Sunday Garden Update

Whew - it is HOT outside! It's been pretty toasty all week, and we got up to 90 today. BEFORE Memorial Day. I still haven't plugged in the air conditioning units yet...holding out until it's desperately necessary! (I came REALLY close today.) It's days like these that I wish that I had a fenced in yard. A privacy fenced-in yard. Preferably behind my house, because my across-the-street neighbor is on a hill that's probably 25 feet above my house, so there wouldn't be much privacy in the front. And then I'd need all the trees in the backyard down. Because I'd like to garden in my swimsuit, with the sprinkler going.

A girl down the street lays in her front yard in her swimsuit while her kids play, and she is in a much higher trafficked area than my part of the street. Still, she's laying, not moving around. I can't wait until Memorial Day finally gets here, so the pool at the gym will open up and I can start to even out my farmer (gardener?) tan.

And in unrelated news, I somehow came in contact with poison ivy. I'm not sure if it was from my yard or not, although I did get it last year. I am a part-time mail carrier, and I thought one of the boxes had something that looked poison ivy-ish to me on it the other day. Add the big patches of welts to the massive amount of mosquito bites I ALWAYS get, and I always scratch them until they bleed, and my arms and legs look like I have the bubonic plague. No wonder I don't have a boyfriend. I have been using calamine lotion and hydrocortisone like crazy, but it just feels SO much better when I'm scratching it. I won't be able to get to the doctor until Wednesday at the earliest, but if it's still bad by then, I'm begging for a prescription.

Anyway, the garden has been kicking into high gear, loving this deliciously hot weather. Here are some highlights -


My sugar snaps, on the whole, are pretty anemic looking, but they were kind of an afterthought this year (since the squirrels stole the first round that I planted), and they're in the worthless front bed, just because I wasn't quite sure where to put them, and I wasn't quite sure if I should just let that bed lasagna itself, or attempt to grow something in the lasagna. I think they're anemic looking because it's probably pretty hot in root-land. Still the ones that have survived are flowering and producing. These two pods didn't even make it inside the house.


The zucchini plant is growing like gangbusters. The crookneck squash plants next to it around growing as tall, but they look like they're going to start flowering soon. They only have maybe 4 true leaves, so it seems strange to me that they'd be flowering already. One of the vendors at the farmer's market had baby crookneck squash for sale today, so maybe it's just a result of the weather.

Yes, the yard behind it is a mess. My lawnmower broke this week. And the kids' toys are EVERYWHERE. And the front yard is a work-in-progress that likely won't be finished until next year. Slow and steady...


Now that I have sluggo'd the bean bed, the garden beans and soybeans are coming along nicely. I can't wait to make fresh edamame instead of the frozen stuff!

And in tomato news, we have an explosion of growth.

Amish Paste

Tommy Toes

Lida Ukranian

The unknown with the first fruit. My best guess is that this is another Tamina, because it's got the same potato leaves, and is fruiting at the same time. Seems like I ended up with more Tamina plants than anything else. Hope they taste good!

Campari

Tamina

This was one of those weird blooms that looked like a bunch of flowers fused together. It's now growing a mutant tomato. I know some people just pick these off to allow for the rest of the plant to use the energy to make regular fruit, but it's kind of fun to watch something out of the ordinary.

On the agenda for this week:

Get the rest of the 20ish tomato plants into the ground. (I can't ever seem to catch the bakery when they have buckets, so I'm just going to hope that I can grow these guys in the ground.) I've never been successful with in-ground tomatoes, only container plants. We'll see how it goes.

Transplant the Amish Pie Pumpkin seedlings to their permanent home.

My Jack be Little Seedlings are also up, and they need to move to their permanent home for the season as well. I'm thinking I'm going to trellis those on a cattle panel, since they are small, with luffa on the other side. The cattle panel will wait for another day.

I want to try to get my hands on a rhubarb rhizome somewhere locally, since I know it can't be harvested in it's first year. I figured I'd let it go this year so I can be eating it next year. I also want to get some ollas to try with my in-ground plants, since I've been watering like crazy and my rainwater harvesting system is likely going to have to wait until next year. Our area isn't exactly known for it's variety of gardening stuff, so I think I'll end up doing a scavenger hunt in Atlanta when I head down there in July.

It's supposed to be a relatively dry week, but staying toasty. I brought my worm bin inside, because I'm worried about them getting cooked. They got their first watermelon rind today, and are in worm heaven.

There's Good News and There's Bad News

Let's do the bad news first, okay?


SIGH. I found some in the bean bed too. Break out the Sluggo.

Now for the good news...

The first round of anemic snap peas, that I was pretty sure that I killed, are not only flowering...


...but I found a couple of pods on them too!


Speaking of flowers, check out my orange bell pepper plant.


And in the new growth report of the day, I FINALLY got some Amish Pie Pumpkin seeds to germinate. I tried them with the paper towel in the baggie method, I tried them in little seedling pots, and I gave it one last shot in the reused grapes container. Since these particular seeds were REALLY hard to find, because of the bad pumpkin season last year, I was going to be really upset if all of my seeds were duds.

Things are going in full swing around here. The weather is still a big ol' mess - freezing to broiling in two days or less - but the plants don't seem to mind much.

Blueberries are filling out. (The one with the beads on it has been decorated by my 4 year old.) They are in 5 gallon buckets right now, but I think next year I'm going to move them to the ground. Anyone know when would be a good time to do that? (After I pick the berries? Sometime in the fall? Before/after winter? Next Spring?)


Remember that green strawberry I showed you last week? Something ate it, and it wasn't a human. I'm kind of depressed. I have the stuff to make a cover, I just didn't get around to putting it up. There are some deep in the container that are ripening, and the birds can't see that they are red. (Or at least, they haven't caught THIS one yet!)



My peppers are also chugging along. Here is the orange bell...it looks like it'll be flowering in the next week or two. (Those 90 degree days interspersed with the random cold ones must make for happy peppers?)


...and the sweet banana got moved into his permanent pot for the season. He's just blowing in a little bit of wind. That plastic container in the background is holding some soybean seeds. It originally held cupcakes for a child in my daughter's daycare class. I watched as her teacher started walking it to the trashcan, and then I laid claim on it before it was tossed.


Speaking of reusing plastic containers, here's an old strawberry container, now holding Black Seeded Simpson lettuce. What I find odd is that this lettuce was seeded after the stuff in the clay pots and in the hugelkultur beds, and it's grown like a weed. I thought maybe the hot temperatures were the problem with the lettuce (and the pots and the hugelkultur bed are in a part of the yard that gets dappled shade throughout the day), but that's not the case, I guess. Live and learn. This stuff will get split up and moved to larger containers sometime this week.


The basically worthless hugelkultur beds -

That's celery in the lower right, and romaine lettuce sproutlings that are probably a month old, and haven't gotten any bigger.

I gave up on the second one, and transplanted the swiss chard into it. Hoping it'll be happier there.




Here are the cukes, still snug in their SWC, and growing, slowly but surely.


My second round of snap peas...since the squirrels and/or the birds annihilated my first round. These will be transplanted...somewhere. Haven't quite figured that out yet. It's my understanding that they don't like heat, so I'm debating whether to put them in the part of the yard that doesn't get the lion's share of full sun. Although, when I tried that with the lettuce, well, obviously it's not working.