Green onion harvest

I harvested my first round of scallions today:



Yum! That brings my total harvest up to:

16 radishes
9 scallions

Radishes and scallions are all I have for spring vegetables this year, because I started my garden so late and because a hungry groundhog ate all my lettuce ... but I am looking forward to summer harvests: peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, carrots, beets, tomatillos, and cucumbers! The plants that are blooming now are:

Bell Boy pepper (70 days)
Early Girl tomato (52 days)
Yellow Pear tomato (75 days)
Tomatillo (60 days)
Cayenne pepper (73 days)

No flowers yet on these:

Ichiban eggplant (60 days)
Gretel eggplant (55 days)
Rutgers tomato (73 days)
Grape tomato (60 days)
Roma tomato (85 days)
California Wonder pepper (70 days)
Double Feature Hybrid Cucumber (50-57 days)

My Roma tomato plants, in particular, have really gotten huge! I am worried about the one-foot spacing. The leaves of adjacent tomato plants are already overlapping and it's only June. The bed is only 3 feet wide, so hopefully that will help with airflow between the plants. Luckily, the eggplants, peppers, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, and onions have all behaved themselves so far and stayed in their respective squares. I suppose I can always prune the tomatoes a bit if they get too out-of-hand.

My herbs are looking pretty happy in the summer sunshine. Here are a few pictures:

My mint plant, which my mum gave me when I first moved into my apartment, and which comes back every year:


A little pot of basil, with rosemary peeking out from the background:


Dill, which took off as soon as the weather warmed up:


and a little bit of cilantro:

Tomatillos

I just wanted to show a few pictures of my tomatillo plants today. They are forming buds already! Here is one of the plants and a tiny bud:





The bud almost looks like a tiny, papery balloon almost like the husk that grows on the ripe fruits. I heard that you need two tomatillo plants to get any tomatillos, because the plants are self-infertile and can't pollinate other flowers on the same plant. I have exactly two plants, but one has no buds yet. Hopefully it will catch up to its brother soon!

Before and After: June 26

Right end of raised bed on June 13:


Right end of raised bed on June 26:


Left end of raised bed on June 13:


Left end of raised bed on June 26:

Update on garden

Looking pretty good!

First harvest!

My first harvest: 4 radishes harvested June 21. So excited!



They were delicious, too!

A few new plants & a baby cucumber

After some investigation online, I think that I planted my lettuce much too late for it to grow well. I was hopeful because Bibb lettuce is said to be heat-tolerant, but this morning my little lettuce plants barely had their first sets of true leaves, and one of the four had already been eaten to the ground by some kind of critter - and it's already mid-June!

I also had one bell pepper in the garden that simply had not grown at all since I transplanted it. It was a California Wonder that I grew from seed, and when I planted it it was the same size as the others, but today it was dwarfed by the others and still had just a few leaves.

I hardly wanted to waste 2 precious square feet of my garden on an undersized pepper plant and a crop of lettuce that was certain to bolt! So off I went to the nursery to pick up two new plants.

I ended up choosing an Ichiban Eggplant and a Cayenne Pepper plant. Ichiban was recommended in my container gardening book, "The Bountiful Container", since it grows well in small spaces, so I thought I'd put that one in the square foot where the lettuce used to be. I also uprooted the underperforming bell pepper and replaced it with the Cayenne Pepper transplant from the nursery, which was already much bigger than my bell pepper. I debated what to do with the bell pepper I had pulled up, and I couldn't bring myself to throw the little guy in the woods. I put him in a medium sized pot, and I hope he takes advantage of his second chance!

Here's my garden today, June 20th, with the new plants in place:





I was also really excited to see my first baby cucumber growing:



I must admit, I did not master the art of cucumber growing this year. I started cucumbers indoors when I started my tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables. Big mistake! Cucumbers grow so, so fast and before I knew it I was repotting them in 6-inch pots. Here's a picture of the cucumber plants on April 25th, 22 days after starting them from seed:



... and then just a month later, on May 30th, they looked like this:



They were all over the place! There was no way to harden them off, because they were sprawled out everywhere and their little tendrils had lassoed anything they could find: the windowpanes, each other, the wire shelving I had set them on ... since they could not be moved, I was forced to leave them indoors. I started over by direct-seeding new plants in the raised bed in the beginning of June, and those plants are doing great. But I left my original cukes in their pots indoors just to see what would happen. I have to pollinate by hand, but it looks like they are growing cucumbers despite the low sunlight on the windowsill. When my outdoors cukes start producing, these guys have GOT to go, but for now I'll let them try their best. Lesson learned though: do NOT start cucumbers in the beginning of April with the tomatoes. I should have started at most 2 weeks before planting outside.

My Bell Boy has begun flowering, happily. The transplants from the nursery are apparently somewhat ahead of my starts, so I'm pretty happy about that and I hope I'll have fruit to pick next month :)

Garden Progress April - June

Since it's already June and I'm just starting my journal now, I guess it'd be appropriate to give a quick update of my progress thus far. I started planting my seeds in early April, in a Jiffy tray. Here's a picture of my garden-to-be on April 10th, including a few stragglers from Summer 2009 that made it through the winter (debatably).



When the baby plants outgrew their peat pellets, I potted them up in 6 inch pots to get them through April and May. Here's a picture of a baby tomato on April 25th.



Here in Zone 5 we have pretty long winters but we can "officially" plant outside around Memorial Day. Here are some of my plants on May 30, nearly ready to go out and face the world!



I was really interested in planting a garden in a raised bed. Last year I only planted in pots, and the production was somewhat disappointing. I was so excited when we got permission from the landlord to build a raised bed. James built the whole thing over Memorial Day Weekend, and he did a great job! He constructed it from landscape timbers. The interior dimensions are 8' x 3' (24 sq. feet total).



The next thing to do was, of course, to plan my garden! I planned the garden based on the "Square Foot Gardening" method. This was the result:



Tomatoes are my favorite, so I wanted a lot of them and several different kinds. I ended up planting grape tomatoes, Yellow Pear, Rutgers (heirloom), Roma, and Early Girl tomatoes. All of them are determinate, because I was worried about the huge, vining indeterminate tomatoes in the little square foot they are given in the plot. We have a short growing season anyways, so hopefully determinate is a good way to go.

I'm growing cucumbers on a trellis in the back of the raised bed. I have 7 plants in four square feet, so I hope they're productive little guys.

I grew bell peppers (California Wonder) and Jalapeno peppers from seed, but I supplemented with two peppers from the nursery (Bell Boy and Chili Red). My hot peppers usually do great but the ones I grew from seed seemed to really struggle this year. The ones from the nursery looked much healthier.

The rest of the garden was filled in with things I wanted to try growing for the first time: green onions, a compact eggplant (Gretel), beets, carrots, lettuce, and radishes. I ran a row of dwarf marigolds down the front of the bed. Here's the raised bed garden on June 13, about a week after everything was planted:



In the past week or so, some of the plants have really taken off. Here's a picture from June 19.



Some of the radishes look nearly big enough to eat after just 17 days.



My Early Girl is flowering:



and there are even signs of life on last year's pepper plant!



The plants that didn't make the cut for the raised bed are parked on the front steps. Most of them seem pretty content thus far, although I did have a few casualties (a tomatillo and a pepper) from potting them up. Here are a few herbs growing happily on the steps: