Garden Overview

Here is the garden from the patio on August 2nd. Please don't mind my shaggy grass, lets call it eco friendly, yeah that sounds like a good excuse. This past week has been much warmer and as you can see the plants are responding accordingly. All the warms season crops are finally starting to really grow which is a positive sign.

Starting with a close up of the lowest native soil garden. A bit hard to decipher what is in here and even hard to tell were my shaggy lawn ends and the garden begins! We have paste tomatoes growing in the half barrel, fingerling potatoes in the white pot and on the end is some herbs in pots and rhubarb.

Still on the same native soil bed as above, this shows the compost bag grown early potatoes. I have harvested one bag and it only had small potatoes still. The temptation got the best of me, I will leave the rest a while longer so they can grow large.

This bed contains romanesco broccoli, late planted broccoli & brussels sprouts and on the trellis behind is red kuri & delicata squash. When the romanesco's are harvested in a week or so the uncovered coldframe will take their place. The frame will then be planted with spinach, kale and some mache a little later in the season.

This bed contains storage onions, shallots, beets, carrots and cucumbers on the trellis behind. You may also notice one of the lemon queen sunflower stakes in the top left, they have buds but the flowers seem a ways off still.

This is the pepper bed, it contains jimmy nardello, big chili II, ancho & purple peppers. I think the black plastic has really helped them along in this cool season.

Here is my little "pot" garden. From left to right is sport peppers that are not doing so great, a sungold cherry tomato in the center that was sown in June and is just starting to flower and tauro radicchio that is just starting to form heads.

This bed use to contain spring crops that have since been harvested, the only ones left are three broad bean plants that I am growing on for seed. Towards the back a the bed is a row of late sown beets and in front of that are two vermont cranberry bean plants. The pot in the center is a tomatillo that sprung up after I spread some of my compost. The broad beans and potted tomatillo will soon make way for the uncovered poly tunnel. Post to come about that soon.

Here are more fall crops that have recently been started. Almost all of these will be planted within the poly tunnel in a couple weeks. More about them next week. I have them on a high window sill in hopes of protection them from the squirrels. Good thing I took this shot as it made me realize they are thirsty.

This bed has gone a little mental and makes me wish I kept at my tomato pruning. It is hard to believe that only a month ago I servery pruned the tomatoes, you can't even tell. This bed contains recently sown parsnips to the left, onions sets & eggplant in the front and many tomatoes in the back and to the side.

Here are the topsy turvys. They are not really growing the best, I'd hate to see how they do in an actual hot summer! I placed them high up so they didn't grow into the tomatoes below but they are anyway. They do have some fruit setting though so not a total loss. I think next year I will source determinate tomatoes to grow in them.

Here we have another ballooning bed. It has three tomato plants to the left, pole beans in the back that are finally starting to climb & bloom, dragon tongue beans, zucchini and some poor shaded carrots in the middle. I don't think the carrots are going to make it.

This bed contains freshly planted leek starts in front, melons on the trellis behind that are not growing very much and my poor eaten chard. I started some fresh chard for a fall planting and hope the bugs are less prevalent this fall.

Last but not least is the potato bin. It is growing like a bad weed and most stems are flowering now. The plants from the bottom of the bin up are about 7 feet high and I have since propped them up with a bit of string. I managed to fill the bin 5 boards high but it has sunk to three boards high now. I am looking forward to what I harvest from it. Last year I harvested about 20lbs of potatoes from a similar amount of raise bed grown potatoes. It will be interesting to compare the yield difference when they are grown so closely.