The garden is officially progressing into early summer, and green as can be with life from vegetables, fruits and grains to weeds, weeds, weeds. The latter we are getting mighty tired of already, but at least the fruits of our labors are beginning to pay off. Due to the amount of time we've been spending on other projects, from getting our Delaware chicks moved up to the coop, to getting the garden weeded and the finicky David Bradley working properly(ish), I've decided that I'll give you a photo tour today. So behold... our main garden...
Yup, that's just shy of 6,400 square feet of garden space (in the main garden) and boy are we tired! Some of our early spring crops, like the Early Freezer (hull) Peas from Rohrer's Seeds didn't take too well between the cold snap that came mid-May and the crazy May weather that rotted out seeds left and right. Just last night I harvested and shelled a whole 1/4 cup of peas from our first harvest. Fortunately, we're planning on putting in a fall crop and hopefully the weather will be nicer that time around.
Even though, the peas we're necessarily happy with the May weather, the Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage was off to a great start, and it's leaves are now starting to form heads. Additionally our broccoli plants are forming heads as well!
We've also been eating tons of lettuce. Why plant so much? Because, homegrown lettuce tastes amazing. So amazing, that it looks like they'll be salads in our future tonight as well!
Doing exceptionally well are our sugar beets, and just today I saw one that looks to be almost three inches across! Unfortunately, our mangels are not looking quite as wonderful, but having thinned the weeds around the one row last night, maybe they'll catch up to the beets.
The first of the celery, which also made it through the cold snap, got harvested on Sunday for German Potato Salad. It's presently going a little crazy, but I'm seriously considering putting it in again next year.
Then, there's the tomatoes. I'm a little frustrated with the tomatoes this year already. Not because they aren't doing well - they are! - but because we had to replace almost a whole row of them. You see, who thinks its going to heavily frost in mid-May? So, we went ahead and put the first row of "warm weather crops" - tomato plants - in on the eleventh while the weather was warming up and momentarily sunny. We covered the cages with bags, piled some dirt on the bags' edges (and later added some clothespins) and created a few mini-greenhouses, for our garden ghosts. We were not expecting what happened on the fifteenth; however, when a frost warning caused us to quickly decide that the seedlings we moved earlier to the greenhouse, along with the tomatoes that were securely planted in the ground, needed reinforced from the potential cold in what was seemingly gale-force winds. (Okay, so they might not have been "gale-force winds," but if you were the one trying to secure plastic covers for tomatoes... they were gale-force winds.) We readied them the best we could, and waited...
The frost came just before dawn on the sixteenth of May; the temperatures dipping down to the 30s on our thermometer. It was absolutely devastating to walk out to the garden. We had been hit... hard. The wind had torn at our carefully placed bags and smashed our weakened plants upon the plastic. To see limp plant after plant lying near-lifeless across their cages is devastating. In all, ten out of the eleven plants we planted early were lying near-lifeless to absolutely dead down the row. (Out of the eleven plants, only three would bounce back.) Among those that had not gotten into the ground yet and survived, are now setting fruit.
Also, as equally happy as our tomato plants now, are the pepper plants. The first of our red sweet peppers having already been harvested!
Progress in the squash row is really starting to pick up as well. Our Yellow Crookneck, Spaghetti Squash and zucchinis are all starting to set fruit already. This year, we also erected a sturdy trellis for the cucumber and luffa gourd plants and one of our farm cats, Whitey, decided to figure out how sturdy our handiwork was. The trellis is acting as shade for our lettuce crop.
Additionally, we planted some radishes to help with pest control in our squash row as well, and it looks like the first of them will soon be harvested and we'll start our second planting.
By far, the most exciting for me so far, was seeing our oat crop last night, actually start looking like oats! It's a fairly expensive experiment when it comes to gardening, but it looks like it just might work? For those of you wondering, we did choose hulless oats, so in theory, it should be slightly less work involved in the whole process. We'll see if that's actually true when it's time to harvest them.
I additionally know some of you are probably thinking no potatoes? I thought there were supposed to be sunflowers in there. What happened to the onions? Well, I can assure you, they are all there as well. Actually, there were very few things that we left out from our original garden plan, but I decided to focus on our earlier season crops for this post that are starting to produce fairly well. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that our sweet corn will be "knee high by the fourth of July," and that we'll be able to pull some more of these weeds by that point as well. I hope the rest of your gardens are just as green as ours! Happy harvesting!
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