I think potato salad might be on the menu tonight.
Post Number: 698
Ok, just to be clear, this is not a picture of the produce in my garden. I’m not even sure what some of those things are. What are the knobbly things at the bottom of the basket? Are those cucumbers, or something else altogether? Yikes.
As far as MY garden grows, it has loved all the rain we’ve had this past few weeks. We’ve eaten banana, green and orange peppers from the garden already. The lettuce (mesclun mix) has been out of control and we can’t keep up. Our peas are just beginning to produce and they are fantastic! The plants are loaded with tomatoes of almost every variety we could find but they aren’t ready yet. We’ll have loads of cherry and grape tomatoes ready within another week, but the more traditional beefsteak and heritage tomatoes will be a while yet. They are still small.
I’m worried about the potatoes. They are growing like crazy in the tower and we can hardly keep up with putting on boards, but sadly, I don’t think this method actually works.
I took the bottom board off the tower and dug around. The plants have flowered at least twice so they should be producing potatoes. In fact they should have started producing potatoes weeks ago. In the end, I dug around and couldn’t find anything. This project may end up being a bust. I’m already planning for next year. I think I’ll do the straw/sheet mulch method. The success ratio looks good. That, or I’ll try the bucket method.
Sadly, the one true failure that I can report this year was with our radishes. We failed to cull them when the seeds came up and, although they had lots of leaves, the radishes were skinny and mostly inedible. We probably harvested 6 radishes out of the entire lot. Oh well, lesson learned.
Post Number: 470
I’m very happy with how the garden is progressing. Our cucumbers seem very happy to grow up the tomato cage and are taking to it like they are meant to grow this way. It’s very cool to see the baby cucumbers hanging and so easy to pick when they are ripe.
Lots of action on the tomato and pepper plants. Oh yes, there will be fresh salsa this year!!
Post Number: 449
You can see that the radishes on the left are growing like crazy! We should have thinned them last weekend and didn’t, so we’ll have some wonky shaped radishes because they are way too close together. That’s ok, it shouldn’t affect the taste! The carrots on the right look small but are actually doing great!
Check out those green peppers! We’ll be eating them soon. We have four different varieties and I can’t wait to taste them.
As you can see, the potatoes have gone wild with this rain too. We put a second tier on the potato tower after I took this picture. I’ll post a picture in a week or so. The tower is supposed to encourage the potatoes to produce more…we’ll see.
So far, the cherry and grape tomatoes are showing some action. Only one of the larger tomato varieties (the Primo Red) has a tomato. It might be a while for them but they are covered in flowers so I’m hopeful.
And that, my friends, is our garden update.
Post Number: 424
It’s been busy with work and with my course. I travelled a lot this past two weeks and need to figure out how to use my WordPress App on my iPod Touch to do quick posts.
I haven’t spent any time yet doing a plot outline for the 3 Day Novel contest. I really need to get at that and not leave it to the last minute. I have a sense of the type of story I want to write…but really need to put some pre-work into it.
I’ve also been spending my time revising the novel I’m working on and it’s changing a lot…almost daily. I went back and revisited my characters and decided that they’ll each need their own secret in order to drive the story forward more effectively. That means re-working the story line. Overall, I’m happy with the progress I’m making. I have a lot of scenes that I still need to write, but I’m excited (and tired)!
Another positive update…our garden is growing like crazy!! It’s been raining almost every day. I don’t like it, but clearly the plants do! I’ll take pictures and post them this weekend.
Post Number: 419
As you’ll notice, he really didn’t pay much attention to actually levelling the area. That’s ok. This was really a project for the kiddies and we didn’t want to make it too difficult. A garden really doesn’t care if it is level. The veggies will still grow. Even so, our 15 year old elected not to participate which was a bit disappointing but, as said, it WAS cold and rainy so I can’t honestly blame her.
We decided to do a grid of raised 2×2 beds. We put the boxes far enough apart to be able to mow between them when the grass seed starts growing. To stop the weeds from growing in the new soil in the raised beds, we laid wet newspaper in the bottom of each bed. It will compost before the roots get too deep, but is there long enough to prevent weeds from sprouting and taking over.
We laid the 9 boxes in a grid and then backfilled with compost, planting soil, manure and peat. Hopefully we got the mixture right and the plants like it. We didn’t put manure in one of the boxes that we intended to plant peppers in. Apparently they are not a big fan of the nitrogen rich fertilizer. We’ll see how they do.
Then we planted:
Box #1: peas
Box #2: grape and cherry tomatoes
Box #3: heirloom yellow, plum, and common red tomatoes
Box #4: leaf lettuce
Box #5: potatoes
Box #6: cucumbers
Box #7: carrots and radishes
Box #8: orange, green and sweet banana peppers
Box #9: onions
We also planted kitchen herbs (basil, chives, horseradish, cilantro and so forth) in pots. The end result? A rather less than precise or beautiful garden, but one that will be great fun for the kids when it starts producing and they see the “fruits of their labour”…so to speak. Let’s hope the rabbits don’t eat everything before we get to harvest time! 
Post Number: 405
