Jennifer and I haven’t written in a long time, but here’s a quick update
of our garden progress for this year. There’s definitely a lot happening so far!
Radishes have been great. We’ve had a lot of success with
the German Giant and French Breakfast radishes. Unfortunately the Easter Egg
and Sparkler White Tip radishes seem to bolt quickly. I decided against
planting the Cherry Belle variety, as we had so many other varieties to plant. I don’t
think we’re going to get too many radishes any more for the summer, but we’re
hoping to plant some seeds in the fall. We’ve heard this is a good time to grow
them as the weather will be cooling down.
The Ronde de Nice and small sugar pumpkins are looking very
healthy. We planted six mounds of each variety. Only three mounds of the Ronde
de Nice germinated at first, so we replanted seeds in the other mounds and those
have quickly caught up to the earlier plants. There are about 10 plants in total
of the ronde de nice. I counted at least fourteen blossom buds on just one
plant, and some of them look like female blossoms, so that’s a good sign. We also have about 10 small sugar pumpkin plants. We're
looking forward to making pumpkin pie in the fall, assuming we get pumpkins
this year.
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| Ronde de Nice |
Early in the season I planted arugula in some containers. It
did very well, and Jennifer and I managed to pick enough to add to a salad. The arugula
that we planted in the garden has unfortunately all bolted, but seeing as we don’t
have any seeds left, we plan on taking the opportunity to collect seeds from
the arugula plants when they’re ready.
We had one harvest of tatsoi
before it bolted. We don’t get to plant this stuff early enough, as the
garden doesn’t get rototilled early enough, so we don’t get the full benefit of growing it. I
don’t anticipate we’ll be planting this again, unless we can figure out a spot
for early planting.
The Royal Red, Merveille des Quatre Saisons and 'Early Green Moss, Curled' Endive (Chicoree
Frisee) are doing fine and we managed to get enough for a salad this week, so I’m
happy about that. There’s been a baby rabbit hanging around
the garden, and we suspect it’s been nibbling the lettuce down, which is okay
with us, as it's nice to see the rabbit.
When we planted our tomato and pepper seeds indoors back in
March, we also planted some cilantro and cinnamon basil seeds. They grew fine,
but they grew tall and lanky. I decided to plant them between our tomato plants
in the garden, not really sure how they would do. Luckily they’ve strengthened
up very well and are growing. I also planted more cilantro seeds between the
tomato plants, and they are coming up and look very healthy.
The British Wonder Peas were doing well in the cooler
weather, but again, I don’t think we planted them early enough; they’re not
doing well in the heat. I wonder
if there might be a chance they’ll take off in the fall?
Last year we collected Cherokee Trail of Tears and Blue Lake pole
bean seeds for the first time, and happily there are a lot of plants up from that very same seed. The bean
plants are climbing the poles quickly now and should hopefully blossom within a
few weeks. I’m quite proud of the fact that we've had some success with seeds that we collected on our own.
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| pole beans |
We didn’t have very many red beet seeds left, and not many
germinated, but we do have some up so I hope to get some beets this season.
The tomatoes are growing quite well, although I think they
might be a bit behind what they were last year. I’m beginning to wonder whether
it will be similar to our first year growing tomatoes from seeds; that year we
weren’t picking our first tomatoes until September! It might be just as well,
though, seeing as we’ll be away from home the last two weeks of August. We
ended up with 13 tomato plants in the garden this year. We planted two Federle,
four Red Zapotec, three Purple Cherokee, two Green Zebra, one Yellow Pear and
one Purple Calabash.
Back in May we mentioned that we’d be growing Bulgarian Carrot, Jimmy Nardello, Orange
Thai and Quadrato D'Asti Rosso peppers. Unfortunatley, the Quadrato D’Asti
Rosso peppers (the one I was most excited about) didn’t germinate that well and
we didn’t end up with any to put in the garden. However, we have quite a few
Orange Thai and Bulgarian Carrot plants. We only have about three Jimmy
Nardello plants this year. In total I think we have about 20 pepper plants this
year.
We added a few more things to our growing list since last time. We
needed to fill up some space in the garden, so we bought eight cabbage plants
and four cucumber plants. We also decided to plant some sunflowers. Lastly, we
couldn’t help but notice some mystery tomato plants growing in our garden. They
must have re-seeded from last year. My guess is that they are Sungolds from
plants that our mom planted last year, but we’re not sure. I am really curious
to see what kind they are, and there are blossoms on the plants already, so I
kept two in the garden. I had no idea that these heirloom tomatoes would
re-seed like crazy.
Megan
Megan
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