Garden Update - June 1, 2014

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It has been a long time since I have blogged.  My life has been pretty chaotic the last year and things are starting to settle down now.  

I have been posting most of my garden updates and news via Facebook.  I have found like most that it is so much easier to post things directly from my iphone.  

Well I found the blogger app for my phone and maybe I can post more often now.  

Banana peppers

Coca cola cooler planter with peppers

Tomato bed

Tomatoes 

Squash and zucchini bed

Garden Update - June 3, 2013 - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

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I knew this year was going to mean a smaller garden and a year of rebuilding, but boy I sure do miss my other garden.  It is clear that the process of creating a quality garden soil from scratch really worked better than I realized.  This year I had to resort to the one size fits all approach of getting soil from a sand and gravel yard.  It was decent soil, but it is clearly inferior to what I had before.  It is also clear that I won't be blogging as regular as before.  I am averaging about once a month, and I would like to post at least once a week.  Maybe if I start getting harvests, that will motivate me to post.

Do I have a garden...yes.
Will I harvest anything from it....we will see.

Let's start with the one bright spot, the Kennebec potatoes in my coca cola cooler.  I have been adding soil as they have grown and this is how big they were two weeks ago.


Look at these things, I swear they grow a foot a day.  I can't wait to see if get some good potatoes.


I have my first tomato baby of the season.


Here are the 12 tomato plants.  They are growing, but they aren't as robust as last years.


Now some of the ugly, here are my squash and zucchini bed.  Plants are small and weak.


Out of 12 plants, I have only one zucchini.


The bees aren't doing their job of pollinating the flowers and they are just dropping off.


Here is my pepper bed, you can see my new fence in background.  I have stained the entire outside of it and I think it looks good.  Now I have to do the inside.


Hungarian Wax Pepper


Yellow Bell Pepper


Habanero blossom


Picture of entire garden.

Garden Update - May 5, 2013

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It's May 5th and this is my first garden update for the whole year.  This year is going to be a rebuilding year and my garden will be smaller than previous years.  Moving to a new house and having to get a garden going on top of all my other projects has been a bit overwhelming.

I will try and give the reader's digest version on what I have been doing since January.  I said I wasn't going to start plants from seeds this year because of time.  Well, that went out the window and I started tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants from seed.  I decided to set my beds up in "L" configurations to conserve space.  I filled the six beds with a garden soil mix from a sand and gravel yard.  I didn't take time to amend the soil, I just went with their mix so I hope it works.  After filling the beds, I have been planting for the past three weeks.  I hope to post regular garden updates now that I am off and running.

Here is an overall picture of the new garden, you can see the three "L" shapes I created.  You can the layout of these same beds at my old house here.  I kind of like this new configuration, it saves space and I still have plenty of room to reach into beds.


Bed Number 1 - Nothing but tomatoes here.  I have a total of 12 tomatoes this year which is double the amount I planted last year.  I have the same combination of Better Boys, Best Boys, and Roma tomatoes. I have the bed all covered in plastic and caged up.  This should be a tomato forest in a few month months.


Bed Number 2 - Eight yellow squash plants in the background, and four zucchini in the foreground.  I plan to harvest these hard until the borers get them in a few months and then plant something else in July, corn maybe.


Bed Number 3 - This bed contains peppers, eggplants, and lettuce.  I have planted 4 jalapenos, 3 Hungarian wax peppers, 2 habanero peppers, 2 yellow bell peppers.  They haven't sprouted yet, but I have planted lettuce and romaine as well.  I still have two slots in the top right corner that need to be planted with something.  Ideas anyone?


Close up of tomato plant.  They have started to take off and the stems are getting thick.


Close up of squash plant, something eating the leaves.

Garden Update - July 15, 2012

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Sorry about the repost, I deleted the original posting by mistake.  Thank goodness for Google cache.

My last garden update was almost a month ago on June 20, 2012.  There have been a lot of changes in the garden and in my personal life since that last post.  I will cover the garden changes now, and the personal changes in the future.  

As for the personal stuff, I will just say August and September are going to be busy months for me and I may not post or comment as frequently.  I will post more details about it soon, but it is not anything bad or dramatic, just change.  I can't wait to share with all my blogging friends.

I will start off with a picture of my peas.  I have got a bunch of them and they are my pride and joy right now.  Five rows of zipper cream and five rows of pinkeye purple hulls.  Over 250 ft total, and I am praying we get a good harvest.

The smaller ones on the left are the purple hulls.  They were planted a few weeks after the zipper creams on the right.

Zipper Creams

Overhead shot of the raised bed garden

One of my potted habanero plants, no peppers yet.

Best Boy Tomato plant

This was my squash bed, finally got off my butt and planted 3 zucchini here.

 

More tomatoes...

Silver Queen corn in 4x4 bed, this will be my last corn planting.

One of my Black Beauty eggplants, they are like trees.

Biggest disappointment this year is my butter beans.  Sure they look nice and healthy, but they are covered in aphids and ants.  I waited too long to treat them and now it will be too hard to get in there and get rid of them.

Another angle of the raised garden from my patio.

Last but not least, my grass is looking great from my sod project a few months ago.  Everything has grown together and looks so much better than before.

This is what it looked like in April.

Garden Update - June 20, 2012

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It has been over a month since my last full garden update, therefore I have a lot of pictures and a lot of progress in the garden to report.  

Here is an overall picture of the raised bed garden area.

Bed Number 1 

We will start with tomatoes, here are four of my nine tomato plants.  All of my tomatoes are doing pretty good except my Romas. They have some kind of worm that is boring a hole inside them.  It is a small worm that looks kind of like a mill worm.  I have had to pull about a dozen tomatoes and I am going to spray my plants with Sevin.  This will be the first time this year I have had to resort to chemicals.  I am not 100% organic, but I try to limit my use of pesticides.

 

Here is a close up of one of the other varieties, I think this is a Better Boy plant.

 

 

 Bed Number 2

Here I have two more tomato plants and I had two squash plants.  I had to pull the squash plants this week because they were eaten up with SVBs.  I haven't decided what to put in those two empty squares yet.

 

Bed Number 3

This was my lettuce and spinach bed.  I cleaned it out this week and planted some Silver Queen Corn.  I am curious to see how much corn I can squeeze out of this 4x4 foot bed.  Those are my two habanero plants in the background.

 

Bed Number 4

This is my bell pepper and eggplant bed.  I have been impressed with how well these are doing so far.  The eggplants are like trees they are so big.  The bell peppers are loaded with peppers too.

Here is a close up from one of the bell peppers.

I have four of these California Bell Pepper plants.

 

 Here is a close up of a nice eggplant.

I also have four of these Black Beauty eggplants.

 

 Bed Number 5

These are my butter beans and man do these things grow fast.  This variety is called Cangreen Lima and it is a bush variety.  These were barely germinating less than a month ago and now look at them.  They are just starting to flower.

 

Bed Number 6

Here are my last 8 squash plants.  They are pretty much done and beaten up, between the SVBs in their stems and the powdery mildew that covers their leaves I am surprised they are still producing at all.  

 

Here is a shot of my corn and peas in my traditional garden.  My WEED FREE traditional garden.  I spent a lot of time last week in between that corn to get all the weeds out.  This second batch of corn will be ready for harvest in about 10 days.  Hopefully the weeding will pay off when I am ready to replant.

Here are my zipper cream peas that are planted next to the corn.  You can barely see them, but there are six rows of peas.  I will say the germination rate on these zipper creams was awful.  I have huge gaps in the rows and manually filled in the gaps this week.  I hope those germinate so I can have nice full rows of peas.  I don't know if the seed was bad or what but I was disappointed.  The seeds were packaged for 2011 so who knows.

 

Last but not least, my peppers in the coca cola planter, jalapenos and Hungarian wax peppers.  These have struggled and been very slow to grow.  The leaves were yellow and not very green.  I hit them with some nitrogen fertilzer and they have started to perk up and look beter.