August 5, 2014

So here we are, August. It's been three months since we started over. In just three months we have a 75' x 125' garden developed. Not bad! And were still expanding. In fact, it won't be long before we really have to expand because we're outgrowing the first allotted space already. 

So what's in the garden so far?
Roma tomatoes
Sweet peppers
Hawaiian chili peppers
Three kinds of eggplant
Snow peas
Snap peas
Bush green beans
Pole green beans
Radishes
Turnips
Daikon
Broccoli
Chinese kale
Carrots
Yacon
Taro
Onions
Leeks
Potatoes
Several basils
Sage
Rosemary
A couple types of mint
Golden purslane
Cucumbers

Watermelon
Zucchini
White summer squash (doing poorly though)

Pineapples

(Above, new pineapple plants we added today.)

Ok, we don't have a lot of each one of those, but we have some. And as we open up more space, we'll devote more room to the varieties that we like. We still have lots more that we are ready to add. As each new bed gets created, it quickly gets planted with another crop of something.

(Above, we just added watermelon seedlings to the garden.) 

The garden is already bigger than what we had at the previous location. Without having to deal with the pasture grasses, we are able to spend our time on our vegetables instead. As a result we are going to be able to maintain a much larger garden.

 

As I mentioned, the white summer squash is doing poorly. Every plant except for one has succumbed to some sort of disease that has rotted up the crown. The plants are goners. 

We are trying to experiment with the leeks. Rather than hilling the soil up around the plants, we hope to blanch the stalks some other way. Our first try will be to wrap a cardboard roll around each plant. 

We'll see how well this works. 

The tomato plants are doing fairly well considering they are growing in unimproved rocky soil. I wasn't expecting much from them. But they are loaded with green tomatoes. Surprise! 

Remember the goat attack? He had eaten these bok choy pretty badly. We had trimmed off the half eaten leaves, and now they've grown back to the point that we are harvesting the biggest ones. 

The new bean trellis has bean plants! The beans have popped up, and so have the radishes we seeded beside them. Those radishes will be harvested long before the bean plants are very big. We didn't seed the entire trellis bed all at the same time. We plan to plant it in four sections, each planted two weeks apart. We want to see how staggered plantings on pole beans works out on the harvesting. 

A sign tells other volunteers not to sow anything in this bed. 

Today we emptied one of the grow boxes that we as been using to produce sweet potato cuttings. The soil level had sunk down to the point that it only filled the box halfway. Time to redo the box. So we opened the box, harvested the sweet potatoes......not many because we had stunted the plants by taking so many tip cuttings. But we knew that in advance, so we didn't expect any tubers, but we actually got a few. We then shoveled out the soil using it to top off two other grow boxes that we made....the far two in the photo above. Now those two boxes are ready for planting. Re-closing the box we took apart, we began dumping organic debris in it again. It's the front box in the photo, and you can see the weeds and cardboard lunch plates. The cycle starts all over again. 

We noticed our first attack of leaf borers. They are in the watermelon leaves. There are three in the leaf above, two close together and one off by itself. You can make out the light colored line that us the tunnel they have eaten inside the leaf. Since this one leaf isn't all that important to the plant, we opted to simply remove and destroy it. Another option would have been to use a fingernail to kill the little leaf borer at the end of its tunnel, thus saving the leaf. 

Today's harvest included bok choy, onions, green beans, zucchini squash, cucumbers, and some cool looking pink potatoes from Peru. One of the cukes was an interesting joined double ....