Yours Truly has been a bit busy lately, so I apologize that I haven't been posting updates. But I'm here now, so here it goes. By the way, we've all been real busy and working hard on the garden!
The garden is at the point that we are making second plantings into the rows. That is, we are harvesting a crop, tilling in compost/lime/bone meal/ash/biochar, and planting the second crops. In fact, in a few places we are already planting the third crop! Yikes!
This past two weeks have been big harvests. Lots of onions, potatoes, chard, cabbages, kohlrabi, radishes, daikon, snow peas, and green beans. But of course, those green beans are not always green. Naw, we have green but also purple and red!! Oh, so pretty!
New item: tomatoes. Our first grape tomatoes are now turning red. We've been able to harvest small amounts for two weeks now.
New Item: pointed cabbages. I've never seen the pointed varieties before. Might be a little odd looking, but everyone who has tasted them says that they were delicious.
New Item: we planted tumeric a while back, but we more or less forgot about it because nothing seemed to happen. Well, today while working on the gourd patch we found lots of tumeric plants popping up through the surface. Relief....we didn't plant it wrong. Guess it just wasn't time for it to sprout.
New crops being put in include potatoes, mustard spinach, yellow beets, white beets, red beets, long French breakfast radishes, daikon, dill, long green eggplant, fat black eggplant, frying sweet peppers, white patty pan squash, and watermelon.
Diane spent the day starting new seeds in the hoop house. The house had gotten pretty empty there, so we needed to focus on filling it up again. I haven't seen exactly what she started, but I did see that there are lots of new trays added to the growing benches.
Working in the garden has been rewarding, but it is also pleasant. We are growing some flowering plants to add to the garden just for the beauty, just to make us smile. We have a few marking the ends of rows, but we are also starting to line the sides of the major walking paths. Geraniums, petunias, cosmos, sweet william, and others that I've forgotten their names. It is so nice to be working along hunched over a green bean bed, picking beans, when behold you come face to face with a purple and white petunia all covered with flowers. Can't help but stand up with a big silly smile across your face. And it feels so good!
July 14th
There is a storm off the coast that is pushing hot winds our way, with lots of bright sun. Alas, no rain. It's the rain we could surely use! So for only the second time since January, we have had to resort to giving the entire garden a nice watering. Sun and warmth, combined with the strong winds is drying everything out.
This coming week will be devoted to making as much mulch as we possibly can. Once the ground is watered, the mulch will keep much of the moisture there.
July 30th
The harvests now include chard, spinach mustard, savoy cabbage, broccoli, radishes, leeks, chinese mustard, fingerling potatoes, sweet potatoes, snow peas, cucumbers, green beans, grape tomatoes, kale, aztec spinach, and carrots. Plus lots of different herbs. Sue J also has harvested a total of 9 gourds so far wih more to be ready sometime in August.
This month we are happy to announce that we have been able to supply fresh vegetables to families in both Oceanview and Naalehu. We have been getting some requests from the Pahala area and plan to expand the garden in order to help those Ka'u residents out, too.
About 200 sweet potato slips arrived from the Sandhill Preservation Farm. We are really excited about having lots of new sweet potato varieties to try here in Hawaii. We don't know how well they will do in our area, but we are giving them a try. Today we have all slips planted and watered in. Now time will tell which do best.
We have started erecting the trellising for the pipinolas. Also known as chayote, pipinola grows really well here. Each plant produces numerous squash-like pipinolas, and it can grow continuously for a long time. The tender shoot tips are also good to eat.
We found a variety of carrot that grows super well. Yaya. It is consistently out preforming all the others we have tried so far. So it looks like Yaya will be one we will add to our "keeper" list.
The tumeric is finally growing. It took quite a long time to come up. But since none of us has tried growing it before, we don't know if that was normal or not. But the plants now look good and are getting quite large.
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