Picked up all the various starts at the Tilth Alliance May Sale on Thursday -- which was vastly different this year, due to the coronavirus. No shopping in person. Instead, everyone shopped online, put in their orders, and chose a date to pick up their orders.

I did my usual and volunteered with Tilth. It's one of the things I really enjoy doing in the spring, and even though the sale was different this year, I still enjoyed it. I was supposed to be a plant packer -- taking someone's paper order and packing all the plants in that order. Instead, I started out as a loader -- pulling the packed orders and setting them out to be picked up -- along with Kieran, my middle son, who was volunteering (voluntold?) with me.

Then I was switched to order checking, which could be quite intense. The small orders were easy; but orders with 2 or more flats got increasingly complex. I even got to watch someone pack my order, and then another person check my order.

So Thursday the plants came home. Thursday evening I took an online class with Tilth on drip irrigation systems . . . the next project!

Friday, most of the plants went in: tomatoes, peppers, summer and winter squash, broccoli, kale, collard greens, kohlrabi, lettuce, braising greens and spicy salad mixes, mustard, and chard. In the process, I got a wicked sunburn.

Saturday I put in the beets, which was all I could stand to do in the heat, especially with Friday's sunburn.

Sunday was onion day. Onions are always a lot of work: first I have to separate them, which is sometimes really delicate work; then I have to plant them individually -- which when you have 20 or more separate onions is so many little holes!

Oh, and earlier in the week we got the gate built!

So here are the most recent pictures of the finished garden. The only thing left to do now is to put in the drip irrigation.

Eastern Beds: Winter squash, tomatoes, peppers in the front bed;
broccoli, kale, collards, kohlrabi, lettuce to the back.
Wine barrels: front, nasturtiums, calendula, agastache;
back barrel, marigolds; center barrel TBD.

Through the garden gate (temporary)

Western beds: beans, radishes, carrots, celery, peas, beets in
the front bed; summer squash, onions, and various greens
in the back. The wine barrels contain strawberries (front)
and flowers (cosmos, bee balm, and flowering carrot) back.

Before we started!

Wow, I haven't posted on this in a LONG time. Of course, I haven't had a real garden in two years, so that might explain it!

So here we go, the new garden. Still in the building stages, so you'll get to see the progress!

We had to surround the garden bed with a temporary fence, as the dog loves to walk in the soft soil. We'll be building a fence to surround the whole garden later this week, and will eventually get a decorate metal gate cut by my friend Keith, who is a metalwork artisan by trade.

Tilling has begun

Finishing up the tilling

Ground is prepped and ready!

Landscape fabric down and center circle pavers laid

Path and gravel done!

All the gravel is down, and the first bed is built! 

The first bed, partially planted!

Mint, lemon balm, and rosemary

Early June 2015

So the garden is in full force. I'm struggling to keep up with the lettuce picking! I've picked 17 bags of lettuce, and picked 13 full heads of lettuce before they bolted. The mint and lemon balm are thriving, since I've been cutting them back in order to supply friends at work with herbs for their water!


Potatoes

 The potatoes are going nuts, and already flowering.

The squash and beans are burgeoning!



Artichokes, Hubbard squash, and an eggplant

The lettuce bed, some already harvested



Tomatoes, acorn squash, chard, garlic, shallots

Onions of various kinds; kale, kalette, broccolis, kohlrabi

The bush beans are flowering, and I already have (at last count) 9 squash set on the squash plants. I'm a little concerned for the cucumbers, since they seem to be getting a bit overwhelmed by the squash; but perhaps that will suit them well, so that they don't dry out as quickly as they did last year (fingers crossed, the bitter cucumbers were horrible!) Tomatoes are already blooming, and cherry tomatoes are already setting. The pole beans are diligently climbing the trellis, as well as anything they can reach. I had to pull one off of one of the tomatoes the other day and encourage it in another direction! I have three or four peppers already set on the plants as well. I've had to cut back most of the chard because of leaf miners; hopefully the current heat will discourage any more of them. I've had a battle with the aphids on the brassicas as always, but have discovered that early, intense, and repeated applicaations of neem oil (totally organic) does the trick. I had to pull one plant, though, that was tiny, weak, and totally infested. But since I have ample kale plants, I figured sacrificing one wasn't going to be a big issue. Now I just have to keep on top of the infestation!

The hardneck garlic is starting to send up scapes, right on time (maybe a week earlier than last year, though!) So this means I have about a month until harvest time, I think. It's thriving this year, and seems to love my garden. I'm trying shallots for the first time, and they seem to be doing well. The onions have finally recovered from whatever trauma they have endured, although the crop won't be as good as last year, due to the damping off that happened with the seedlings. Maybe I'll try growing some over the winter this year.

So that sums up the progress on the garden this season! I've already had a 61% return on investment so far this season . . . as long as I don't count time as part of the investment!

Spring Garden 2015

Hard for me to realize that it's been nearly a year since I posted last about my garden. It's been a busy year, with a fair sized crop coming in (about 200% Return on Investment!) and some much needed changes taking place in the garden itself.

The Chip Pile - halfway done.

First off, I got tired of battling the weeds and the slugs and snails that hid within them, so I decided it was time to do something about the chaos in between the garden beds. I went online and was first going to order wood chips from a local company; then I stumbled on a very useful website, Chip Drop, which connects arborists and gardeners. Chip Drop will deliver wood chips to your specified location for free. Now, if you choose the free option, you may have to wait a while to get your load of chips. They also offer you the option of donating an amount to cover the cost of the delivery. The recommended amounts start at $20. I offered to pay $20, fully expecting that I would have to wait a few days to see my chips. I was surprised to be contacted by an arborist looking to deliver chips the very next morning! Of course, my husband wasn't too thrilled with it, since that took up a fair amount of the parking behind our house, but I kept reminding him it was essentially FREE (especially when you compare the price of the delivery to what it would have cost me to buy the chip from a regular landscape supply company!)

Now, a couple of caveats: 1) they deliver on their schedule, not yours; and 2) this is not the pristine, well-cleaned, branch- and log-free chip you might get from a landscape company. This has branches, large and small, and can contain a bit of detritus from the site where they did the tree cutting (so you may find a bit of garbage). That being said, it smells fabulous, and the load was generous enough to cover my entire area  at least 4" deep, plus leave about a 1/4 of a pile to spread out around the rest of my yard.

If you're interested in your own load of chip, here's the website address:

https://www.chipdrop.in/login/

So this is what I've done for the past month:




The halfway point. Three weekends to get to this!

Halfway point, the other direction.

Passing the halfway point and on the home stretch!

Again to the west. Sans artichokes, which harbored the slugs and snails!!

The finished product, looking down from the porch.

The finished product, looking down from the porch.

The herb bed and the end of the garden area!

And here are the plants that will go in the tidied beds!

And here . . .

And here!

Spring Garden, 2014

Beds prepped

Time to get the garden started again! It's been a little chaotic this year; I prepped the garden back in March, went to the Tilth sale the second weekend in March, and then life interfered with the garden in the form of my stepdaughter ending up in the hospital for a week and a half. And of course, that time coincided with the best weather for the entire month of March!

Beds prepped

I finally got back out into the garden this past weekend. Fortunately, the weather had been warm, and since I put my seedlings from Tilth out under a frost blanket, and uncovered them judiciously throughout the last few weeks, the seedlings had adequately hardened off. I finished off some weeding (pulling out blackberries), and prepped the beds with organic fertilizer. The raised beds are really paying off: the weeding is reduced every year, and the soil is improving greatly with each passing season as well. The beds are rich with organic matter, and full of worms, ranging in size from that of a straight pin to nightcrawlers as thick as my pinky, and at least a foot long!


(Top) Garlic, bok choy, purple broccoli; (bottom) giant red mustard,
black kale, Sutherland kale, broccoli, Romanescu broccoli,
purple kohlrabi

The weather was gorgeous on Sunday for the middle of the day, but then I had to go pick up my mother across town. By the time we got back, the clouds had started rolling in. I scrambled outside and started putting in the onions, but had to quit about halfway through the bed when big, fat, cold raindrops began pelting down.

Finally got out there yesterday afternoon to get a couple more beds done, and then again this morning to finish up. So everything is in the ground. Here's the end result!

Top bed: Peas -- Mammoth Sweet and Sugar Snaps

Onions, Swiss chard

Yellow Onions and Lettuces (Spotted leaf, Red Romaine,
Spotted Romaine, Merlot red leaf, Spotted oak leaf,
Australian yellow leaf, and Black-seeded Simpson)

For the last week or so, my Merlot leaf lettuce has been getting slowly "leggier" -- the stalk has been growing longer, usually a sign of impending bolt. This morning when I went into the garden, I noted that a couple of my spotted Romaine were also starting to get a bit leggy, so I decided that today was the day to harvest.

I filled two bottle flats -- you know, the kind the vending machine service technicians carry the bottled Coke in -- full to overflowing with lettuce. The count:

Today's Harvest

5 heads of Romaine
9 heads of Spotted Romaine (I left one on the stalk to bolt)
6 heads of Merlot lettuce (I left one on the stalk to bolt)
9 heads Australian Yellow leaf lettuce (I left one on the stalk to bolt)

Why did I leave three heads to bolt? Well, last year some of my lettuce bolted before I got it harvested; this spring when I went to prepare my garden beds, I found 9 little Australian Yellow starts, 5 spotted romaine starts, and 3 Merlot starts. And yes, they all survived the transplant into small pots, then the subsequent transplant about 3 weeks later into the ground. They formed the bulk of my lettuce crop this year. I'm hoping that by allowing my lettuce to bolt again this year, I'll get a fair number of small lettuce starts again next spring, and be able to start at least my lettuce without having to buy transplants!

I also harvested:

4 artichokes
About a pound of snow/snap peas
About a pint of strawberries

Sadly, it looks like my strawberry crop is coming to an end. We've done well, though -- we've managed to harvest a couple of pounds of strawberries, which have made a pleasant accompaniment to ice cream in the evenings. I want to make strawberry jam soon, but I suspect I will be doing that using strawberries from a U-Pick, since I don't get nearly the necessary harvest off of my little patch.

First broccoli and some more artichokes!

Current garden count:

4 gallon bags of lettuce -- 2 Monday, 2 today
40-50 sugar snap/snow peas
30 strawberries
3 artichokes
3 green onions

First, the good news -- the lettuce is still going strong and not showing any signs of bolting yet. We had a spell of cooler weather from Friday of last week through now -- still sunshine most days, but interspersed with some rain and coolness as well, which seems to have helped to keep the bolting at bay. The lettuce is producing well -- evidenced by the above -- and the romaine is really starting to develop the full, oblong heads which are their trademark. The spotted romaine is producing madly -- every day when I go out to pick it looks thicker and leafier than it did the day before!

The peas are on the same burgeoning path as the lettuce. Every day when I go out, I see more peas to pick. It's as if they grow overnight from a pod the size of my pinky to ones about 4-6" long. I staked the mammoths better last weekend, so it's a little easier to see the smaller peas, but I suspect the smaller peas are never going to produce very well, since their much larger relative seems to have taken over most of the garden space! At least getting them staked better means that we can actually see the corn plants and they're getting a little more light than they were!

All the beans seem to be up now, and heading toward the light. The cucumbers have some minor issue that involves a white streak on the stem, but for most of them it doesn't seem to be impacting them unduly. The one sad little one looks like it may give up the ghost, though. I sprayed with an essential oil anti-fungal treatment, and gave them some more worm tea this weekend, so we'll see how that works. The squashes are recovering nicely from whatever was ailing them previously, I think thanks primarily to a liberal weekly dosing of worm tea. The first broccoli crown is about ready for picking, and looks to be followed shortly by the first bunch from the purple sprouting broccoli.

Potatoes are flowering; artichokes are growing at a rate that makes me start looking for recipes for marinated artichokes . . . tomatoes are setting rapidly. The yellow tomato Taxi has 5 tomatoes set now; Speckled Romas have one tomato each; two of the cherries have about 5 tomatoes each. Haven't looked too closely at the rest yet. Beets are beginning (barely) to come up. Peppers are flowering. Mustard has thoroughly bolted -- about time to pull it out and drop some rutabagas in its place. Once the lettuce bolts, I'll plant rutabagas and brussels sprouts in its place.

I finally got around to putting something in the front flower beds. I bought four perennials this weekend -- a pink hydrangea, blue and white mixed delphinium, purple/white penstemon, pink bearded tongue, lavender/pink pincushion flower, lavender, pink cranesbill (true geranium) and veronica (speedwell). My color theme is apparently purple, blue, and pink . . . The intent is to also plant some annual seeds and a few perennial seeds (columbine and coreopsis). We'll see if I manage to get them in the ground!