July 25 harvest

Today's harvest:



Looks like roasted veggies are for dinner tomorrow :)

Lots and lots of green tomatoes on the vines, none ripe yet! Cukes are doing great, harvested just 2 so far but there are many more that are almost ready waiting on the vine!

Cukes & tomatoes

Some cucumbers that survived Chuck's hungry rampage through the garden:




Early Girls coming along:


and Yellow Pears just getting started ...


Of course, even my Early Girls didn't outpace my nextdoor neighbor's Big Boys. They have already eaten 15 or 20 beefsteaks! At least I can hope for the first cukes on the block ... haven't heard of anyone else growing any :)

OK ... off to work!

Bell pepper & baby tomatillos

One of my bell peppers is getting pretty big!


and here's a baby tomatillo:

Tomatoes growing

Mmmmm ...

Groundhog day

I have a problem with a groundhog.

I have heard the neighbors with gardens complaining about a groundhog who lives on my block. I'm going to name him Chuck for the sake of this blog. Well, Chuck kept eating my lettuce to the ground as soon as it came up, until eventually (in desparation) I planted something else in its spot. I thought he subsequently found a new mealtime locale. My next door neighbor, who has a large kitchen garden, patrols his garden daily. He has been making frequent groundhog sightings and has updated me a few times on the groundhog's most recent reported "meals". Well, I'm reporting now that Chuck LOVES cucumbers.

Just on Sunday I took pictures of baby cucumbers growing on my seven plants. I probably counted 50 babies. Well, today I counted 5. Every other tiny cucumber had been eaten right off the vine, flower and all! Occasionally Chuck had the audacity to leave about half of the cuke on the vine.



Today I spent my lunch break researching groundhog prevention tactics. Recommended strategies included

- Scare tactics: scarecrows, owl statues, pinwheels, automatic lights, etc.
- Fences: which need to be 1 foot deep and 3 foot tall to prevent digging and jumping
- Smelly stuff: one recommendation was combining 1 tsp hot sauce with 1 gallon water and spraying it all over the plants. Someone else suggested planting mint at the perimeter because groundhogs don't like the smell. I'm certainly not planting mint at the perimeter, it will take over the garden!
- Moving groundhog's home: trapping, blocking his tunnel, etc.

I may try the hot sauce technique to preserve my few remaining cukes and perhaps my sweet peppers in case he might be interested in those too. I did happen upon this article from the Humane Society: Getting Groundhogs Out of Gardens.

Burrows

Groundhogs hibernate from October through February, and their breeding season begins soon after they wake up. If you must evict a groundhog from a burrow under your house, porch, or other building, do so shortly after they've emerged from hibernation or wait until late summer, after the young have been weaned and are living on their own.

These humane harassment techniques will encourage groundhogs to move along:

* Partially dig out the entrances to the burrow (there are usually several) and clear away surrounding vegetation.

* Put urine-soaked kitty litter (the clumping kind works well) inside all burrow entrances. The strong odor often causes them to vacate the premises.

* Place a one-way door at the main entrance to the burrow. This lets the groundhog safely exit but not return.

After the animal has left the burrow, loosely pack the entrances with grass or similar material. If it remains undisturbed for three to five days, you can assume the burrow is unoccupied. Permanently close it by excavating the areas around the entrances and burying square sections of heavy gauge welded wire at least 1 foot deep across all entrances.

Is "humane harrassment technique" an oxymoron?

Garden Progress 7/10

I pulled 9 days' worth of weeds today that accumulated while we were on vacation. The garden exploded in the warm weather while we were away. Here is a "before" picture from June 25, just before we left:



and here it is today on July 10:



Here is the progress of my various plants thus far:

Carrots (Danvers Half Long): Direct-seeded 5/31; sprouted in 2 weeks; greens about 8-10 inches tall now.


Green onions: Harvested 14 so far, all good to eat; planting sets continuously to replace harvested onions.

Radishes: Harvested 16 so far; 10 were good to eat and the others were woody or the roots never bulbed out. Replanting continuously to replace harvested plants.

Beets (Ruby Queen): Soaked seeds overnight and direct-seeded 6/14/10. Not too impressive so far, perhaps 4-6 inches tall.

Eggplant (Gretel): Many leaves, no flowers. Transplanted from nursery 6/13.

Eggplant (Ichiban): 1 flower. Transplanted from nursery 6/20.

Tomatoes (Roma, Early Girl, Yellow Pear, Valley Girl, Rutgers): Transplanted the Early Girl from the nursery 6/10. All the others were grown from seed, started indoors on 4/3, and planted out 6/13. All of the tomato plants have flowers, but only Early Girl has fruit so far. Surprisingly, my Yellow Pear tomato has overtaken the Roma as the biggest plant in the garden.

Pepper (Chili Red): Transplanted from nursery 6/13. Flowers, no fruit.

Pepper (California Wonder): Started from seed indoors 4/3, planted out 6/13. Flowers, no fruit.

Pepper (Bell Boy): Transplanted from nursery 6/10. 2 fruits developing and many flowers (see yesterday's post for a picture).

Pepper (Cayenne): Transplanted from nursery 6/20. 2 long thin fruits growing, plus several flowers.

Tomatillo: Started from seed 4/6, planted out 6/13. I have 2 plants and both are flowering. I need both to survive the summer because they are apparently self-infertile, so you need a minimum of 2 plants. They have cute little yellow and purple flowers all over. Today I saw some bumblebees visiting them!


Cucumber: Direct-seeded in garden 5/31. I have 7 plants in the back of the garden and while they don't take up much space, they try to take over by lassoing the other plants. It's too bad I was away and could not train them up the trellis as well as I'd have liked. Today I carefully unwound their tendrils from neighboring tomatoes and shrubs, and tried to weave the plants gently through the trellis instead. I don't want to do anything too drastic because there are baby cukes everywhere!

Welcome to the jungle!

We were traveling this week and have just returned home after 8 days away. The plants got huge! A plant-sitter came by and watered the garden and it looks like he kept just about everything alive. I'm pretty pleased because it was very hot and sunny the whole time we were gone!

The cucumbers and tomatoes have really grown. The cucumbers each just had a few leaves when we left, and now they each have many leaves, flowers and baby cucumbers. There are also some baby tomatoes and peppers.





Minor weeding and grooming may be necessary tomorrow, but altogether not bad progress during our vacation.

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: