June begins... garden tour

 An annotated tour of the garden beds and plantings as of June 4th 2023...

The lunchbox mini-peppers, planted in one of my large blue pots, just transplanted this past weekend.  I have fertilized them and need to do so again for them to thrive.

The peas, which refused to anchor on the wood fence after all and now are sprawling across the other white planter, from which I harvested the last of the baby bok choy a week or so ago.  I've thought of re-seeding with spinach but I think it's too hot now.  Not sure what will go here, need to put something in or reclaim the dirt and put away the planter.

Lots and lots of gladiolas in a pot too small for them.  By the fall I will figure out where to put them for realz and they will (I hope) forgive me for an overly crowded summer.

Sunchokes are coming up great!  I look forward to an abundant crop.

The zinnias are doing well, though something has munched some leaves on a few of them.

Cosmos, Sonata Mix, are budding and generally happy.

My lemon balm is really coming along.  I look forward to fresh lemon balm tisanes this summer, maybe with some of the spearmint added.

The ground cherry has started being much happier now that the weather has warmed up.  Let's see how big it can get in the pot.  I should plant it in dirt next year.

The orange balm gets about 2 hours less light daily than the lemon balm, and you can really see the difference in how it's lagging behind on growth.  I hope it will do well enough to try some in a tisane later in the summer.

Clockwise from bottom left: cube of butter summer squash, calendula, angel baby spaghetti squash, candystick dessert delicata squash x 2, dickinson pumpkin, and corn.  Plus a nasturtium in the middle.

Lettuce leaf and mammolo genovese-type basils in front of tomatoes.  Queen of the Night, Paul Robeson, and Lucky Tiger.  Carrots planted on either side of the tomatoes and between them.  Calendula on the edge.

More calendula, a double row of mostly pencil pod yellow wax beans with a few capitano roma yellow beans (most didn't come up).  Opal and thai basils in front of the tomatoes, which are similarly interplanted with carrots as per the other bed. Dr Wyche's yellow, honeydrop cherry, Speckled Roman which I thought was dying and a San Marzano II (much smaller plant) next to it that I bought to replace it.    

But wait, there's more!  Clockwise from top left, honeynut butternut x 2, kurin kabocha x 3, more calendula, and a costata romanesco zuke, plus two more nasturtiums in the middle.

Peppers (Jimmy Nardello, Escamillo F1 Yellow, Carmen F1 Red, Golden Star yellow bell) and eggplants (Listada de Gandia, Rosa Bianca, Bride, Long Purple)!  Between them, sugar snap peas and two kinds of cucumbers, Burpless and Dragon's Egg.  Center front, a pair of French marigolds.  Tucked in at the back corners, two Early Girl icebox watermelons, one on each side.  Yeah, that's a busy bed, I will be fertilizing regularly.

On either side in the back, lettuces that I got as a six-pack and transplanted.  They need to come out soon before they bolt.  Plus more sugar snap peas and the two types of cukes.  In the foreground, four kinds of beets! Merlin, Robin, Boldor golden, and Chiogga.  Tucked in near the back, to hopefully vine up the trellis, two kinds of melon: Hara Madhu and Madhu Ras.

The herbs are doing great! Front to back, alternating left to right: borage, chocolate mint, stevia, spearmint, chives, parsley, sage, summer savory, and then I forget, but including rosemary, thyme, oregano, and marjoram.  You can tell what I got from starts vs raised from seeds!

Last but not least, the humble potato, in grow bags.  Need to roll up the sides of the two middle ones, started later in the season, and hill them up.  To-do this week sometime!

So much has happened...

 

Here is the garden, at about 7pm shaded by the maple tree to the west of our yard.  All six beds are built and filled (7 cu yd of soil), three cattle panel trellises have been constructed between pairs of beds, and 3.5 cu yd of mulch has been applied over the cardboard around and between the beds.  Phew!!  

At this point I have either transplanted or started in the beds over 20 cultivars:

1. Tomatoes
2. Basil (thai, opal, lettuce leaf, genovese)
3. Peppers
4. Eggplants
5. Cucumbers
6. Cantalope
7. Honeydew Melon
8. Watermelon
9. Carrots (orange, red, and purple)
10. Beets (red, yellow, and chiogga)
11. Pumpkin
12. Winter Squash (kabocha, delicata, honeynut)
13. Spaghetti Squash
14. Sweet Corn
15. Lettuce (romaine, red ruffled, green ruffled)
16. Potatoes (in grow bags)
17. Sunchokes (ditto)
18. Ground Cherry (in a big pot)
19. Baby Bok Choy (green fortune, purple lady)
20. Peas
21. Beans (capitano, pencil pod yellow wax)
22. Spinach

I've also been starting annual and perennial flowers.  Out and transplanted are nasturtiums, calendula, marigolds, cosmos, and zinnias.  Still growing in starter packs are yarrow, echinacea, daisy, rudbeckia, viola, and alyssum.

Did I mention the herb garden?  In pots, some from starts I bought, some from starts I grew:

1. Spearmint
2. Chocolate mint
3. Borage
4. Sage
5. Rosemary
6. Thyme
7. Oregano
8. Marjoram
9. Chives
10. Summer Savory
11. Orange Balm
12. Lemon Balm
13. Parsley

So that's why I haven't been blogging for a month.  Phew!

Garden progress!

 

We have all the large beds built, and four of them have hardware cloth. Today we will put hardware cloth in the other two beds, and then we will be ready to move that 7.1 cubic yards of dirt into the beds. I will call Lane Forest products on Monday and arrange for the dirt delivery. We are going to spread a huge tarp out on our front lawn and ask them to drop it on the lawn. We don't want it dropped on the street!

The tomatoes are hardened off and ready to plant. Some of them didn't fare so well outdoors, I wasn't as gentle hardening them off as I should have been. Part of the problem is they were too tall to go into the little greenhouse that I was going to build, a kit off Amazon. Next year I will wait to start my tomatoes until April 15th so that they won't grow too large for my seedling starting area before it's time to plant!

Meanwhile, the peppers and eggplants are doing fabulously on the laundry room shelf. I used only three of the six grow lights in the kit to make this more of a holding area unless of a grow indoors greenhouse area. So far so good, I think the plants will not grow up to the top of the lights before it's time to put them out on June 1st. The tomatoes had grown right through the top of the wire shelves so I had to put them out before I was really ready.

The planter gardens are going strong. Potatoes up in the grow bags, peas and spinach in the top long planter, green and purple baby bok choy in the bottom long planter, and my gladiolas coming up in the blue pot.  

The next round of potatoes are ready to be planted, they have chitted out some nice strong green sprouts.  French fingerling and Burbank russet.

In the ongoing game of dominos, getting the tomatoes outside meant I could get the eggplants and peppers into the laundry room which meant I could start another round of seeds in the kitchen shelf. I have a dozen different herbs, plus basils, plus some flowers. 

The three containers in the back row on the right hand side are the flowers, calendula, cosmos, and French marigolds. You can see they are all coming up! In the back row to the left, the French thyme is up and I have some basil up in the front. You can't quite see it in the picture but also in the front there are one or two bits of marjoram starting to peek up above the soil.

I probably should have gotten herb starts from the local plant stores, since a three or four inch pot is about the cost of a packet of seeds. But sometimes they are more expensive, you're not sure exactly what you're getting, and, well, seed catalog time is a crazy time. So I'm starting all my herbs from scratch. We will see how it goes!

I'm using the 3-in deep four cell containers from epic gardening. They have deep side slits for air pruning of roots, so that you don't end up with roots circling around the container in a big mess. I got them too late for my nightshade starts, but I intend to use them going forward. They're really sturdily made and I look forward to many years of use. 

The Excitement is Building

The old garden site has been leveled and weeded, and the first two 8.5 x 3 foot metal beds have been placed there.  They are oriented north-south, and we put half inch hardware cloth under them to keep moles and voles out.  We know we have either or both because we find the tunnels when we dig.  The beds are 15 inches high.

Two additional beds have been set down approximately where they will end up, so that we have an idea of the layout.  We need to mow the grass as short as possible and put down both hardware cloth and a layer of cardboard under the beds.  The latter will take care of the grass.  I asked on the Pacific Northwest Gardeners group on Facebook, and folks had seen lawn grass grow up through 2 feet of raised bed, and regretted not putting down cardboard first.  OK!  

The final pair of beds are not yet built, but will go in the foreground of the picture above, in line with the beds on the dirt.  The edge of one bed will be about 6 inches onto the dirt on the line where the dirt stops and the lawn begins.  Remember too that the 4-foot space between pairs of beds will be occupied by a cattle panel trellis that arches from one side to the other.  The trellises will probably be built after we fill the beds, as they would be in the way of filling them.

Our target date for having the beds filled with soil and ready to plant is mid-May. We should be able to manage that.  Drip irrigation etc will take a bit longer, but we are planning what is needed and will be trenching for it before we lay down cardboard and wood chips on the paths between garden beds.  I will miss out on some spring crops, but should still be able to sow beets, chard, carrots, maybe some late peas, more spinach, and I have a set of onion starts that may last until I can get them into the beds.

Meanwhile, my six tomato seedlings continued to grow like crazy under the LED grow lights.  They were shading out the eggplants and peppers, so they had to be up-potted to gallon nursery pots and put on a new shelf.  I used only half of the second pack of lights, just 3 of them, in the hopes that it will slow down their growth until it's safe to put them out in our cheezy prefab plastic-over-metal-shelves greenhouse.  The seedling's roots were just reaching the bottom of the 4-inch white plastic pots, so I repotted them at just the right time!

The eggplants and peppers are much happier without their pushy tomato neighbors.  I plan to up-pot these to saved 16oz yogurt and cottage cheese containers soon, once I have time to drill the drainage holes into the containers.  I'm fertilizing both sets of seedlings weekly with fish emulsion (half a tsp in a half gallon of water) and they are loving it.

Outside in the white planters, spinach, peas, and baby bok choy are coming up!  Look closely and you can see the Purple Lady bok choy along side the Green Fortune ones.  No sign yet of my potatoes or gladiolas, but I'm sure they're busy down there under the soil.

Super excited by the garden buildout and things growing!  I can hardly wait to get to the next stage!

Planters to the Rescue!

 

My garden isn't ready yet, but I have planters! I can plant things! 

Big gardening day!  I planted many things in planters: Carola and German Butterball potatoes in grow bags, gladiola bulbs in a large pot, and Super Sugar Snap peas, Catalina Baby spinach, and two kinds of baby bok choi (Purple Lady and Green Jewel) in the long white planters.  

I scattered the bok choi on the surface of the soil, and then lightly sprinkled soil to cover it.  I read an article on seed germination recently that said seed depth is critical, as a small seed planted too deep can use all its energy without breaking out of the surface.  I think that’s why so few of my bok choi came up in California, I planted them in holes poked with a chopstick that were probably a half inch deep.

I hope we can start working on the raised bed garden soon, but for now I feel good that at least I have planted some spring greens.

This is the first time I've grown potatoes, and the first time I've used grow bags.  I rolled down the edges to make a shallower pot so I can hill up the potatoes as they grow by rolling up the edges and adding soil or straw.  I've seen videos on YouTube from both Ben at GrowVeg and Kevin at Epic Gardening, so I think (haha?) that I know what I'm doing.  I planted an extra German Butterball potato in one of the pots, crowding them a little, because supposedly you get a bigger crop of smaller potatoes.  I prefer cooking with little potatoes that I can just wash and halve or quarter.  

I had to leave my gorgeous pink gladiolas in California, since I didn't want to risk bringing agricultural pests with them, and they had already started to sprout in December.  I bought a large pink and purple assortment at Jerry's Hardware, and planted them in my big planter.  This is not a long-term planting-- they are much too crowded.  I will take them in next winter and then replant them in the spring, either in multiple pots, or in the ground.   The bulbs are about the size of a half ping pong ball.  My 15+ years old ones in California were as big as small onions, and kept throwing pups that would grow large too.  I hope to have many years of beauty from these new gladiolas.

Things are growing!

 

We are not much closer to having a garden. One thing we did accomplish last weekend was to measure and put in stakes for where the beds are going.  We established that the placement of the beds will not interfere with Mike's ham radio antenna guy lines and antenna tie downs. It seems like it's going to be a tremendous amount of work to level off that old garden bed, but Mike says it will not be that difficult. 

We have started saving cardboard to put down between the beds and mulch over. I have heard multiple people say that it doesn't work over time, and the only thing that really works is black plastic with mulch over it. I understand that, but I don't really want to mess with the groundwater absorption by putting black plastic between all the beds. So I will just have to weed after the cardboard decays.

My tomato, pepper, and eggplant seedlings continue to do well, with most of them having true leaves now. I have rearranged the pots to put the tomatoes on the outside, since they were starting to shade the eggplants and peppers. The New Hanover ground cherries are finally up, and I have thinned them down to one for now. I usually wait until they are larger to thin, but a whole clump of them had come up within the size of a quarter.

I'm a little concerned that some of the tomatoes are crinkly around the leaf edges. Perhaps I am fertilizing too much. I will not use fertilizer the next time I water them.  The foliage is also a lighter green than I would like, and I don't know if that's because it's just new growth or if maybe my lights are not as good as I hoped. I will continue to monitor the situation.

The potatoes that I set out a few weeks ago to chit in the light are starting to do well. One set has sprouts that are thick and green and over a quarter inch long. I have read that means it's okay to go ahead and plant them. So this weekend I will get out one of my new potato growing fabric pots and plant that group.  

I'm really new at this potato stuff. I have read that one can cut the potatoes so that there's an eye in each major clump, and then let them dry and plant them. I'm kind of afraid to cut into them! Plus they are going into the same grow bag, so would it really make sense?

The latest arrivals are my rhubarb crowns. You can see one of them is raring to go, and I need to plant those this weekend as well. I will plant the two crowns in two different places to increase my odds of getting a successful crop. I still don't have a really good feel for what areas are shady in the summer, so I will plant one over by the shed where it will get afternoon shade from the shed. We had rhubarb outside the back porch when I was growing up, but it was just there when we bought the house. We never really tended it except to harvest some of it in the summer.  

These are "crimson red" from Renee's seeds.  There were a couple of other cultivars I was looking for, but they were two or three times the price and I decided, how much flavor variation can there be in rhubarb anyway? Renee's had a pair of crowns for $19.95 plus $6.95 shipping. Most other places were selling single crowns for at least $10 more for the crown and closer to $11 for shipping. Crimson red was still pretty high on the list of good cultivars, so I'm happy.

Fish Emulsion! Good Stuff!

 

It's amazing what a little fish emulsion in the water can do for your seedlings, even if you're using potting soil with fertilizers in it.  Most of the seedlings doubled in size over the past 3 days.  Good stuff!!  Be sure to dilute to half the usual strength for indoor use.  I'm using a quarter teaspoon in a half gallon of water.

I've thinned the tomato seedlings down to one per pot, and as soon as I see some good true leaves from the peppers and eggplants, I'll thin those as well.  Still no sign of the New Hanover Ground Cherries in the lower left corner, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  They can take a LONG time to germinate.