My Garden Helpers

These are my garden helpers.

They're incredibly busy, pretty much always working outside the home, and coming back to share the wealth of their day.

It's my observation that since these guys have lived in my garden, my garden is far more productive than it used to be.

For example: my tomato harvest is pretty generous. This is about how many tomatoes I harvest from one 3' x 8' patch of tomatoes.    

This year's varieties, all heirlooms, all indeterminate:
 

Slicing tomatoes: Cherokee gold. Incredible flavor, modest production. I'm going to replace these with Brandywine next year: Pink, slightly more production.

 

Cherry tomatoes: Chocolate Cherry. Very good flavor, excellent production. I'll probably supplement these with Sun Sugar next year: yellow, prolific, and stunningly sweet. I do like cherry tomatoes in hanging baskets.

 

Cooking tomatoes: San Marzano: good flavor, incredible production. I'll probably use these again next year, but I might not plant them so thickly, and I'll attempt to prune them more often.

 

 

The Most Amazing Weeds

We took a tree out of a flowerbed in the front of our yard. It took a fair bit of mass with it, leaving a substantial hole. We had just retired a couple of old compost bins, so we had a lot of compost. So we filled the hole with fresh, and perhaps not completely mature compost.

We got some of the most interesting weeds. In addition to the usual assortment of weeds, we have some fruits and veggies. We have a really healthy zucchini, and it's not a hybrid pumpkini! We have a tomato plant and what appears to be a tomatillo plant. And we have what appears to be two very healthy melon plants.


If I'd planted them intentionally, I probably would have spaced the melon and the zucchini a little better, but they seem to be happy snuggled up together.

I don't actually know what kind of melons these are. The leaves look like a cantaloupe, though they're larger than the cantaloupes I've grown in pots. But the fruit itself shows some signs of watermelon-ness (I've grown both in the past, but no other melons).

It seems perfectly happy growing in our flower bed, so we'll let it grow there for a little while and see what we get.

Serendipitous gardening. How fun!

2015 Midsummer Report



 

 The summer of 2015 was ridiculously hot. I got all of my starts in the ground by late April, and nothing froze. I was eating fresh Kale weeks later, fresh tomatoes before the end of May. Lettuce and spinach bolted almost immediately. The melons were terribly happy. I left a few dozen sunflower weeds in place.

July 2015

What 2014 was like

Outdoor garden: (from right to left)

First bed: Western bed: Squash. Lots of squash.

Second bed: Beans, sunflowers, deal, zucchini.

Third bed: tomatoes, lots of tomatoes. Also marigolds and sage.

Fourth bed: Corn in front. Garlic in back.

Fifth bed: Kale in front; onions and carrots in the middle; kale in back.

Sixth bed: Easternmost bed: peas in the spring. Beans and tomatoes and kale and some sort of strange lettuce thing in summer and fall.

Seventh bed: Southeast bed: Kale, garlic, Swiss chard, parsnips, etc.

Eighth bed: Southwest bed: Lots of rhubarb. Lots of raspberries.

Three beds in the back of the greenhouse: (from right to left)
Indoor bed 1. West bed: Peppers in front, peppers in the middle, watermelon in back. Note: don't do watermelon again.

Indoor bed 2. Middle bed: Peppers front and middle. Watermelon in back.

Indoor bed 3. East bed: Tomatoes in front; tomatillos in the middle, melons in back.

Mapping Garlic

Planted garlic a little later this year: in the ground on the last day of September. Added a bunch of compost (including worm bin compost) and dug it in deep. Last year, this space grew zucchini, dill, sage and marigolds.

Unlike years before, none of the seed garlic is from the grocery store. (I’ve planted the cheap basic garlic in years past: they grew wonderfully, and often are larger and tastier than the stuff in the grocery store.)

I bought three heads of seed garlic this year: Rocambole Garlic, also called German Red Garlic:
“Flavor is strong, hot and spicy. Keeps moderately well when properly cured and stored. Can be grown in mild climates; however, develops better quality and size where winters re cold. Color will become brighter if it is stressed by too much water.”

(Source: Irish Eyes, via the Red Barn.)

I also planted two heads of Elephant Garlic:
“(Allium ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum) is a plant belonging to the onion genus. It is not a true garlic, but actually a variant of the garden leek. It has a tall, solid, flowering stalk and broad, flat leaves, much like those of the leek, but forms a bulb consisting of very large, garlic-like cloves. 

The flavor of these, while not exactly like garlic, is much more similar to garlic than to leeks. The flavor is milder than garlic, and much more palatable to some people than garlic when used raw as in salads.”

(Source: last year's Elephant Garlic, which was grown from a head I got at a grocery store [WalMart].)

We rather like the big stuff. We roast it (the garlic snob version is bake it under a water-soaked clay pot), and spread it on bread. 

I’m concerned about losing track of what went where.

Lessons Learned from the Summer of 2014

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Organic Beefsteak tomatoes

• Maybe be less ambitious with the blog. Admit it: growing stuff is more fun than writing about growing stuff. 

• Tomatoes: Don't grow 9 varieties next year.
  2014 Winners:

o       Chocolate Cherry (purple cherry tomatoes)

Part of the Basil Hedge

o       Sun Sugar (yellow cherry tomatoes)

o       San Marzano (indeterminate cooking tomatoes)

o       Cherokee Purple (an excellent slicing tomato)

• Don’t get carried away with kale. (6 – 10 plants; plant spring & fall)
• Don’t get carried away with basil.
• It’s cool to use (some) veggies in the flower beds.
• Stake up the sunflowers!



Scarlet Runner Beans.




• Plan on arched trellises: more stable than poles.

o       Beans

o       Peas

o       Cucumbers

o       Squash

o       (Maybe grow sunflowers through the trellis? 

• Be more intentional about

o       Carrots

o       Lettuce

o       Beets

o       Spinach

• Do less with:

o       Corn: don’t waste the time.

o       Squash. Maybe just Hokkaido and Pattypan.

1.6 pound tomato (Brandywine)

o       Don’t bother with Armenian cucumbers: hard to grow, not real impressive results.

o       Nasturtiums: they want to take over. Plan accordingly.

o       Marigolds: specify the smaller size, and plant sparingly.

• Change how I use the greenhouse:

o       No melons in the greenhouse (a pain to pollinate)

o       No cucumbers (a pain to pollinate)

o       Only 1 tomato plant in the greenhouse, or even better: none (they don’t need greenhouse & they take a lot of space.)

o       Peppers are good for greenhouse (easy manual pollination)

o       Starts and such are real appropriate in the greenhouse.

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July 2014: The State of the Garden

Scarlet Runner pole beans going nuts on some sunflowers.

Next year: plant the sunflowers 2 or 3 weeks earlier.

Why do they call it a Black Krim tomato if it's red? But it IS yummy. 

Cherokee Purple tomatoes. Presumably they'll be purple later.

Kind of wimpy carrots. I don't understand. Carrots were epic the last few years. This year, they're wimps.

Garlic is doing great, though. 

 Kale is going nuts. 

 Onions seem to be thriving.

Rhubarb is ready for its third harvest of the season. 

Poor sage. hidden among the dill and zucchini. 

Winter squashes are going for the gold.

As are the summer squash.