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All my cilantro has gone to seed, and so it is time to harvest the coriander. Well, past time, actually, but that is the case with everything this summer. Once the seeds are dry, they just fall off the stalks when you brush them with your hand. I usually catch them in a colander, and then try to sift out the stray bits and pieces (easier said than done). Of course, many of them the seeds fall and start the next crop of cilantro. Cilantro is something we always like to have on hand (and I absolutely hate buying at the grocery store). Luckily it reseeds itself so easily that it is the perfect herb for the lazy gardener (which would be the appropriate title of my blog, now that I think about it).
As you know, the theme this summer is all about low effort for maximum gain. In that vain, I’d like to acknowledge the coreopsis (aka tickseed) that illuminate the front of my house (and the banner on this site). I planted some seeds a few years ago, and ever since then I have enjoyed a riot of gorgeous yellow flowers every summer. They self-sow, and appear in the spring and continue through the summer. I’ve never watered them, and other than some deadheading when I have the time and energy, these cheerful flowers require virtually nothing of me.
This is my first season growing garlic. We planted eight rare or heirloom varieties last fall, and I just noticed the scapes had come up last week on the hard neck varieties. I’ve never seen garlic scapes before, nevermind cooked with them, so I was eager to harvest them and give them a try. What is pictured above came from my Shantung Purple garlic plants. I chopped the scapes (minus the woody bottoms and the flower tops) and sauteed them with some spinach from the garden. The garlic flavor was nice, but milder than I expected.
I am looking forward to tasting the differences between the different varieties of garlic. I might have to have an official taste-testing party, with roasted and fresh garlic. Maybe compare them in some pesto, whole roasted cloves, and fresh garlic in olive oil? Sounds like fun on a summer evening.
Technorati Tags: garlic, kitchen garden, spinach
One of the best decisions I made last year was to plant strawberries. I mail ordered Tribute everbearing strawberry plants (more like roots, actually) from Stark Bros, put them in the ground in the spring, and they grew well and spread like crazy. They have required absolutely no effort on my part, and the rewards have (as you can see for yourself) been incredible. They produce strawberries all summer, and I already have more than I can possibly eat.
The girls are here!
Needless to say, these two are keeping us hopping. They are identical twins, even though they don’t look it. Anna has lots of hair, and is a pound heavier than Ella.
We do have a garden this year, and although we haven’t really scaled back much in terms of the number of plants, we have certainly scaled back in terms of time and effort expended. As soon as the little bosses let me, I will start posting again.
I should have written this post a long time ago, when my memory was fresher. In any case, writing it now has helped me refine my plans for this summer. Here then, are my reflections on the 2007 season.
Lessons Learned
Broccoli/Cabbage: I learned that although I like broccoli and cabbage, they are a pain to grow because of all of the pests they attract. And it wasn’t just one pest at one point in the summer, it was a succession of different pests that required different methods of control and constant monitoring. It really wasn’t worth it, in the end. I’m not in a big hurry to grow them again, but if I do, I would put them under a row cover. The problem with row covers is that you need to allow for pollination, but that isn’t an issue with these two plants, so I think it might be the perfect solution.
I have lots of favorite plants in the yard. I have always had a fondness for herbs, and during the many years I lived in apartments, I would always have an assortment of large pots of various herbs on my patios. I would haul them from one apartment to the next, and lovingly care for them, despite the fact that I rarely used them in my cooking. The point was simply the process of growing them. When I was a graduate student, I finally was given a plot in a cooperative garden for a year or two after having been on a waiting list. It was there that I grew my first vegetables and started learning about gardening by simply trying things out and observing the results. I vividly remember picking the first ears of corn, and how excited I was to eat them.
Now that I am lucky enough to have a large garden, I find that I have a soft spot for one of the old trees in the yard. It is a dogwood that sits right outside my living room, and it is where I hang a bird house. I’m not quite sure why I feel like the tree is an old friend, but I love it. It isn’t perfect, by any means. It leans and droops towards the East and has some large white spots that grow on it. But sometimes is the most beautiful sight to see, such as when the blooms open in April or when a bright red cardinal sits on branches covered with snow.
We saw a few snowflakes mixed with the rain today. As I look forward to the first dogwood blooms of 2008, I thought I would post a picture (above) that my mother took of one of the dogwood blossoms last year. Isn’t it beautiful?
This was probably the last snow of the season that the garden will see. Amazingly, many of the herbs have survived the winter (they don’t look great, of course, but they are still alive). I’ve got parsley and cilantro still growing, as well as sage and rosemary. The strawberries are sprouting new green leaves underneath the dead debris. All in all, it has been a mild winter. Of course, this is good for some of the perennials that we tend to lose (mostly lavender plants), but it probably means a buggy summer.
I sure have missed blogging! One of the tasks I still need to do is to recap the crop from last summer, and identify the plants I really loved (and those I wasn’t so thrilled with). Hopefully that will be posted soon. My long hiatus has left me a bit rusty when it comes to blogging. Spring is almost here (you can even hear the peepers at night if you listen closely).
I finally got around to harvesting some more black hungarian peppers. I have been slowing drying the first batch for the past couple of weeks, and have been experimenting with a variety of techniques. I even tried pinning them on the clothesline to see if they would dry faster that way. It didn’t seem to work any better than any other method, but makes for interesting conversations with your neighbors.
I finally finished them off in the oven, and would recommend that as the easiest method. I set it to warm, and then turned the oven off and let the peppers slowly dry out in the mild heat.
Once they are dry, it is easy to take off the stems and shake out the seeds. Then I just grind them in my little coffee grinder, and the result is a pungent, spicy paprika. It took about 15 peppers to make the paprika in the picture at the top of the post.
We hung this clay birdhouse (made by a local potter) on our dogwood tree this spring. Sadly, we just noticed that our bird friends seem to have moved away.
We wish them a happy fall & winter!
Thought I would take a shot of the stump we hollowed out by burning a fire in the center. It worked surprisingly well, and didn’t take much effort to create a hole this size.
It could use some more flowers along the outer edge of the plater (I was thinking something that would trail down the sides would look nice).
I previously posted about how devastating it was to pick a watermelon to find that it wasn’t ripe at all. Emma was kind enough to provide a link to an article that was helpful. One of the tips in the article was “when the tendril closest to the stem withers, that’s a dependable sign” that the melon is ripe. Well, I was out picking in the garden and noticed the withering leaf in the picture above. When I moved the larger melon, sure enough, the tendril closest to the stem was completely withered.
With much trepidation, the melon was picked, and we were thrilled to find that it was, in fact, perfectly ripe. If we had waited much longer, it would have been overripe. Thanks, Emma!
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I was quite late planting my onion seeds this spring, so I supplemented with some onion seedlings that I purchased from Johnny’s.
Here is the description:
Field-Grown Onion Plants.
Includes one bunch (60-75 plants) each of Walla Walla, Red Burgermaster, and Copra plants. Copra Plants Unsurpassed for storage. Uniform, “rock-hard” storage onion with early maturity. These medium-sized, dark yellow-skinned storage onions have the preferred blocky round shape with thin necks that dry quickly. Firmness and skin are superior. Unrivaled in our yearly storage trials, remaining firm and sound after other varieties have sprouted. Highest in sugar (13 -14 ) of the storage onions. Walla Walla Plants: The famous mild variety from Walla Walla, WA. Red Burgermaster Plants Jumbo red bulbs from plants. Widely adapted and grower friendly, these bright red, globe-shaped onions have great flavor for sandwiches and salads. Internal rings develop better color earlier from transplants. Burgundy skin finishes well for superb appearance either with greens or topped.
Read the rest of this entry »
Here are the ten varieties of tomatoes that are currently ripe. I nearly had some yellow brandywine to add to the picture, but I didn’t see the first two that ripened and they disintegrated in place. There was another close to being pickable, but it could use another day I think, so I left it for tomorrow.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I planted 21 tomato plants. I guess I wasn’t thinking. Or maybe I thought they wouldn’t all survive. Or that the tomato fruitworm would wipe them out.
I’ve decided that I should plan a “pick your own” tomato party. Give the folks a little wine (or better yet, a lot), let them taste some tomatoes, and then send them out to the garden. I could even lock them in until they pick every last one, since I went to the trouble to build a really high and really strong deer fence. But that would only help for a day. There would be more tomatoes ripe the next morning. And on second thought, maybe it would just be more effective to drink the wine myself and forget about the tomatoes.
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It has been a while since I’ve written a post about a bug and my sometimes-gruesome attempts to protect my crops from them. Well, if you have been lamenting the absence of such a post, today is your lucky day! If not, you might want to check back on another day when I talk about a recipe or post a photograph of a flower.
Actually, there is nothing too gross here. Just a few pictures of my latest foe, the harlequin bug.
I noticed them a while ago, but couldn’t actually figure out what they were up to. I suspected they might be doing something inappropriate to my broccoli florets, but I couldn’t figure out what. And when questioned about it, they strenuously denied any wrongdoing. So, I took this picture and did a background check. Good thing I did. Read the rest of this entry »
A couple of months ago we told our neighbor about a white rabbit we’ve seen in the evenings (okay, we referred to it an albino rabbit because that sounded a little more dramatic). Soon after that conversation I noticed the white rabbit on the neighbors property. I thought of telephoning to accuse him of stealing my albino rabbit, but decided to take the high road.
Apparently the grass, or in this case, the christmas tree. isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence. The rabbit is back, along with a small brown accomplice.
On second thought, maybe the rabbit is back because we haven’t had time to mow our lawn recently.
I will now blame the rabbit for the sad state of this tree (probably not the little fellow’s fault, but it can’t really defend itself, so it is going to have to take the fall).
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I made a really big mistake, and picked one of my watermelons way too soon. I had read that a sign it is ready is if it breaks away from the stem with very little effort. I guess I proved that tip wrong, and with disastrous consequences (hey, you’d be upset too if you just wasted a huge percentage of your watermelon crop). I also thumped it and thought it sounded right, but I’m apparently not very proficient at distinguishing the subtleties of melon sounds.
The exterior on the ill-fated watermelon was darker and more uniform than the ones here in the picture.
Does anyone have any better advice? I obviously need to wait longer, but how will I know? And how quickly do they get overripe?
Technorati Tags: garden, gardening, kitchen garden, watermelon
I wasn’t the best potato farmer this year (despite my Irish ancestry).
I didn’t buy any seed potatoes, just used some from last year that had sprouted in my cupboard, along with really tiny potatoes that I had dug up with the harvest last year.
I didn’t pile up the soil around the plants as they grew. They got awfully spindly, as other gardeners kept pointing out.
I also didn’t pinch off the flowers to delay the end of their growth cycle.
Technorati Tags: kitchen garden
For all 101 ideas, see the New York Times article or check out the feature at Kitchen Gardeners International.
I have to say I’m pretty excited that my perhaps-not-so-crazy idea of burning into the stump to create a planter seems to be working. Actually, it has been surprisingly easy, and we now have a fairly good size hole without having expended too much effort.
Chris even drilled drainage holes through the side. I will plant some flowers in it, and if it isn’t too embarrassing-looking, I will post them.
I wish I could say I thought of this myself, but the credit goes to my neighbor. For the price of about two packets of fancy seed, he planted a huge tract of sunflowers with oily sunflower bird seed. There was more than enough to have a field of sunflowers, even with deer and other pest problems. I, on the other hand, planted four packets of sunflower seeds and haven’t seen a single bloom due to the evil deer.
But, I get to see this lovely view from my windows!
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As you know, I have four blueberry bushes. I also purchased one red and one black raspberry bush this spring. The red raspberry is doing okay, the black one has been growing like crazy but has not set any fruit or flowers. I am suspicious that it is growing from below a root graft, and therefore will never fruit.
In the woods bordering our property, Chris noticed these berries growing. They are scattered on the edge of our yard and loaded up with berries. Four new baby berry plants have sprouted out of my old wood chip pile. I plan to dig them and plant near the garden. But I can’t figure out why the deer haven’t eaten all these berries. Any place my garden raspberries poke through the fence, the deer devour them, stems and leaves included. If I plant the forest berries, will they leave them alone?
I knew it was just a matter of time.
Each year I am inundated by thousands, perhaps even gazillions, of squash bugs. And each year, sometime in late summer, Chris finds me in the garden crazily stamping on squash bugs and yelling at them to go away. Sometimes he has to forcibly remove me from the garden. Sure, I know what you are thinking. I’ve gone on and on about the slugs, the flea beetles, the deer, the cabbage worms, the japanese beetles, etc., but this is different. It was the dreaded squash bug that killed my beloved zephyr squash last summer.
I did a quasi-scientific test this year with my eggplant. I split up a six pack of plants and planted some of them with black plastic mulch and some of them without. The differences between them are remarkable: the plants that had plastic mulch are about 50% larger (taller & wider, with bigger leaves) and have given me more fruit to harvest. I was able to harvest much sooner (and thus able to enjoy more Szechuan eggplant and baba ghanoush .
Of course, this isn’t really a scientific test. The plants are in different garden beds, and various things could be different such as the soil, the sunlight, the watering, and the amount of attention I’ve given them. They also have different neighbors (peppers vs. cucumbers & broccoli). And I only tried it with the globe-type eggplant (I didn’t split up the ichiban). But, it does seem promising, doesn’t it?
Technorati Tags: eggplant, gardening, kitchen garden
This is a pattypan squash I planted at the end May, and you can see that it isn’t exactly overwhelming me with its growth. On the other hand, below is a photo of a volunteer that I found along the walkway in the garden this spring. Actually, I found several seedlings that obviously were in the squash family, and I moved them over to the fence line. It has added a bit of suspense, wondering what they would become. Turns out one is a patty pan (obviously bigger and more productive than its intentionally planted sibling) and a few are ronde de nice.
Who knows if this will actually work, but I figure it is worth a try. We were forced to take down a maple that was in front of our house because it was diseased and threatening to fall on our cars. We chopped it up for firewood and shredded the small limbs and leaves for mulch. But what to do about the stump?
I’m always trying to learn more about gardening, but there is still so much I don’t know. So, I could use some help. I planted four blueberry bushes last spring. I got them from the same supplier (bare root) and planted them in a row. I heard they like it a bit acidic, and they are in a spot where pine needles drop each year. They are all on the north side of my garden, full sun. I treat them all the same, but two just look like they are dying while the other two are thriving and have blueberries on them. Any idea what the problem could be? They seem like they are in trouble, but I don’t know what to do!
Parents who go out of town and leave their teens behind should expect that unsavory things (from the parents’ perspective) are likely to transpire in their absence. We have no children, never mind teens, and therefore were shocked to come home to an orgy. A japanese beetle orgy. Sure, there were a few meandering about when we left, but they seemed innocent enough. How stupidly naive!
There is not much that can be done to combat this pest, given that there are no natural predators in the US. Except to grab them with your fingers and crush the life out of them.
I know what you are thinking. The poor beetles! What a severe sentence! She’s an overzealous prosecutor! This isn’t fair! But I will not bow to the political pressure from the right. I will not pardon them. Nor will I commute the sentence (and then sneak in an inevitable pardon later). No, guilt is guilt. The sentence stands.
Some might say this was entrapment. It is true, borage can be used as a “trap plant” to attract japanese beetles so that you can collectively do away with them. Too bad, I say. They still chose to eat in my garden, and now they have to pay for it. Even if they are rich (which of course they aren’t), and even if they have a friend who lives in a white house (which they might). Justice may be obstructed in Washington, but not in my back yard.
Technorati Tags: eggplant, garden, gardening, insects, kitchen garden
I only devoted half a garden bed to the cucumbers (about a 4 x 5 foot area) and added a couple of short trellises for them to grow on. On Friday I picked 18, and our neighbor promised to pick them while we were gone for a few days. We spent three nights sailing, and came back today to pick 33 cucumbers.
If you have any cucumber recipes, now would be the time to share them! A girl can eat only so many cucumber sandwiches… I could use some inspiration. Normally I’d use them in gazpacho, but I have no ripe tomatoes. I’ve been dipping them in hummus, using them in salads, and just eating them plain. And of course, leaving “anonymous” donations on my neighbors steps. But faced with this basket of cukes, I need some help!
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OK, I don’t really have a farm, just a garden.
The title is a little spoof on Dylan’s song “Maggie’s Farm”. Chris (my husband) starts singing it when I’ve been working him too hard in the garden. Maybe some day I’ll have a farm. In the meantime, I wanted a place to keep track of my garden activities, what I’ve planted, how it worked out, and my plans for the future.
I also hope to meet other gardeners and learn from your experiences. So please, come on in, and feel free to share your thoughts!
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I know, everyone and their step-uncle is blogging about making pesto from the basil in their garden. So why am I blogging about it too? Well, I happened to try the pesto recipe over at 101cookbooks, which was recommended by Gini. It is called, How to Make Pesto Like an Italian Grandmother. Who could resist that, especially if you’ve got basil growing in your garden and pasta in your cupboard? So, I tried it, and it was terrific!
I added some tender young zucchini. Didn’t even need to cook it, just put it at the bottom of a big bowl and then put the hot gnocchi right on top. The heat from the pasta slightly cooked the zucchini, and then I stirred in the pesto.
Technorati Tags: kitchen garden, recipes, squash
The cabbage war is continuing. I was ready to declare victory, as I seemed to have the cabbage whites under control (or maybe they have been lulling me into a false sense of security before they completely obliterate my cabbage, it is hard to know). The new enemy is the striped flea beetle (a different variety of flea beetle than I have on my eggplant). Above is a photo of my cabbage when it was happy and healthy.
Below you can see the striped flea beetles and the damage that has been done already. I had no idea that so many bugs would be trying to eat my cabbage. I don’t even like cabbage all that much, but now that they are being attacked, I feel deeply, deeply attached to them. Mess with me if you want, but don’t mess with my plants!
Now that I finally have high-speed internet, I have been enjoying the free podcasts available on itunes. I listen to some npr shows (e.g., This American Life, Wait wait… don’t tell me- which is very funny) and a grammar/English language show (A way with words).
I also really enjoy some of the gardening podcasts, particularly one from the UK called The Alternative Kitchen Garden. I download the new episodes, drag them to my tiny mp3 player and listen while I run or garden. Ever since I listened to the comfrey episode, I’ve been dying to get some to add to my garden (apparently it is a good green compost).
Don’t know how we survived on measly dial-up for so long.
Technorati Tags: gardening, kitchen garden
The bees seemed to arrive late this year. The lavender had been blooming for a couple of weeks when finally they arrived. They love my borage, which is one of those great herb/flowers that keeps seeding itself relentlessly. Besides attracting bees to the garden, borage is good for using the flowers in salads. I know the leaves are edible too, but they are quite hairy and rough, which I don’t like (although the flavor is nice, kind of cucumbery).
Chris made these wonderful compost bins for my birthday last year. He used only reclaimed wood from an old barn, and we reaped the first bounty this spring when we emptied three wheelbarrows of compost into the garden. I throw in our kitchen scraps, weeds, plant materials, and shredded paper. I love them! And extra benefit: a place to wash off a harvest and sort your seeds.
Technorati Tags: gardening, compost
This is my first time growing cabbage, and until last weekend they looked perfect. How quickly things change! Every day I look for cabbage worms, but they have already wreaked havoc.
My gardening book says to put pots of mint in between the plants. Does anyone know if this will work? I also see that bt is supposed to help. If you have any advice, I’d love to hear it!
Today is a special day, as we will be eating the first cucumbers tonight. It seems like there are dozens of little cukes happily growing, so we should have more very soon.
Also pictured, some baby zucchini. Got to love summer in the garden. Now, if we just had some tomatoes to go along with these…
You can see why I built the deer fence around the garden (there is a deer lurking in the shadows on the right side of the first photo). They seem surprisingly desperate this summer, and have eaten lots of my flowers. The second picture is of what is left of my sunflower. I usually plant sunflowers along the north side of the garden, and in past years they weren’t much bothered after they got big. Not so this year.
The pest theme continues today. I had planned on posting pictures of some recent deer damage (they ate all the leaves off my pear tree and even ate my sunflowers)! But, I happened to be outside last night after dark (there were strange noises coming from the forest so I thought I would investigate) and I decided to take a quick look at the garden to see if I could find any slugs. Ha! How naive I was! There were so many slugs that I quickly filled up a container of soapy water with them (which was recommended to me at the best method of disposal). It was amazing how many slugs there were.
When I closed my eyes to go to sleep late last night, all I could see were images of slugs slithering around my garden. In my exhausted state, I set the container of dead slugs on my front step and when I finally quit the slaughter. The poor UPS guy this morning sure got a eyeful.
I had been putting down some slug bait periodically, but apparently I’ve been wasting my time and money with that method! I had noticed some slug damage on my marigolds, and they had eaten my cumin seedlings, but I had no idea that I had so many slugs wandering around each night.
OK, now I am sure you are wondering what is up with the picture. Chris took a time-lapse photo of me slug hunting, and I was wearing a head lamp (which is very handy for hands-free slug hunting, I might add). So, all those bright spots are of me zooming around picking up slugs. We are going to try for a better photo on another night.
Technorati Tags: garden, kitchen garden
I keep finding most of the bugs in my garden on my eggplant. First, the flea beetles arrived. But, I was ready for them, and sprayed a bit of neem oil on the leaves. Then it was the colorado potato beetle that chomped out some big pieces of eggplant leaves (but didn’t live to tell about it). And then I found the aphids quietly hiding on the underside of the leaves. Oh, and there were also some small green worms. But, there were also armies of ants marching around (it looked like they were doing something important), and also a few lady bugs hanging out, taking it all in.
I have become a bit obsessed with my eggplant. I have even developed a new morning ritual. I inspect the leaves of each eggplant, and crush the few stray bad guys (mostly flea beetles) that remain.
But, I still have questions. What are the ants doing? I learned from watching a documentary on insects that ants will herd aphids. They “milk” the aphids by collecting a substance (called “honeydew”) that the aphids excrete. I wonder if the ants on my eggplant were responsible for bringing the aphids? If so, they must be pretty upset with me.
Yes, a beautiful ripe raspberry. Too bad I didn’t get to eat it. I took this picture and then was so distracted taking other photos that I forgot to pick the berry. When I remembered an hour later, it was gone.
I am now fighting back. That very evening I installed netting over my berries. I can report that it works perfectly for all my berry bushes and my strawberry beds.
This year I am resolved to note and identify the insects I find in the garden. My neighbor tells me that this caterpillar, found on my dill, is destined to become a monarch butterfly.
I have an enormous debt of gratitude to my friend the braconid wasp, who last year rendered the evil tomato fruitworm ineffective and allowed my tomato crop to thrive. I hope to post picture of a fruitworm this summer that has wasp cocoons along its back. I also found this colorado potato beetle (bottom, left) on my eggplant. I “eliminated” it, along with some slugs I found. I feel a bit bad about having to do that, but then I don’t like having my crops eaten before I have a chance to eat them myself.
No, too early to pick any. Just a few flowers, so the harvest is a long way away. But, I thought I would list the varieties I have this year, and then update it with more info as the summer progresses. I have a total of 21 tomato plants this year (13 varieties).
Yellow Brandywine
from seed;
Brandywine
from nursery; prone to cracking, excellent taste, perfect for gazpacho; low yield, prone to tomato fuitworm;
Sidduth’s Strain Brandywine
from Seedsavers;
New Girl
from seed;
4th of July
from seed; excellent germination; high yield (although I never get close to harvest on 7/4, more like 7/18), long season; small-med fruits; resistant to tomato fruitworm; I plant several each year since they are so reliable;
Carmello
from seed; poor germination;
Sun Gold
from seed: med-large cherry (subsequent year volunteers have larger fruits); slightly tart, the last tomatoes in the fall (resistant to frost)
Yellow Pear
from nursery;
Beam’s Yellow Pear
from Seedsavers;
San Marzano
from seed; poor germination;
Green Zebra
from Seedsavers; slightly tart, grow them mostly because they are so incredibly pretty, not so much for the taste;
German Pink
from Seedsavers;
Cherokee Purple
from Seedsavers;
As expected, the plants have gone crazy while we’ve been gone, and the tomatoes just love the hot weather (although I could live without it). Tim (our next-door neighbor) did a great job caring for the garden while we were gone. Everything made it through, even though I planted some things right before leaving.
Unfortunately, only one of the asparagus crowns has pushed up spears, so I think the other nine are dead. Stark Bros will replace them in mid-November, along with the peach tree that never leafed out. Oh, well.
Technorati Tags: garden
We are leaving tomorrow for a week (I have a conference to go to, and Chris is tagging along), so this will be the last garden update for a while. I was happy to finally see asparagus shoots this morning, as I was becoming increasingly worried that the crowns were just rotting in the ground. A happy sight!
It is always hard for me to leave my garden, but such a thrill when I come back and see how much things have grown in my absence.
The tomatoes should go crazy next week (it will be sunny and warm). Also found the first tomato blossom this morning, on a brandywine. I can almost taste the gazpacho!
As you can see, my onions are growing well. I added a mulch of leaves I collected last fall to help retain moisture. I generally have very good luck with onions, but last year some of them seemed to be rotting in the ground. The tops were still green and hadn’t fallen over yet. I harvested them early in order to save more of them, as more and more of them seemed to start rotting. They also were more likely to go bad in storage than the previous year’s crop. We still had plenty (I think we might have gotten through St. Patrick’s Day before needing to buy any), but did lose quite a few. It seemed to equally affect the different varieties, and it also didn’t seem to matter whether I had started them from seedlings or had bought them as young plants.
One garden book suggested that not enough moisture late in the season could cause this, which seems counterintuitive to me (I thought maybe they had too much moisture late in the season). Any advice?
We’ve only lived in this house for three years now, so each year there are lots of improvements.
Year one we added the first raised bed, year two we built the deer fence, year three we brought water to the garden. This year we added the new triangle beds in the center of four of the rectangles, and I planted strawberries in two of them. We are starting with 21 (it was supposed to be 25, but we seem to have been shorted a few). They have been planted only a couple of weeks, and are growing like crazy!
Also new this year: asparagus, cabbage, and raspberries (although we don’t expect many).
Technorati Tags: strawberries
This squash plant was grown from seeds I collected from a beautiful squash my Aunt brought with her for Thanksgiving. The squash was grown on a farm co-op (Sisters Hill Farm), and was just gorgeous. We used it for a centerpiece because it was so colorful. I don’t know what kind of squash it is, exactly, as I haven’t seen anything quite like it in the seed catalogs. I am trying not to get too excited about the prospect of harvesting from this plant, as I have an ongoing war with squash bugs. Last year they bested me, and I wish I could say that I expect to be better able to deal with them this year. I don’t use the term evil lightly, but definitely I think it applies to squash bugs.
Technorati Tags: squash
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