three producing cauliflower plants is a first for us!

Asparagus Box

Azaleas in Bloom

Spring Cauliflower Plants

Celery Patch

Dill

Garlic Box

Hardening off Eggplant & Butternuts

Irises!

Marjoram & Sage

Pea Flowers!

Potatoes

Red Cabbages

tomatillos with Seeded Zuchinni

Garden

 

21 April Weekly Update

Cauliflower

Cauliflower Achieved!!!

Perhaps it’s the month of achievements with asparagus finally coming up last week and our second ever no-doubt-about-it bona fide head of cauliflower!  This is *by far* the largest head of cauliflower we’ve managed to grow in the five years we’ve been earnestly trying.  It was quite tasty.

Cauliflower, Cilantro, and Parsley

Other harvests this week were lettuce, cilantro, parsley, beets that weren’t ready but we needed the box for tomatoes (the beets in the picture went into the juicer whole), kale, mustard, two very small potatoes and several small carrots found while working boxes, four small radishes for salads, and a little bit of asparagus.  We would have had more asparagus but Ms. Foodgardenkitchen was out of town most of the week and Mr. Foodgardenkitchen was fuzzy on the ins-and-outs of when to cut the asparagus and he let them go far too long, thinking they would get thicker.  Once an asparagus spear comes up, it doesn’t get thicker with time, it just goes to fern if you don’t cut it early enough.  Once it starts to fern, you’ve waited too long.  We have quite a few ferned out spears in the asparagus box…

Beets, beet greens, and 2 found potatoes

First Asparagus

cilantro, Radishes & Carrots

Kales & Mustards for Juicing

Cilantro for Juicing

Lettuces

I was away for 5 days and it was absolutely amazing how much growth happened in all of the various plants we have in the garden in only 5 days.  It’s interesting how you don’t notice how much growth can occur in just a few days if you’re looking at the plants every day.

On Thursday we planted the tomato, tomatillo, and cucumbers that had been hardening off for the past few days.  We also started hardening off the starts in the basement that were ready for this next step of the process – some summer squash and more cucumber starts.  We’ve gotten very poor germination on the various winter squash we started inside.  At this point, we’re just going to try direct seeding but I don’t know what the problem is.  Ditto on zucchini germination success – zero out of 8 tries (with brand new seeds).  For some reason, we have a hard time getting zucchini to grow but yellow squash (and patty pans) aren’t a problem.

Tomatillos Planted Out – One has already bloomed

Transplanted Paste Tomatoes

Slicing Tomatoes Planted

Oregano

Overwintered Leeks – Ready for Harvest

First Pea Flowers

Cucumbers Transplanted

Carrots – No squinting this time

Broccoli & Peas

Cabbage, Cauliflower, and Sugar Snap Peas

Bolted Cilantro & 3 Transplanted tomatillos

On Saturday we seeded an area of lima beans (2/3 of a box; paste tomatoes are in the other 1/3), a full box of haricot vert, a trellis-wide row of Old Dutch Half Runner beans, and 4 butternut squash seeds (we have 2 butternut squash starts in the basement which we’ll begin hardening off soon; we’re trying for 6 plants).  And on Sunday we started various melon seeds in the basement – hopefully we’ll have some success with these!

First Iris

Apple Tree in Bloom