Monthly Archives: May 2017
Grocery Garden Harvest Report – May 3
It’s been a couple weeks since the last harvest report, and in that time we harvested a bunch more leafy greens and the sugar snap and snow peas.
Harvest Report for May 23, May 26, and May 30:
- 18 oz. of mesclun @ $5.99 per pound = $6.74
- 40.7 oz. of baby lettuces @ $5.99 per pound = $15.20
- 6.6 oz. of baby arugula @ $5.99 per pound = $2.47
- 14.9 oz. of sugar snap peas @ $5.00 per pound = $4.56
- 13.4 oz. of snow peas @ $5.00 per pound = $4.19
Two week total = $33.16
Year to Date Total = $67.24
*Fun fact: We have now harvested an equivalent value to what we spent on seeds for this garden this year!
Friday PhotoEssay – May 19, 2017
We survived a rainy, stormy week and the garden looks generally green and healthy.
We also planted most of our remaining warm season plants this week, including replanting some things that hadn’t been successful so far…
Part of that planting was putting up all of our cattle panel trellises before planting our vine crops. We planted cucumber, watermelon, and cantaloupe seeds this week. I think they have managed to stay well watered!
We also saw some pesky insects starting to make an appearance. The holes in the cabbages turned up some young cabbage loopers on the undersides of the leaves. We treated with Dipel Dust (a bacterial-based product) on Tuesday. Unfortunately, most of it did wash off later. Hopefully it did enough to get rid of the majority of the caterpillars.
Like most other plants, our carrots are growing well. Unfortunately, the plants are a bit too thick to produce good carrots. We thinned the plants out so that there is about one carrot plant per inch. This should make it easier to get good quality carrots rather than carrots that are twisted around each other.
We also transplanted our gingers back outside this week. They had been in my office and are more than ready to go back out. This is the turmeric. The rhizomes are still nice and healthy, but it is just starting to come out of dormancy and put on new growth for the year.
We are almost done with our spring planting, so from here on it is just a matter of watching everything grow!
Grocery Garden Harvest Report – May 16
I have two weeks of leafy greens harvests to report today. The Grocery Garden has green and red butterhead lettuces that are at the baby leaf stage, a mesclun that is slightly larger than baby sized, and a lettuce mix that is at baby leaf stage.
Not a beautiful picture, I know. This is the “after” harvest shot of the Wildfire Lettuce Mix. We harvest the leaves down to almost nothing so that the plants stay smaller and the leaves more tender.
Harvest report from May 9th and May 16th:
- 3.4 lbs baby lettuces @ $5.99 per lb = $20.62
- 0.86 lbs baby mesclun @ $5.99 per lb = $5.16
Total for past two weeks: $25.78
Year to Date Total = $33.98
Salad greens total up quickly, but the catch is you have to want to eat $10 worth of salad each week. That’s a lot of salad for some people!
Friday PhotoEssay – May 12, 2017
After a week of warmer temperatures and MORE rain, the garden has grown a lot! We also planted some of the warm season plants and plan to plant more this coming week.
The peas in particular have grown significantly and most of them are starting to flower.
Most years, we may have one variety of peas planted in one area. This year we have 5 different pea varieties – one heirloom shelling pea, one snow pea, one sugar snap pea, and two peas for containers. This is the ‘Peas in a Pot’ variety. It is about 10 inches tlal and is already flowering and setting pods.
The sprouting broccoli in the barrel planter is starting to head in the center. Next week we will probably remove that small head in order to encourage development of side shoots. Sprouting broccoli doesn’t form large central heads, but it won’t be very productive if the central head isn’t removed.
The tomatoes were all planted this week, although we are waiting until next week for the peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, and melons. Because of the grafted plants, we couldn’t plant them deeper, resulting in some creative staking to keep the plants upright until the stems have gotten stronger.
We planted this Dragon Tongue Arugula in the Grocery Garden. This variety has highly lobed leaves with red veins. It has proven to be a very slow grower so far and the germination wasn’t great. We will wait and see if it improves with time.
The new Prairie Star Annual trial garden was planted this week too. If you have driven by, you probably saw the row of big containers. These are for demonstrating the Prairie Star Annual Flower trials. We are excited for this new usage of the front of the Demo Garden space. Hopefully this area will be a beautiful color show all summer.
The Demo Garden Blog 