Late August Happenings

Just a quick update to document what's happening in the garden right now. Usually by the end of August I start getting "garden fatigue" (or at last garden blog fatigue) and stop updating here, but I'm always bummed when I go back the next year and have no idea what was happening last year at this time. So here goes.

Firstly, we have a baby bunny.

We also have two adult bunnies, off an on. We've only seen this one baby. I'm guessing the nest is in a neighbor's yard and this guy is the only one brave enough to venture into our garden.  Dang him and his adorable chomping self.

There are also lots of tomatoes.

The ground cherries are starting to come in (left in the below picture) and the green beans are still being harvested in dribs and drabs. Also still some zucchini (there are three out there unpicked right now) and cukes.

The purple beans are flowering and slowly starting to form little beans. So pretty! Unfortunately they're the baby bunny's favorite snack. Dang him (again).

Aren't they pretty?

On the bright side I've been lucky enough to somehow almost totally avoid the bean beetles this year. There were a few in the spring. I picked them off and never saw any more. Woot!

OK - that's it for now! I'll be back with a mid-September update in a few weeks!

Giant Tomato Plants and Zucchini & Bean Harvest

First  - let me just show you my giant, out of control tomato plants.

It's hard to tell from that pic, but the tops of some of them are as tall (or maybe even a little taller) than I am (5'5'')!  Many of them are more than twice as tall as the tomato cages they're in, so I headed to Ocean State Job Lots yesterday to get some stakes to help support them. I'm in awe, because I started every one of these plants from seed, on my windowsill back in March. My friend Karen always says that tomatoes are the most amazing plant in the world because from a *teeny* tiny seed you get a giant sprawling plant and so much bounty. I totally agree.

Still no ripe big beefs yet (any day now, I hope!), but I've picked a couple pints of cherry tomatoes so far.

cherry tomatoes starting to ripen

I'm also excited because it looks like I'll get a good zucchini harvest for the first time in a few years. The last couple summers the darn vine borers killed my squash  plants before I could pick anything. Somehow the bugs haven't found them yet this year! 

Zukes!

A zuke hiding among the stems

It's also green bean harvest time.

Beans, beans, good for your heart...

Today's haul:

Should have a ground cherry harvest sometime soon too. 

The yellow one in the center is almost ready to drop. They're ripe when they fall to the ground, hence their name.

My back garden area, planted a couple weeks ago, is starting to come in. There are purple and green snap beans in the center section and transplanted ground cherry volunteers in the right. I still need to plant some fall crops (probably carrots, spinach, arugula, radishes - whatever other seeds I have on hand) in the left section (not shown).

Beans (left) and ground cherries (right)

I'm so happy the ground cherries I transplanted are growing! They looked pretty small and wilty right after I moved them. Wasn't sure they were going to make it.

Sad little ground cherries three weeks ago.

I can't remember if I talked about this in my last entry - but woo. There are ground cherry volunteers *all* over my garden. They're everywhere. I'd say that after crabgrass they're my most common weed. The average ground cherry plant yields *300* little fruit during the season. They grow in husks and are ripe when they fall to the ground. This means that by the fall when they're falling to the ground by the hundreds, it can be easy to miss a few (or many) of them. The missed cherries end up sinking into the soil and leaving their seeds there. The seeds are very tiny (comparable to carrot seeds- maybe even smaller) so I guess must easily get carried by the wind, because they're not only in the bed where I grew them last year, they really are in every little tilled spot in the garden.

I created a brand new little garden bed this year for my ten year old (pics in my next post!), which was just lawn last fall, and *somehow* he has ground cherries growing there too! 

I feel like I've unleashed a ground cherry monster. Luckily they're yummy!

Early July Update

Well, it's been about a month since I've updated. Things are looking much different!
My tomatoes are kicking butt. I think these may be the largest tomato plants I've ever had this early in the season. They're already outgrowing their cages!

So green, happy and BIG!

 
Lots of tomatoes on all of them too.

Park Seed's Sweet Million

Park Seed's Whopper

They're doing so much better compared to last year's tomatoes. Last July most of the blossoms were falling off my plants and just a few little green tomatoes were hanging on for dear life. I was growing all heirlooms then, and promised myself I'd try some hardy hybrids this year. And woo - what a difference!  I also mixed Tomatotone organic fertilizer (love that stuff) in with my garden soil before planting, which I hadn't done last year. And for the first time I started every one of my tomato plants  from seed (inside in March). So proud of  myself!

I'm did a companion planting and have marigolds, eggplant and basil between the tomatoes. It's a little crowded, but I think I like it, and the plants seem happy.

Marigolds (yet to bloom) in the front, eggplant behind them, and basil behind the eggplant

The basil is getting tall and seems to love the partial shade. The eggplant (also started from seed) is also getting larger. I totally recommend Great Garden Companions by Sally Jean Cunningham. Awesome book for figuring out what plants you can tuck in where.

In other news, the ground cherry plants are growing:

ground cherry with a pepper next door

The zucchini plants are huge and are flowering.

savoy cabbage and nasturtiums tucked around the zucchini (and my foot!)

The beet and carrot area is looking slightly scraggly, partially because I just thinned the beets. Dudes, beet greens are da bomb. Sooo good. I ended up with a giant bowl large enough to feed our family of four a big salad for two nights. They taste like spinach with a hint of beet.

Beets and Carrots

I also have bush beans and a few cucumber plants. Need to put up a trellis for the cukes.

Bush beans (with zucchini in the background)

baby cukes forming

We have a bumper crop of grapes growing.

Our crazy overgrown not properly trellised grapes

It was hard to capture, but the vines are *covered* in little grapes. It's a grape bonanza!

The strawberries are starting to flower again.

 

It hasn't been a totally successful year though. The garlic fizzled out. All the plants were small, and the soft necks fell over (From what I've read I believe that means they're ready to harvest. My first year growing soft necks). Even the hard necks looked small and dying, so I pulled up all the garlic to make way for new plantings.

Mini garlic drying. We'll still use it.

The peas were also not as great as they usually are. The rabbit ate about half of the plants when they were small, and so I didn't have enough for the peas to trellis on each other. They fell over and are now getting yellow and crispy.

Fallen over peas on the left

There used to be garlic in the middle and right sides of the above bed. Today I prepared the center empty section to plant more bush beans (love me some bush beans!). I'll do that in the next few days. I transplanted some volunteer ground cherries on the right. Apparently ground cherries literally grow like weeds. I have volunteers all over my garden from all the dropped seeds last season . It's hard to tell from the picture, but the transplants are looking droopy. I moved them there on Saturday and right after, they looked like they were goners. They've been perking up a little each day so I think they'll make it.

I'll pull the peas in a few days and plant lots of carrots and beets - maybe a few radishes. And at the far end of the pea bed some pumpkin seedlings are popping up (hopefully they'll have enough time to make actual pumpkins!).

I think that's it for now!

Pests!

This year I'm dealing with a couple garden pests for the first time.

First we have Mr. Bunny.

 He's super adorable, but he's eating all my  plants!

I started some cabbages from seed and plunked them in the garden in late April. The next morning, gone! He's also been nibbling my lettuce. I could deal with that, but now he's taken it too far. He's eating my peas. Snow peas are a favorite veggie in this house. Dude, do NOT mess with my peas.

Nibbled Peas

Here's a shot of the pea bed. Notice how the plants on the right are much bigger and happier looking, and the plants on the left are smaller and sparser, especially in front? That's rabbit damage, people! He's been going to town.

According to my neighbor, the bunny lives in the bush next to my pea and garlic bed (he's eaten a few of my garlic stalks too). Googled tonight to figure out what to do. Scarecrow? Big plastic wolf-like fake dog to scare him away? As it turns out rabbits are very sensitive to smell. Someone on a message board  recommended circling your garden with Bounce dryer sheets.  So tonight I ran out and did just that. I don't have a picture yet because it's dark out (and it looks kind of silly!). Hope it works. Rabbit be gone. :/

The other new pests I'm dealing with are cutworms.

They eat the stalks of tender seedlings in your garden - basically mow down your baby plants by cutting right through the stem. They're moth larvae/caterpillars that burrow under the soil by day, and come out and eat your plants by night.

Lovely Critters

The first thing they ate were my ground cherry seedlings. My GC seedlings this year are a lot smaller than my GC seedlings were last year. I got a late start on them so they're a few weeks to a month behind. Which means they're tender and tiny and the perfect size to be eaten by cutworms.

When a cutworm's been there, the seedlings are reduced to a pile of leaves.

Before Cutworm

After Cutworm

After I found the leaf pile I rooted around in the soil by the plant remains and found him.

Isn't he cute?

I smooshed him right after taking that picture. No mercy.

The best defense against cutworms is making cardboard collars for your plants. For some reason if a cutworm is moving across your garden bed and encounters a cardboard wall, he won't attempt to go under or over it. He'll  just move on.

Sooo, I outfitted that area of my garden with lots and lots of collars!

Toilet Paper rolls cut into shorter segments work great. So do cereal boxes cut into strips and taped into collars. Looks like the one above is starting to come apart. I need to get out there and remedy that! Although from what I've seen so far I *think* they prefer plants that are smaller than this.

I didn't think of collaring my leafy greens, and cutworm ate one of my kale seedlings yesterday. Same thing. Pile o' leaves, and I found him just under the surface of the soil, circling what was left of the plant stem.  Lettuce and kale were directly sewn in the garden and were a lot less work, so I'm not going to bother doing the collar thing with them. I smushed that guy too, so I think they're safe for now.

Dang pests.

Late Spring Happenings

This morning my eight year old asked how long it would be before we have fresh tomatoes from the garden. I checked my garden blog from last year and apparently we didn't have grape/cherry tomatoes until late July, and weren't eating fresh full-size tomatoes until mid to late August! Pretty sure we usually have ripe tomatoes before that. Maybe it was a late year? Or maybe it was because I planted all heirlooms last year?

But his question made me realize it's been weeks since I updated my garden blog. So I thought I better check in!

I feel like my garden's kind of a mess right now. I've been moving things around and digging and building.

The first thing I did was build a new 4'x4' raised bed, which is the new home for my strawberries. I built it in the dry wasteland on the left (north) side of the house. That area of the yard gets full sun all day, but for some reason grass refuses to grow there. Or a lawn (more like weeds!) does grow there, but not until mid summer, and it always comes back dead in the fall. I think it's a combination of grubs and the ground being chock full of roots from what we call "the weed trees" that border our property. In future years I'm hoping to put 3-4 more raised beds over there to take advantage of the sun and grow something in lieu of a lawn.

Anyhoo, without further ado: My new strawberry bed!

Baby strawberries growing in the bed:

In a blog post from mid June last year I had pictures of ripe strawberries and said we'd been picking them for the last 2-3 weeks, so I think they're later this year than usual - either because of the Polar Vortex (we had a chilly spring!) or because I set them back when I moved them from their old place in the garden.

The raised beds in the backyard where the strawberries used to live were 7 years old and were falling apart. They also had as much grass/weeds as strawberries, so I decided to completely scrap four of my old 4'x4' raised beds (two of which used to hold the strawberries) and create a new tilled garden area there instead.

Old bed falling apart:

The old garden layout (pic from last May):

I got rid of the 4 raised beds in the rear in this pic. The two front beds are also falling apart. I think I'll keep them as raised beds and eventually somehow replace the wood. That's a project for another day!
New tilled garden:

This is a different angle. You can see the two raised beds that were in the front in the other pic in the rear of this pic. If you look hard you can also see my other tilled bed in the rear. I like to split my tilled beds up into three sections separated by boards to walk on.

So quick tour of what's growing now.

In the old tilled bed we have peas and garlic:

In old raised bed #1 we have asparagus. We've harvested enough to eat with dinner (for our family of four) twice, and for me to eat on my own at lunch 3-4 times, and it's still coming up!

It's a little blurry - but trust me!

Asparagus bed with the pear tree to the right:

There are lots of baby pears all over that tree right now!

Baby lettuce:

Baby kale:

I had some larger lettuce and cabbage, but an evil rabbit ate all of it! In fact, as soon as my lettuces start to get big, boom. They're nibbled and gone. I need to get some netting to keep that guy away.

Toad friend:

 

He lives under the board between the peas and garlic.

In my new tilled garden area I planted tomatoes (Whopper, which is a big beef variety and Sweet Million, a cherry tomato). I have 15 plants all started from seed. I almost always buy my tomato plants. A few years ago I started some grape tomatoes on my own and last year I grew one of my own plants, but got the rest from the nursery. So we'll see how this goes! Looking at my garden blog from last year my nursery plants were much larger than these, but I've heard that if a tomato plant is blooming (those were) it's likely to become stunted, since it's putting its energy into the blooms/fruit instead of expanding its root system. Also, the plants I got last year were all heirlooms, and these aren't - so yields might be better? I'm hoping!

My little tomato plants, interplanted with eggplant (in the middle - also started from seed!). I also sprinkled marigold seeds throughout that section of the bed:

In the section in front of that I planted my three remaining tomato plants, my 5 ground cherry plants, and a section between them with onions, interplanted with beets and Purple Haze carrots (couldn't plant full size carrots in my six inch high raised beds! Excited to see if they grow well here!).

In the back section not yet planted I think I'm going to plant cucumbers, beans and nasturtiums. Maybe a zucchini or two? I'm also going to add pumpkins to the middle of my old raised bed where my lettuce and kale is.

That's about it! I feel like it's not too impressive, but it should get a lot more lush and productive as the season goes on!

Oh, and while I'm posting pics, I finally finished my first garden chalkboard to sell on Etsy. I made the stencil template for the words myself! I'm in the process of making a second one with regular individual letter stencils (different font) which will be (mostly) identical to the one I made for my own kitchen.

I still don't have anything listed for sale on Etsy yet. Waiting to have at least two boards to list. But I'm getting closer!