Late Spring: Lots of lettuce

Our garden is looking great--it always looks great in Spring.

We've done pretty well, all things considered. Here are a few shots:

Those are lettuce and spinach plants in the front of that bed.

We've already had lettuce and spinach from the garden, and there's clearly more than we can harvest.

That's a new raised bed from Gardener's Supply

I grabbed a Sharpie marker and dated the bed so that when it falls apart in, oh ten or twelve years, I'll remember when I put it together.

We put the little "greenhouse" in the garden with the herbs that Anne started indoors from seed. They are ready to be hardened off.

The bed in the bottom left is kale--very delicious kale, I might add.

The bushy looking plant near the greenhouse is a strawberry plant that overwintered beautifully.

And finally, below is a panoramic shot of the garden. It probably won't look this good for very long!

How's your garden coming?

Finally, a day in the garden!

Yesterday we were able to work in the garden. I was so happy to just be out of the house! We removed the row covers that we put on last week when we had a frost warning. The radishes and greens look fine.

Look what was under the row covers--radishes!

We planted all of the herbs that we bought at Hilltop Hanover Farm. After a couple of years of not belonging to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) we belong to two: Hilltop Hanover and Fable We joined these two because they are CSA's that issue you a "card" and you can shop whenever you want and buy whatever you want. We are experimenting with this model--it allowed us to get organic herb starters for the garden that we didn't know we were going to have.

Anne planting herbs

Herbs from Hilltop Hanover Farm

The plan was to travel this summer--Ha!--and not have a garden. "Man plans, God laughs" goes the old Yiddish saying and it apparently applies to women also. Once we realized that we would be around all summer it made sense to plan a garden. We can't get to White Flower Farm for our tomatoes this year and we might just give up on tomatoes anyway. The Old Farmer's Almanac is predicting another wet summer for this region.

We've had so much rain that I don't think I'll need to take advantage of the DripWorks irrigation system that I put in a few years ago.

So how's your "sheltering in place" going?

Gardening in the time of the novel coronavirus

We haven’t posted in, oh, six years, based on the date of the last post ;) And we weren’t going to have much of a garden this year because we had travel plans. Mensch plans, God laughs.

So when it became clear that we weren’t going to be going anywhere we revisited our garden plans. A really bad snowstorm in March of 2018 collapsed the garden fences. Here’s a “before picture” of the collapsed garden. The fences were rebuilt that Spring.

Collapsed garden, March 2018

Garden after being rebuilt, summer 2018

Our microclimate is changing. These past couple of summers have been so wet that the tomatoes basically drowned. We thought long and hard before we picked this years plantings.

We’ve planted radishes and lettuces from seed on April 4th. These plants will do okay even if the weather is cool. You can just see the seedlings coming up in these pictures taken today, April 14. Ten days of a mix of rain (like 2 inches yesterday) and sun seem to be doing these seedlings good.

 

We marked each row with the name of whatever it was we planted (the “we” in that sentence is Anne).

And now we just watch and wait!

How are your gardens coming?

Tomatoes!

And cucumbers, and green beans, and marigolds.  But first, our new tree!  And second, a new place for our picnic table.

The tree: a kousa dogwood planted coincidentally the morning that Anne's mother Ruth died.  We've ordered a plaque with her dates and the tree will be in her memory.

And the picnic table is now nearer the porch (duh!) and much more "user friendly."  We've already had folks over for bbq's and are enjoying the new set up immensely.

The garlic bed

Garlic harvest

And the garden!  Let's hear it for garlic-planted last fall and harvested at the end of July.  Four different kinds-China Dawn, Russian Red, Georgia Fire and Leningrad.  Some large, some smaller, all delicious and very special!

What happened to the summer of 2013?

Well, we got married in October of 2013 and that sort of took precedence over the garden.  And of keeping the blog updated.

So in the next post I'll bring us up-to-date!

Spring? Who can tell, the weather has been so weird!

Last fall we had Mary Ellen of Verdesign develop a plan for our garden.  She did an amazing job and we've been so pleased.

She suggested that we plant spring bulbs in the front and back of the house.  We hesitated-and now that they are up I can't imagine why.

Backyard

 This is a shot taken from the back yard, looking up at the vegetable garden.  We never had flowers here - we never really thought of it as part of our garden.  We put the bench there to look down the ravine, and the "seasonal stream" which in the past few years has been more like an ongoing marsh.

We have yellow daffs, daffs with orange trumpets, all facing south as they strain to reach the sun.

Front bed

This is a shot of the front of the house, looking to the right of the front door as you face the house.  The vegetable garden is in the upper right.  The andromeda have great color; the forsythia in the back pick up the yellow of the daffodils in the front.

Before the daffodils bloomed we had snow drops-starting on New Year's Day for heaven sake!

Magnolia

The "piece de resistance" was our magnolia tree, which Mary Ellen moved to the back of the house and which got a lot of sun this year.  Here's a shot before the frost killed the flowers :(

We counted 11 flowers and then we had frost.  Every magnolia in the neighborhood looks as though the flowers were burned-all brown and shriveled.

I think my favorite new view is the view of the center circle (which is really an oval). The ferns that will arrive later in the spring are sending up their fiddleheads, and in a few days it will be full of grape hyacinths, but right now it's a profusion of daffodils.

This picture doesn't really show off the sun dial in the center but I hope you get the basic idea.

Center with daffodils

Happy spring, everyone!  And happy gardening.

Images from the garden before the heat wave

Things were coming along best before the heat of early July, and then all the specialty bugs, worms, caterpillars and who knows what else. You know--plant asparagus, get asparagus beetles, plant squash, get squash borers. ETC. Anyway, these are pretty pictures.

Garlic!

Softneck and hardneck.

August: the garden is at its peak

We have a ton of stuff from the garden, even though we lost our zucchini to squash borers and most of our cukes. These pictures tell the story-that's a huge head of cabbage, from which we hand picked a ton of cabbage worms and drowned in soapy water (and we probably ate some, too).

We're still getting strawberries (you can see them in front on the cutting board but some critter got most of them-not sure which critter).
We've harvested Black Krim heirloom tomatoes - those are the ones with the little bit of a crack in them. They were fabulous. Note the two types of potato-red and yukon gold.

And the real surprise? Banana peppers, all from one plant. Anne has become convinced that Mel Bartholomew might really know what he's talking about: Square Foot Gardening here we come!

Our garden doesn't look like his-yet. We've got the raised beds, all we need now is the plan.

July photos

No pictures of the garden, just of the bounty of the garden: potatoes! What a surprise this was (even though we planted them, neither one of us expected that they would really grow!). Look at how happy Anne is with our 2 1/2 pounds of red potatoes. They were delicious and very, very special.

We also got beans, both green and purple. These have been fabulous, and I've really enjoyed making a green bean and potato salad with a mango yogurt dressing (last night with a cumin yogurt dressing!) from Moosewood Low Fat Favorites Recipes, one of our favorite cookbooks. Here's a link to the Moosewood Restaurant site, if you're interested.

This has been the best garden year yet!

Where has the summer gone?

So here are some pictures of the garden-it's now August and I somehow didn't even post one picture all of June and July, so I'll just post highlights (but not the squash borers or the asparagus beetles-more pleasant highlights).
So here are a few June shots-on the left is the cucumber obelisk (with a Gerber daisy on top-thanks to Betty Torrance, thanks Betty!) before it was overrun with too many cucumbers.
And before bugs got most of them.
The tomatoes are a much happier story, so here's a shot of them from early June (above) with a whole mess of (I think) Johnny Jump Ups in front of them.
One last June shot, the one in the center above-look at how neat everything looks!

Spring, or should I say, summer?

One of the nice things (perhaps the only nice thing) about the storms of the winter is that we now have "partial sun" in our vegetable garden, which is a huge improvement over the "partial shade" that I believe that we had last year.
I only know this because we bought a Sun Calc light meter that tells us this. And the garden is looking great. This is an early picture-note the fencing at the very top.
This is a new addition to keep woodchucks out of the garden. Bill Alexander in this excerpt from The $64 Tomato tells the story of the woodchuck in his garden who waited for the pulsing on the electric fence to stop and slipped through the two electric wires. Bill Alexander called him "Super Chuck."
Made me glad I didn't bother with the electric fence this year. Anne wasn't too keen on it since it only takes one time for the batteries to go, or for the grounding to come undone, and the woodchuck has salad.
Everything is very lush-look at this, taken over the Memorial Day weekend-those are the snap peas on the pea fence from Gardener's Supply (our favorite place for garden stuff). And the raised beds are last year's model from Square Foot Gardening. My nephew Michael got this year's model-tool-less! When these fall apart, and they will, I'm going for the "tool-less" kind. We used Mel Bartholomew's book, Square Foot Gardening, New Edition as a guide. I especially like the revised "Mel's Mix."
Let me tell you about the strawberries-Anne harvested this pint on Saturday. They are amazingly sweet, and amazingly soft-if you make a fist with them in your hand you'll have squished berries.
So far, so good. Let's hope it stays this way!

Lots of Rain, Little Sun

Aerial View of Garden, June 25 '09

Flora in Ptown!

Ladyslippers all over the Provincelands...

And scotch broom (with Connie)

Clematis on a fence.

Golden Chain tree as trellis.

Looking down toward the bay.

Other areas, late May

How does your garden grow--late May '09