Sunday, October 8, 2023

Late summer update

I have not posted in a while. But I have been busy harvesting tomatoes, green beans, chard, kale, cantaloupe... This morning I came home with Kg 3.192 of these tomatoes:


My total for the season is Kg 32.25, or 71,705 lbs. And my vines are still carrying lots of fruit. And our freezer is full of tomato sauce. Not bad.

Monday, June 5, 2023

Late spring update

This year I put seeds in the ground in early May, all before May 10. In early June I have harvested radishes, spinach, some beet greens, arugula, cilantro, parsley, basil, as well as strawberries, from their small raised bed. Here is a picture of my first spinach take:

And here is a picture of cilantro growing in a corner of its bed:


As usual, my garden beds are full of volunteer plants. I did not put potato eyes in the ground, yet I have potato plants flourishing here and there, as in this picture. 
The foliage is impressive, as are the blossoms. I will remove the blossoms to eliminate competition with the tubers.

There are hundreds of volunteer tomato plants growing in each of my raised beds. My fava beans are about to produce their pods; chard, carrots and squash of various kinds are coming up. I am disappointed that I don't yet see peppers and eggplant. I am similarly puzzled by the small number of green beens growing. I have replanted some and I wait to see what will happen. All is good.

Sunday, April 9, 2023

Blossoms

It's April 9th, and I have been readying my raised beds. The greenhouse has several things growing, and I have put fava beans in my raised beds. Spinach is coming up, along with radishes:


Two exemplars of each are visible in this photo. The forecast is for mild weather.

It wasn't mild a few days ago when I had to cover the peach with a tarp to protect it from lows in the low 20s. The tree was about to bloom, and today I took a picture of some blossoms, which I hope will turn into fruit here comes summer.



Thursday, March 9, 2023

Too early?

My early planting experiment has failed.

In January I planted some spinach and some kale in my greenhouse. The spinach came up. But then February came streaking cold, snow, rain and overnight lows in the teens. Not much of a sign of vegetable life remains.

So today I decided to try again. I put some spinach in the greenhouse and radishes, green beans and more spinach in the raised bed outside the greenhouse. Let's see how it goes.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

All eyes are 'n the ground

First of all, I want to express my thanks to all my followers who filed comments on my last post.

I realize that I have not given an account of my 2022 potato harvest. Unfortunately I have misplaced the potato fact sheet: how many pound harvested, essentially. But I can assert that it was an excellent crop, all the more so because unplanned and unexpected. Sometimes I wonder...

This year I will try to keep track of all my garden doings. And today I planted all the eyes I had managed to carve out of my potato crop in the last few weeks. They are all in the wagon garden, and I look forward to seeing their progress.

I have also planted spinach in the greenhouse trough, and Russian Kale in a smaller planter in the greenhouse.

Needless to say, I have doctored the soil in the trough and in the wagon garden. Other such doctoring is underway. Never anything but my compost and my friend Gary's horse manure.

I have also assembled another raised bed, and it's ready to make its entrance into the vegetable penitentiary (I am thinking of renaming the "penitentiary" the "resort") where its designated task is to grow tomatoes. More garden beds are coming.

Monday, January 9, 2023

Lo and behold!

 For all of you devoted followers of this blog of mine, hear hear!

It's a new year and I am getting my garden beds ready.

I was in the greenhouse working on the soil in the trough, adding manure and stirring. And look what I found!


A clear demonstration of my ineptitude at harvesting potatoes. 606 grams of demonstration. We are still eating my potatoes from last year's garden, but are about to run out. I have been selecting sprouting potato-eyes, but as I am ignorant of potato culture, all I know is last year's harvest was the result of me throwing some potato eyes in a couple of my raised gardens. I have added the three miniscule ones on the left to my potato eye stash. We'll see what happens. But, please, don't inundate me with me with suggestions. I can only process one message per week.

Once I finished (?) pullling potatoes out of the ground, I treated my soil and planted spinach. We'll see what happens. Happy gardening.

Saturday, October 1, 2022

The Beat Goes on

Tomatoes keep on coming. I think I had weighed a total of 10,904g through the 7th of September. Since then I have harvested another 11,917g--almost 23kg. We are feasting on them, making salsa di pomodoro for our off-season consumption. The freezer is full.