Weeeellll, since you asked...
Starting from our front door and heading out in a clockwise position...
The Tumbling Tom tomatoes are frickin' adorable. So cute and fun. Plus they're surviving.
The strawberries are roasting. Between trips, events, illness and laziness, I just haven't been able to figure out a new home for them. Southern exposure is resulting in death and destruction. Note to self: Find a shady home before planting new strawberries next year.
The espaliered apple is still alive...yay! And, surrounding our front area are eight tomatoes. Complete with three inch green tomatoes. I'm literally rubbing my hands together in anticipation of fresh, off-the-vine tomatoes.
I also think I planted chives near the apple tree. That or the grass leaped over the border. Either way, whatever is growing there is doing fine.
The garlic and onion are bolting. For you non-gardening types, "bolting" refers to "growing flowers and going to seed" rather than "running away". I dug up a red onion the other day. The bulb was on the small side, but still tasted good. I'm just going to harvest everything this weekend and hope for the best.
My winter peas are dead, but the spring crop is popping up. Surrounding the peas is a bed of mesclun. Yum. At least that's what the snails tell me.
The grapes, blueberries and blackberries are doing awesome. No grapes on the vine yet. Maybe next year? The raspberry is a bit puny. I also just figured out that we planted something between the grape and the berries. Maybe flowers? Weeds? I really should keep track of the random seeds I throw in the ground.
Note to self: USE the gardening notebooks, journals and websites.
I've got a couple bell peppers hanging out along that wall that are still alive (a plus) and then a row of green, purple, yellow and scarlet beans. They're short, but they're already bearing fruit. And by short, I mean, they're six inches tall. Stunted considering they should be six FEET tall.
And then we head into the main garden, flanked by an herb pot and flowers, and housing three eggplants, six cucumbers, six potatoes - four of which are volunteers, twelve tomatoes - remember? I got a bit crazy, four Romaines, six spinach, three red leaf, a couple rows of beans - black, green, red, yellow, purple, radishes, four bell peppers and a line of sweet peas peeping up over the dirt. Oh. And I can't forget the three zucchini and three yellow squash.
Needless to say, all that lovely room I had before things started to grow is...well...gone.
Everything is doing well. Except the bell peppers. I think I'm going to move them to join their friends at the front of the house.
In the meantime, half the tomatoes are growing outside their cages in a blatant mocking of my attempts to corral them. The other half are pouting by the green beans and refusing to grow.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if the problem lies with their proximity to the beans...must research that.
The lettuces are bolting. Bummer that. I was hoping to keep them around all summer. I'm going to attempt to plant some more from seed.
The eggplant is just...sitting there. The squash is taking over. Whoever said you can trellis squash lied.
The cucumbers are still alive.
And the potatoes...well, let's just say that my Irish heritage is making itself known with my green potato thumb.
Continuing on, you can't help but notice the platter-sized leaves of my paddy pans. They have taken over their entire area. Here's the problem...
I know I should have only planted two or three, but the little tiny plants a) looked lonely and b) had a very low chance at surviving. So I planted nine. They are now taking over. I've sent out an SOS to my gardening group to take a couple of them off my hands, but by the time we get together, I may not be able to leave the house for fear of being swarmed by giant paddy pan leaves. You think I'm joking? Yeah, well, let's just say that the lemon tree thought I was joking too.
Speaking of citrus...the orange tree died. Moment of silence, please.
The carrots are fantastic. I can't keep Joseph and Chad out of them. Not that I try too hard. They're sweet and tender and perfect.
The radishes have been harvested in the barrel. I think I'm going to do a green bean teepee in there next. Don't judge.
The two tomatoes flanking the barrel are growing baby green tomatoes. (For those of you keeping track, that's right...24 tomatoes. Don't judge.)
And that leaves us in the final stretch...the sunflowers in front of the kids' windows are growing and the six bell peppers are doing great.
So that's it. That's what's happening in my garden. Doesn't it just make you green? Sorry...bad pun, but I had to do it. You know I had to do it.
8 comments:
You should snap the flowers off of your onions and garlic as soon as you see them. The onions you should jump on and eat what you can; the garlic ought to be fine, I think. At least, my garlic has always been fine if I snap the flowers off.
On second thought--do you have hardneck or softneck garlic? I've only ever grown softneck, but I know hardneck is "supposed" to flower. I do *not* know if you're supposed to snap them off for hardnecks.
you know you kill me, right?!?! you'll be happy to know, we've planted ... yes finally, planted!
those carrots look to die-for!
Zannie - I'm not sure which garlic I have. How would I be able to tell?
I figure I'll pull out my onions, send them through a chopper and freeze. I'm bummed that they're not very big. ESPECIALLY since I planted them way back in November. They've been using a lot of real estate.
Danielle - You don't know how happy that makes me. I've actually been fretting. Honest to God fretting about your lack of tomatoes. I didn't want to bring it up because I know I can get a bit...zealous.
If you know the name of the variety you planted, you can look it up online. If you don't, you can probably guess based on whether most of them have flowers (hardneck) or only a few (softneck).
But it doesn't matter. I looked it up in my gardening book, and it says to snap off the flowers for both.
It's very important to choose your onion varieties carefully and to plant them at the right time.
From Golden Gate Gardening:
Most varieties of bulb onion form bulbs as the days lengthen. Different varieties start to form their bulbs at different day lengths, so we need to be sure the ones we choose will form bulbs where we garden....
Day-length sensitive onions can be divided into roughly three groups. Short-day varieties require 12-14 hour days before bulbs begin to form. Intermediate-day varieties need 14-hour days, and long-day varieties need 14-16 hours....
In addition to choosing an onion variety that will form bulbs in our location, we also want to plant our day-length-sensitive onions early enough that they have time to form big plants before the length of the day stimulates bulb formation. Seeds or bare-root plants that start growing in late winter will make bigger bulbs than ones that start out in late spring.
Then we begin to think about starting even earlier, before the coldest months of December and January, in hopes of having even bigger plants ready to bulb up at their day length of choice. This idea, however, runs into the second climactic factor that affects bulb onions: vernalization. This term means that exposure to sufficient hours of chill stimulates the plant to flower, whether or not a bulb has formed. An onion plant can flower if the stem near the ground is bigger than a pencil before the cold of winter begins. When an onion flowers, it becomes all flower stalk--all woody, unpalatable stem, with no succulent bulb underground.
Early plantings require a bit of dancing about to avoid vernalization. Planting can be timed so that the seedlings are still smaller than a pencil on December 1, or they can be kept in a greenhouse and allowed to grow bigger, then planted out after winter cold has passed....
If you are using onion sets, never plant them before most of the winter's coldest weather has passed, because the plants that grow from them are often already bigger than a pencil in diameter when they start to grow. Even cold weather in February and March may produce a certain number of "bloomers." Another way to reduce the number of "bloomers" when you are using sets is to choose the smaller sets for bulb production and save the larger ones for growing scallions....
When old-time farmers said of someone that they "know their onions," it was meant as a high compliment. The new day-length neutral bulb onion varieties simplify the situation quite a bit, but there is still plenty for the adventurous gardener to learn.
Oh dear. I'm trying to remember if the stalks were bigger than a pencil at the first of December...I'll have to do a search through pictures.
I want to say that they didn't pop their heads up until after the first of the year.
It's always so hard to figure out if I should trust OSH. They put out their onion bulbs as early as October.
You shouldn't trust OSH. Even dedicated garden stores will sell things that people will buy, whether or not they will grow well locally, and whether or not it's a good time to plant them.
But it takes a lifetime of gardening knowledge (and in a specific location, as well) to walk into a store and know whether a seedling you see there is a good bet. You can know some, but there isn't room enough in one brain to always know. So you do the best you can.
But onions, they're tricky. I haven't been brave enough to try bulbing onions. I've been growing bunching onions for scallions, but haven't tried bulbing onions. (My latitude is a particularly tricky one for day length.)
I might get brave next year, though. :)
Ok I know you have enough going on here but...my Grandma plants these things called brown beans...they are a green bean but the bean inside is brown and let me tell you....they are to DIE for i can eat a whole jar!
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