Garden Update Two

I haven't posted in awhile, but I have to tell you that I am stunned by the progress our tomatoes have made since being planted in the garden about a week ago. As you know, we've had quite a bit of trouble growing our tomatoes from seed and they were growing so slowly. They weren't even to the recommended size of about six inches tall when they were planted. Well, since then they have all become quite a bit more leafy and grown taller. We planted them all up to the first set of true leaves, so they were each only about an inch off the ground. Now they are all consistently two and three inches off the ground. In just one week! You can see an image of a Yellow Pear tomato plant above. I can't wait to see the progress that they make in the next little bit.



Our Musquee de Provence pumpkins germinated in their mounds. We had three come up in one and one in the other. Yesterday, however, we went outside to notice that two of the squash in the mound of three were gone. I have no idea what would prey on squash plants, but at least we still have two left. Any ideas?



We planted a lot of the lettuce from the trays into the garden too, because they were overcrowding; over fifty plants in fact. I don't really know what we were thinking having so many plants, but we have the room so why not? Anyway, we have lots of people we can give some to if we can't eat it all. The above image is of the deer tongue lettuce (we think).

Our peppers have been in the garden about a week and a half and I fear we have already lost a few. I think they were too small to hold up to the heat perhaps. The good thing though is that I noticed the first hint of new growth on many of them, so hopefully they're becoming more established and we'll still end up with some success.




By the way, our replanting of radishes in the main garden has been a success! Yesterday we harvested our first three French Breakfast of the bunch.

Jennifer

Garden Summary

Because we haven't provided a general view of our garden, I thought that today I'd tell you a little bit about how all of our vegetables are doing to date. The majority of our vegetables were started in mid-April, and now we are truly seeing some amazing progress.

Today I harvested another radish from our herb garden. I think it's one of the Plum Purple radishes,but Jennifer thinks it's an underdeveloped China Rose radish. Since we planted a mix of radishes, it's difficult to be sure. We are nonetheless happy to see a radish besides the French Breakfast radishes we've been getting.

Unfortunately, it seems that many of our radishes are bolting, and the roots aren't even developed yet. We suspect that it's the sudden heat we've been getting, and maybe not enough water.

The radishes in our herb garden seem to be close to bolting as well, but we may still have a bit of luck with them. It's a slightly shady spot in our yard, and I think it may be a good spot to offer the radishes some relief from the sun.

Our plan is to leave the bolting radishes in the ground and see if we can save their seeds when they produce seed pods.

As for our other vegetables growing in pots, the lettuce, beets, Swiss chard, and carrots seem to be progressing nicely. The round pot in the picture directly below is the Little Finger carrots, the rectangular pot is the Paris Market carrots, and the middle image is of the mixed coloured carrots.

The following pictures are of our lettuce. We transplanted a few lettuce plants into individual pots. I particularly like the Green Oak Leaf lettuce for its appearance, which you can see in the middle pot in the second picture.



Here are some pictures of our Swiss chard too. We already cut a little bit of it the other day, so it was a little bit more leafy then. It's growing fast in this summer heat


And last but not least for pictures, our beets have been growing extremely fast, although we did have to replant a few seeds in places where beets didn't come up.

Besides what we do have growing, we replanted our Benning's Green Tint summer squash and our Musquee de Provence squash seeds in the garden in four mounds. Nothing is coming up yet, but we hope we will see some progress soon. The indoor sowing of the squash wasn't very successful.

We also planted more Paris Market carrots, beets, radishes, and lettuce in our garden. The radishes and lettuce seem to be germinating rather quickly, but we haven't seen much of a sign of the beets or carrots yet. It has only been five days since we planted, so we're not worried the lack of germination yet.

We've also been having more success than before with our tomatoes and peppers. They were rather slow growing but we've been in the process of hardening them off over the last two weeks, and will likely go ahead and plant them this week. We don't want to leave them too late, since it's already a week into June. Unfortunately, I don't have any good pictures of our tomatoes and peppers right now, but once I have some I'll put them up.

Megan