Vegetable Gardening

[jobob]

Wow. Nice.

You have me dreaming about heirloom tomatoes now.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Wow. Nice.

You have me dreaming about heirloom tomatoes now.

Thanks JoBob and Smilingcat!

Actually, last year all I was able to do was to dream about my heirloom tomatoes, since they got a late start and then winter frosts came early, killing all my tomato plants off while the tomatoes were still little hard green golf balls. It's always an adventure in weather every year.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Progress trudges along....

I have the estimates on several of the cheaper-end styles of permanent sturdy professionally installed garden fence. All obscenely expensive, but the fence will last longer than me probably, and be pretty maintenance free and varmint-proof. It'll be 7 feet tall- enough for the rare deer we get passing through here.
Now I have to decide on the fence style among the 5 or 6 choices in my budget range. Then it's wait for the excavator to be able to fit me in his schedule to come with the topsoil and digging.

We now have a red fox living right in our backyard under our shed. He is (so far) too smart to go in the big Havaheart trap set with cat food for the past 3 nights. He really can't stay here since we are pretty much right in the village and he needs to be more in the countryside. There was a litter of foxes and their mother wandering the neighborhood and this one picked our shed to burrow under.

Meanwhile, my little mini-veggie garden is literally exploding in growth now. Lots of baby green tomatoes the size of large marbles, everything looking so lush! I've been staking and pruning the tomatoes up off the baby lettuces, and thinning the many radishes to 1 1/2" apart. I've learned to spread the seed a bit further apart as I plant it. I have baby romaine and bok choy coming up nicely, and my scallions are happy 2" tall green shoots now in a long row. I'm judiciously clipping back some of the stringbean/waxbean leaves too, to continue letting the radishes get sun.

But harvest-wise, I've got plenty of Swiss chard and TONS of leaf lettuce- we are now having fresh green salads almost every day. In fact, I am going to pick some on Monday to give to a lady I know who would love some for her family with kids. We will not be able to keep up with eating it quite fast enough. But then, I just love giving away fresh garden stuff. Several years ago I had so many wonderful tomatoes that we would bring bags of them into town when we went for breakfast, and pick unsuspecting strangers to bestow them on- after an initial moment wondering if there was a 'catch' (which was always funny), people were delighted.

I haven't grown lettuce in about 20 years, and it's a great feeling to be doing it again and having success.

[OakLeaf]

I'll post pictures of my protomatoes in a day or two.

Propping up the low spots in the fence seems to be keeping the deer out. Fingers crossed. I'm not ready to take the netting off the beans yet, though.

My volunteer mustard greens have all bolted, but they're attracting so many honeybees that I don't want to pull them out!

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Pix from today....eating tons of lettuce, and stir-fried Swiss chard is on the menu for tonight, with shrimp and rice. Things are getting a bit crowded! Been pruning back some of the leaves on tomatoes and string beans so they don't completely shade the radishes and lettuce and scallions....

[GLC1968]

Wow, look at all that lettuce!

We have an over-abundance of kale, spinach and chard right now:

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Oooooh! That's so pretty!! I love those smooth river rocks as pathways!

Can you freeze the kale? Kale is like super-healthy for you.
Are those onions I see or scallions?

I wish I had planted some spinach. Well, spinach for the big garden this Fall, perhaps!
Some of what you see in my garden is radishes, while the lettuce is mostly the lightest green in the photos, and some ruby as well. I love tender leaf lettuce.

[jillm]

Lisa, your garden is looking great!

I've been checking in on this thread occasionally. Fun to read others' experiences! My yard is so tiny that i'm combining a sort of square foot gardening and a lot of vertical gardening.

I'm finally speaking up to share a book I just found- four-season harvest by eliot coleman. This guy lives in Maine and manages to have fresh greens most of the year! Haven't read the whole thing, but just from flipping through the pages I'm inspired to do at least some fall plantings.

ALSO! I got a vita-mix for my b-day. Y'all. If you can swing it, get your hands on one. I haven't done much with it yet, but come tomato season, LOOK OUT! The best thing I've made so far is a soup. Chop onions, garlic cloves and ginger in the v-mix, saute until cooked. add some collard greens (or any other green growing in yr garden). cook until just wilted. Dump this into the v-mix with a peeled lemon, a lil s n p, some water... i added some chia seeds because I had them... blend. The end: kick ax soup!

Love this thread!

[GLC1968]

Lisa - scallions and onions. Though, so many of our onions were planted incorrectly (oops) that I don't know that they'll have a chance to really develop at all. We'll see. Live and learn!

I think that you can freeze kale and for the variety that we have, you can dehydrate it as well. We plan to do some major dehydrating this weekend so that we'll have healthy kale greens to add to things all winter long!

I didn't do much leaf lettuce (just a few heads), so I'll definitely do that for the fall. In fact, once we get our bean trellis up, I plan to plant baby lettuce and other delicate greens underneath it (it'll be an arch). We'll see how that works.

Oh, and can I just say that right now, when things are growing like mad (weeds included) that square foot gardening is winning in the 'less work, more bounty' competition with our row garden area. I've barely had to weed anything in there!

[smilingcat]

Hi Lisa and GLC,

wow your gardens are so green and lush.

The June gloom is taking a toll in my garden. I don't know what is the problem with the Japanese cucumber. The cucmber sets, grows to about 3 inches in length and still very skinny. Then it stops growing, wilts and dies off. Have any idea?? The leaves of the plant are healthy deep green no yellow or spots, big leaves. If it was too much nitrogen, I think the plants would have grown to be giant but its not. This has never happened to me in the past. Can't find information in stack of books we have.

Meanwhile the Armenian cucmber has set. they are tiny like 2 inches long. Lemon cucmber is getting bigger and round. And the Green Zebra tomatoes are almost ready to pick.

Yes we love our baby greens too. So tender and so sweet. Could never get it like that at the store.

One of the brandywine yellow tomato plant may have to be pulled. It has zero flowers on it ??? All the other tomato plants do have flowers. Not only that the color of the leaves is really pale light green. don't know why??? We may replace it with one of the musk mellons.

will post pictures this weekend (I hope).

[short cut sally]

I've had a huge peat type dirt pile that was destined to be for flowers, but just never got around to putting in another bed. Hubby added some top soil to that, mixed it and made my garden with it last weekend. I know. It's getting late. I wanted a simple 8x4 area, put wood sides, make it presentable. I got a 7x 25 long and just there-like a runwaywith sides about a foot high. No wooden sides, so I'll be a weedin' more than I wanted.
I found some greenhouses that still had some veggie plants available and on sale. I had to do some searching. I planted zuchinni-more plants than I wanted!. I couldn't throw the plants away. cucumber, grape toms, musk melon, cauliflower, cherry type and regular hot peppers, and looking for eating toms like a beefsteak or something. Basil too.
I did find some little leaf lettuce seeds which I wished I could've gotten in the ground before all this rain hit. There is hardly any seeds even out there unless for things like pumpkins, corn, which will take a long time for maturity. Theres no herb seeds anywhere's. Hence, why I had to buy basil.
The only thing is next year it will be designed a little better, more user friendly, and I can start early. This year, was just too late. Worth a try though.

[GLC1968]

smilingcat - how is your water situation? I know that we had similiar problems with one type of cuke last year and I'm pretty sure it was a hydration issue. I didn't mulch very well because I wasn't used to an arid environment and some things suffered needlessly. Some varieties apparently are more water hardy than others. That's just a guess though...

shellyj - definitely plant anyway, even though it's late. We did a few things from seed (summer squash/zucchini, beans, corn & baby carrots) early-July last year and still got something to harvest (we have a short season too). We also had tomatoes but we started those with starts from the farmers market. It's always worth a shot, even late in the season. And in about a month, you can start planting for fall harvests, too!

[Photoflygirl]

Here's pics of our organic raised-bed garden:

The whole garden, the lettuce bed, the strawberry bed, baby romas and the herb garden (the dill fell over! I have to get out and stake it.). We have had so much rain the last three weeks, we haven't had to water. And I haven't found a solution to what to put in the pathways. I like the rocks in your pathways, GLC.

[Photoflygirl]

We also have basil, sage and lettuce in some waist-high planters near our patio. The basil absoutely LOVES this location, because it gets so much sun everyday. It grows to at least 3.5 ft. tall every year. I make tons of pesto to give away and freeze each year.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Your lettuce bed is very pretty! And I love the strawberry runners being sent out in all directions.

I want to put some strawberries in my upcoming new vegetable garden too.

Today I bought some seeds to sow for a Fall harvest, hopefully in my new big garden supposedly getting dug within the next week or two. I 'could' have waited to buy the seed, but the seed racks at the stores are slowly getting emptied so I figured I better get some seed while they still have some choices left.
I bought seeds for spinach, kholrabi, turnip, carrot, beets, bunching onions, bibb lettuce, leeks, and chinese winter radish.
I didn't get cabbage or kale because... we just don't care for it!