Winterizing the Garden

Winterizing the garden beds.

Winter Rye and maple leaf mulch. There's some red clover in there, too, but I think the mulch may have overwhelmed it.

I like how it looks.

The 2019 Garden Season Started Today

And so it begins...

Last year, I started the hot peppers between Christmas and New Year's. That was too late.

The Lemon Drop peppers started fruiting in October, but the Reapers started blossoming in November. It's now December and they are still plugging (slowly) along.

Might have fruit by spring. Or they might start over with blossoms in spring. Who knows. One Lemon Drop that produced a mediocre crop last year survived over the winter and gave me eight or nine crops this year.

I'm getting a little bit more of a running start this year. I started eight batches of peppers today, December 16th. Some of these are not as slow as the "super-hots," and I'm just getting a terribly early start this year. 

 

About half of these are seeds I've saved from the last couple of years; the rest are from growers around the country. Some came as a gift.

I also started some Impatiens this week. They took so terribly long to mature last year. It might have been better to start these in January or February, but it's too late now. I got excited. 

I also started a batch of Schizanthus. I was in a hurry and the package looked like an Impatiens package. Well, this will be interesting.

Also, I picked some lemon drop peppers and a lemon this week.

Lemons are Lemoning

For the first time, I have lemons that are lemoning, turning yellow.

They're small.

But they're ripening. In November.

This could be really cool.

I hope they make it.

Reapers In the Fall

I was given some seeds for some "super-hot" peppers last winter. I had a heck of a time getting them to germinate.

Seriously, I started them during the last week of December 2017 for the summer 2018 growing season. Apparently, that wasn't early enough.

Yellow Reaper

Out of five varieties, and maybe a dozen seeds each, I got one plant from each of two varieties.

I have been told that super-hots mature more slowly. But this is ridiculous.

It's now the middle of October. I'm tearing things out of my garden, getting it ready for winter.

Carolina Reaper

And only NOW do these guys begin to blossom.

OK. Well, they're in the greenhouse. Maybe they'll produce something.

I plan to keep it from freezing this winter, so it's very likely that the plants will survive to next year.

And if they do, then they'll have a running start on next year's growth.

So I still have time to buy the gas mask and asbestos gloves.

A Retrospective

First experiment with raised beds started in 2010. It made for many jokes about graveyards, but it also sure made gardening easier.









Note that this is regular hem-fir. We refused to use treated lumber. (That treatment is poison; we didn't favor growing our family's food in the midst of poison.)








Didn't use cedar because cedar's expensive! And it isn't really suitable for direct burial.










2011 saw the addition of chips between the beds.











Good results in the garden, while we built the greenhouse. Also 2011.









2012:  I doubled the height of the raised beds, added a couple of inches of really dry meadow muffins, and watered the garden. I'll dig it into the dirt later.











2013  saw the demise of the flowering plum that shaded the west end of the garden.

Miss that tree (and that tree house). Used the stump for a fireplace while we burned it out.
















2018: all the wood beds have pretty well rotted by now. We're gradually replacing them with galvanized steel on top of cinder blocks.








This brought the working height up to old-guy range. We had to buy a lot of dirt, which means we had to shovel a lot of dirt, which is awfully good exercise.

Seems to work pretty well.

One bed to go: when the garlic is ready, we'll harvest it and replace the remains of that wood with cinder blocks and galvanized steel, and the upgrades will be done.

The Garden in June

It's June now, and the garden is filling out nicely. It looks full, but there's not much (except salad) that's ready to eat now.

The stock tanks are amazing. Far easier to work with.

There are three avocado trees; no fruit on these yet. The olive and lemons are looking very promising!


The trellis for the peas is getting quite bushy. I'm eager for them to ripen. Kind of a neat entry into the garden.










Herb garden, part one.

That's our picnic table back in there, right behind the basil bed.

Sage on the far end, next to the blueberry bush. That blueberry is doing remarkably poorly this year. Every time it rains, the busted gutter drains a lot of the water on top of the berry; that may be a problem. That's on the honeydo list this year.

This is the second part of the herb garden. The plants in the ground are herbs.

Hanging, we have some herbs, some nasturtiums (spicy!), some tomatoes (not ripe yet), and some cucumbers.


















This is the new patio behind the garage. Making use of the small space.

I was concerned that the pomegranate tree had died. It's coming back. We put the wood on the chain link gate to keep the wind from whipping through there. I think that helped it freeze last winter.

Kiwis growing on the fence, sunflowers up against it. Tomatoes in the hanging pots, more herbs in the pots on the shelf on the fence. 

I've been experimenting with trying to add flowers around the edges. We'll see how that goes. I'll certainly need to water much of that, but it should be worth it.

Inside the greenhouse, things are calmer than earlier in the spring. All the 'maters and squashes are out. The pepper bed is doing well; I have a couple of cucumbers growing around the peppers in there, and a couple of tomatoes in the back.

I'll probably keep starting things far too long into the year. It's just so interesting! Currently, I have four mystery seeds going, and some giant asparagus things from a seed pod I found in a public garden.

Early May Planting

Early May rolls around, and it's time to put things into the garden. Well, theoretically, Mother's day is that official "no more frost" date, but the forecast is for excellent weather. 

It all goes out this weekend.

This  is the tomato bed. It's tough to see in a photo, but there's a trellis of fencing wire in the middle.

Legend

Behind the trellis are the San Marzano, cooking tomatoes.

In front, in two rows (yeah, probably too densely packed!) are slicing tomatoes: mostly a determinate heirloom variety called Legend (I haven't grown many determinate tomatoes) and three plants of an indeterminate heirloom variety called Brandywine.

Brandywine

Brandywine's can get pretty big. A couple years back, I had a nearly two-pound Brandywine tomato! Brandywine is also the taste test winner. Yummy!

I'm experimenting with planting cucumbers to vine around the base of the tomatoes. We'll see how that works out.

I'm going to have to learn more about pruning determinate tomatoes. 


Then there is the squash bed.

This one's 8' in diameter. Since the middle is tough to reach, we stuck a rosemary plant there, so we don't have to weed that spot.

I've got German / Hokkaido pumpkins, Honey-Nut, Carnival squash, Hubbard squash (all winter squash), and two zucchini and a pattypan (summer squash).

They're not the same, but I had to put the cantaloupes somewhere. So there are two of those here, and two more in a hanging basket. And a couple of peppers as an experiment, to stand above the squashes.

This is the front salad bed, with the raspberries out front. Peas in the back (on a trellis), spinach, beets, romaine lettuce, kale, parsley & cilantro.

Home grown lettuce is pretty darned good!


There will be some sunflowers here and there to liven things up, mostly on the north end of beds, but there are some volunteers here and there. (Hmm. I keep meaning to plant beans to climb the sunflowers. Haven't remembered that yet.)