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Changes in the Family of 4 Garden
Things have changed drastically in the Family of 4 Garden in the last 2 weeks. The cabbage are gone (except one), the potatoes and onions are gone, the peas and lettuce are gone. We have planted seeds for squash, cucumbers, melons, and okra to take their place.
The onions aren’t as big as we’d like to see, but they still look great!
The okra and melons are going to take over this area by the end of the summer, even though they are getting planted later.
Family of 4 Harvest Report:
2 lbs Red Onions @ $1.20/lb =$2.40
2 1/4 lbs Yellow Onions @ $1.20/lb =$2.70
3 3/4 lbs White Onions @ $1.20/lb =$4.50
1/3 bunch beets @ $3.00/bunch = $1.00
10 lbs Yukon Gem Potatoes @ $1.20/lb =$12.00
1/4 bunch carrots @ $2.00/bunch = $0.50
Weekly Total: $23.10
Year to Date: $141.04
Friday PhotoEssay
Another week flew by, with lots of changes in the garden. I apologize for fairly light blogging, but the summer continues at a crazy pace. Yesterday, we had a bunch of kids from McConnell AFB here for a Garden Day camp, so we had a lot of fun, but obviously no blogging got done.
The ‘Marmande’ tomatoes are the first heirlooms to set fruit, and by almost unanimous consent, the kids yesterday said they looked like green pumpkins. They do, rather.
We harvested the leeks on Tuesday to make room for our summer, heat-set tomatoes. Some of the leeks were developing almost garlic-like bulbs, which is an interesting phenomenon. (Technically, elephant garlic is a type of leek, so I guess it isn’t too surprising.)
The squash, cucumbers, and melons are doing a great job vining themselves up the trellises. I expected them to take a little more training than they have so far. Even so, I’ve got some clips ordered to help with the trellising, because I expect we’ll need them later.
This “bug” is hanging out in our purple kale. It actually is of the Order Hemiptera, which are commonly called “true bugs,” so this is one insect that is correctly called a bug! This a Harlequin Bug, which is a pest of cabbage, horseradish, and other members of the cabbage family, which makes sense why it is on the kale. The “Insects in Kansas” book helpfully states, “some people might consider it a beneficial species when it feeds on Brussels sprouts and broccoli.” Gee, thanks! I’m not too worried about the presence of just one harlequin bug, but we’ll keep an eye on it.
Here’s the Family of 4 Garden before we harvested the onions and potatoes with the kids yesterday. We had a lot of fun digging in the dirt to find potatoes. We could have gotten bigger potatoes by waiting another couple weeks, but it was too much fun to pass up!
Have a great weekend!
Friday PhotoEssay
The garden sure has changed a lot this week, especially since the weather has been pretty consistently warm.
The heirloom tomatoes are almost unrecognizable. They will be well past ready for another level of twine next Tuesday! They are also suckering a lot from near the base, so I think we will be pruning them next week as well. I’ll try to get pictures of that process.
The wind certainly didn’t do any favors for our onions. They are pretty well flattened. But, since they still seem to be alive, we’ll let them keep going until they aren’t.
Some of our peppers are starting to grow out of the thrips injury, while others, like the one above, are definitely not growing out of it yet. We may have to spray next week.
More cabbage pictures! This is the cabbage in the Family of 4 Garden, so it is more in line with normal cabbage season, compared to the ‘Caraflex’ that had gotten a head start with the Garden Show (may it rest in peace).
The lavender is in full bloom, and it is much prettier in person than my pictures would show. The colors just get washed out in the bright sunlight. Hopefully we’ll have a cloudy day while it is still blooming nicely.
We have 2 peppers and some squash in the large, 100 gallon smart pot. This picture was taken on Tuesday, and the squash have at least doubled in size since then.
Have a great weekend!
Insect Issues
This spring is showing more than it’s fair share of insect issues, I think. In particular, we are seeing lots of flea beetles and other beetles coming in on the Master Gardener Hotline. I haven’t seen as many flea beetles here, but there are some.
Here’s one of those pesky flea beetles hanging out on the leaf of one of the leeks. It’s not causing that much damage, but it’s good to be aware that they are out there.
Our onion leaves, meanwhile, are showing very characteristic damage from thrips. To learn more about thrips, you can check out this webpage from the University of Minnesota. Basically, thrips are a tiny insect (about 1 mm in length) that feeds on the leaves down in the growing point. According to the UC-Davis entomology site, the best control for these guys is using spinosad, an organic pesticide. I guess we’ll have to give that a try!
On a positive note, there are also LOTS of ladybugs around the garden this spring. (I guess the bad news to that is that we must have a good food source for them.) I suspect that the reason we have so many so early is that they managed to overwinter under our row covers, just like the aphids did!
Planting Onions & Potatoes
We finally got the onions and potatoes planted in the Family of 4 Garden yesterday.
We planted 3 kinds of onions: Yellow Granex, Red Candy Apple, and Super Star White onions. All of the onions planted were transplants, so there’s a little bit of instant gratification in seeing more things growing in the garden right away.
The rumor that I’ve heard here is that you plant onion transplants if you want big onions and you plant sets if you want green onions. I’m not sure where that idea came from. I suspect that it may be easier to get large onions from transplants because our spring growing season can be so short. However, I think it is perfectly possible to get full size onions from both transplants and sets.We always planted sets growing up.
We planted the onions in rows about 4-5″ apart and the plants were 3-4″ apart within the rows. That means that in a 2 ft x 4 ft area, we have about 72 onions planted.We also put down a little bit of fertilizer, since onions need phosphorus to thrive.
Our potatoes are ‘Yukon Gem.’ This is a new variety that isn’t widely available yet, but I managed to find some seed potatoes from an online catalog. ‘Yukon Gem’ is an improved version of Yukon Gold. It supposedly yields higher than Yukon Gold and has better disease resistance. We don’t have any Yukon Gold to compare it to, but we will see if it turns out to be productive.
Planting potatoes is one of my earliest gardening memories, and generally a pleasant one. (Much more pleasant than the memory of hoeing potatoes, although that’s not really too terrible either.) The first step in planting potatoes is cutting your seed potatoes into pieces. If you look closely at the end of the potatoes above, you can see the divot in the end – that’s the eye of the potato. Each seed piece needs to have at least one eye, because that’s what will sprout.
It is also important that there’s a decent sized piece of potato along with the eye, because that will help feed the plant as it begins to grow. Yukon Gold and apparently Yukon Gem too are a little bit wimpy in the potato eye department. Other varieties have lots more eyes. We didn’t cut the pieces up as much as we could have, since we had 2 1/2 pounds of potatoes to plant a 4 x 4 foot area. Some people say that you have to let the seed pieces “heal” awhile before planting to prevent the seed from rotting. I’ve never done it that way and we very rarely had a problem with rotting. Your choice!
The seed pieces were planted about 4-6″ deep and 10-12″ apart. The rows were also about 12″ apart. If you do the math, that means we should have about 16 potato plants in the Family of 4 Garden.
