Blog Archives
Friday PhotoEssay: Year in Review
I’ve been meaning to do the Year in Review post for the Friday PhotoEssay “whole garden” pictures for a couple weeks now. I guess it is good that I waited until now to get a true “after” shot from the cold.
March 10th after a snow!
April 3rd
April 11th
April 25th
May 2nd
May 9th
May 16th
May 23rd
May 30th
June 6th
June 13th
June 20th
June 27th
July 7th
July 11th
July 18th – I think this was pretty much the peak of the garden for the summer, don’t you? Maybe one of the two previous weeks, but this was a pretty green week.
July 24th
August 1st
August 8th
August 15th
August 22nd
August 28th – You can tell things are on the downhill slide now!
September 15th
September 19th
September 26th
October 3rd
October 17th
October 31st – The end of “summer” for the year.
November 21st – Almost put to bed for the winter!
Friday PhotoEssay – July 25th
Tomato Day is tomorrow! I hope you are planning to attend and enjoy the hot summer weather along with a whole bunch of your closest gardening buddies. In case you missed seeing the flyer, go here.
Here’s a look at the garden this week. You can see the pumpkin on the right side is starting to look a little wilty…I guess the squash vine borers are going to do it in after all. Bah. I hope we will get a couple of ripe pumpkins first!
There is just a tinge of orange starting on some of the pumpkins… But they have quite a ways to go yet. I’m really hoping for some fresh pumpkin!
In case you’ve never seen it, this is what cilantro looks like when you let it go to seed. The seeds, which look to be almost dry, are what we call coriander. You can grind the seeds into the spice OR you could let the seeds drop in place and have a fall planting of cilantro come up. That’s what we’re planning to do.
I just noticed that our new grape vine has one small cluster of grapes on it. Even though we really shouldn’t let it go, at this point I’m inclined to let it be, since the plant has been doing so well and the cluster is pretty small.
The quinoa is starting to show a little color in the seed heads, but it is also starting to show some Swiss Cheesey-ness in the leaves. On close inspection, there appear to be some little larval guys munching on the leaves. They don’t look quite like caterpillars, but maybe either beetle larvae or sawfly larvae? I’m not sure. Perhaps after Tomato Day I’ll take a closer look. In the meantime, it really isn’t a big deal since the seed heads are already forming.
I was hoping to update more on the Curry Leaf this summer, but it really hasn’t done much. It has grown, but it isn’t a huge plant yet, probably because it’s been so cool. The most interesting thing about it is that the cowpeas keep trying to swarm it under with all their tendrils. I think we should have put the cowpeas on a trellis!
Have a great weekend!
Handouts from the Grow Good Food Workshop
If you couldn’t attend the workshop or if you missed out on one of the sessions, here are the presentations:
1. Getting Started with a New Garden Beginning Gardening
2. Choosing What to Plant Choosing What to Plant Handout
3. Common Pests & Problems Common Vegetable Pests & Problems
4. Growing Heirlooms & Saving Seed Growing Heirloom Vegetables & Saving Seed
5. Raised Bed Gardening (not available yet)
6. Success with Squash & Other Vines Success with Squash & Other Vines
7. Food Preservation 101 Preserving the Harvest Basics
8. Vegetables for Picky Eaters (not available yet)
9. Equipment & Gadgets for Food Preservation (not available yet)
Handout from the Planting & Preserving Workshop
I usually try to post the handouts/presentations from all of my classes on the blog, and I realized that I never posted my presentation from the Planting & Preserving Workshop back in February.
Planning and Planting to Preserve (PDF)
I realized in looking through the slides that I didn’t really have any speaker’s notes included. If you have questions after looking through the slides, please feel free to leave a comment or send an email and I’ll try to help you out.
First Plantings for 2014
After we got all the compost into the raised beds on Tuesday, we had a few things to get planted. Because of our garden plans this year, we just had a couple things to plant here and there.
First, we had ‘Yukon Gold’ potatoes to plant in the MG Favorites Garden. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of the planting. We also had a bundle of ‘Red Marble’ cippolini onion plants to go in the ground. They came in the mail yesterday, so we needed to get them planted.
The cippolinis are relatively small onions that are much flatter than normal onions. We chose them specifically for the Italian Garden, and then decided to plant the rest in the Salsa Garden, since we already had them coming. The plants for these onions were pretty small – smaller than I’ve seen before with other onion plants. I’m assuming it is because the end product is also smaller?
We also had some Lacinato Kale to plant in the Italian Garden and some ‘Parris Island Cos’ romaine lettuce for the Master Gardener Favorites Garden. These plants were started about a month ago, but I don’t think I ever got that on the blog.
We planted spinach and radishes in the MG Favorites Garden in an area that will be under the trellis later this spring. We also planted spinach in the ‘Taste of India’ Garden.
In the Italian Garden, we planted seeds of the endive/escarole mesclun and the ‘Italiko Rosso’ dandelion (red rib dandelion).
Hopefully by next week there will be growing things to photograph!