New stuff...

This is the new "west field"...what used to be the "west onion field". Those onions didn't really thrive so we pulled them young to use for pickling onions. And decided to throw some plants that appreciate shade in there instead of veg.









The grass is overtaking the garden, but not in the beds, luckily. Here it all looks a little chaotic...











Our lovely sunflower - waiting to see if it will give us any seeds to eat....









I need to look these up on the seed packet - strange little yellow flowers










These are the prickly pods they sprout from!

Just some recent stuff...

A beautiful violet sweet pea...












our monster zucchini (courgette) plant!












some random flowers in the flower square











romas on the way!











a long shot of the giant roma plant that Ian had to build a support for so it would stop crowding the other plants in the square

So look closely:

At least three baby mantises hung around and made their home in one of the pots by the front door. This is from last week. I've seen one since this photo was taken and he's grown even more. Each time I see them, they're bigger and greener and looking more and more like the adult mantis. Its pretty cool. I'm just afraid the last one I saw may have eaten his brothers or sisters or something since there is only one and he's gotten pretty big. (I actually don't know if its male or female btw)
I also have no idea if the ones I released in the back garden are still around or not. Most likely not since its the favorite hunting grounds for many sparrow parents right now.

These are from March....

The shallots, which we have no idea what to do with...they were doing great, we're not sure what to do now. We only lost one to those devilish sow bugs.











This is our first and last kale - it was delicious!
















I just really like the way pea tendrils operate - they're so cute b/c they look so delicate but they are super strong!










Our lettuce gave us three different evenings of dinner salad - even one night feeding salad to four adults and two miniature people. (Not midgets, Lowell and Gigi). Not to mention how everyday at least once a day Lowell procured at least one leaf of lettuce to munch while he played in the back yard.





A square of beets, shallots, roma tomato and flat-leaf parsley (which didn't really make it until I just threw the few that survived in a hole in the ground between the broccoli in the back and now I have at least two thriving parsley plants!)

Random early shots from the garden - most from April

Our first tomato - which, Lowell ate immediately after it turned red. Because he happened to be standing next to me when I saw it and said, "Ah, this one if ready for eatin'"....My mistake. Of course, after scarfing down the first one, he figured the others must be ready too, not thinking about the color, and managed to chomp down half a rock-hard, green tomato despite my protests. Many, many protests. Luckily, he left the other unmolested...until this past Thursday, when he heard me from across the garden telling his dad we had a ripe one. Next thing I know, Lowell is right beside me and grabs it, and into his mouth it goes. I picked another red one today and we have four more on the way in the next couple of days. Hopefully Ian and I will actually be able to eat them ourselves. Otherwise, I'm not too worried because the Roma plant is covered in tomatoes just waiting to ripen!

The evolution of the garden:

The order of the pics:
2/20/09; 3/23/09;
4/5/09; 4/10/09; 5/16/09

Calling in baack-up:

So the garden isn't looking so great these days...One of our broccoli was almost completely taken over by what I believe to be were scale insects. It looked pretty nasty. Most of our onions are just completely flopped over given the amount of rain that we've had the past month - which is great, but every day I kept thinking, "please don't kill my veg, Rain..." But the onions are existent so that is a good thing. The zucchini plant that I took in as sort of a charity case from a neighbor and stuck it in a random part of the garden that didn't get the designer soil from Naural Gardener is doing by far, better than any of the original plants. The spinach was taken out some time ago and replaced by strawberry plants. We'll see how that goes. The original squash was taken out of one of the small boxes and moved to a larger box so that it could have more room to spread its roots. It has not grown at all. Nothing - its looking pretty sad right now. I also planted two small tomato plants in the same bed as well as a strawberry. And they all have plenty of room. One of the lettuce ended up bolting, so Ian pulled them all out of the main lettuce box (I have some rogue lettuces growing in random parts of the garden. Some are doing quite well while others are very slow to grow).
The huge broccoli plants in the back of the garden are still big as ever and Ian and I looked over two of them a couple of days ago, like proud parents as we witnessed the beginning of the heads of broccoli on them were literally crowning.
I gently removed the pitiful parsley plants from their square the other day so that I could make room for something else. Another tomato (so, I went to Home Depot a while back wanting to get one or two starter tomato plants, and accidentally bought 9 - they were bunched so close together it was hard to tell, and it was only 3 bucks, so no big deal). We now have five regular tomato plants in the garden (why? when I hate tomatoes unless they're in a sauce) and one Roma tomato. I'm not quite sure on the care and tending to tomato plants so I feel that I've created a monster. Our roma plant is huge and is producing like crazy.
Back to the parlsey - I stuck some of the little guys pretty randomly and without much care in the ground between the three huge broccolis in the back. I pretty much just dug a little hole and threw them in and left them there as an experiment. At least half of them are looking better than they ever did in their original box, so I have hope for them yet!
We harvested some of our peas not too long ago and they were wonderful raw. In fact, all of the veg we've eaten from the garden we've eaten raw and it tastes great. The peas were spectacular. The pea plants are looking very haggard these days, though, so I'm not sure we'll see many more of their delicious fruit now. They have been through it all, I think. Our latest battle for them was with powdery mildew. I think it might have got the better of them in the end.
The shallots are going strong and it may soon be time to pull them out.
The carrots are coming along as well, still too small to pull, but I have faith that they will be superb when their time comes.
The beets - hmmm, the beets. They really look like they're ready to come out. But given my huge mistake of not thinning them (seriously, I only read about beet seeds coming in groups of 4-5 in a pod, and thought I was planting seeds, not pods), who knows when they will be ready. The greens on top say they are, but the roots on the bottom, not so much. Ian pulled a group out yesterday. Only one beet had a size that was worthy of eating. So Ian chopped the less-than-golf-ball-sized vegetable into small slices and sprinkled it on our salad - which consisted of lettuce we just pulled from the garden, and the beet greens. The beet greens were really quite nice in the salad and can stand on their own as well.
In the flower squares, we have a couple of wheat stalks and definitely some kind of sunflower. While most all of the stalks in the front flower square are over a foot tall, the ones in the middle square are a bit smaller and none have produced any flowers yet. Some experimental flowers that I planted in the far Northwest corner of the garden have made it and I had one bloom - it looked to be a sort of purple aster daisy or something like that.
The sweet peas: they are a tangled mess. I have one sweet pea stalk that has been producing - it has given me about 6-7 gorgeous lillac-colored blooms that smell heavenly. I wish more would bloom to cover up the stinky smell of the broccoli plants. I had no idea, but large broccoli plants smell awful.
So, all of our plants have been hit by some little predator or another so imagine my glee when the other day, I walked out of the house and noticed in the corner of my eye, a tiny praying mantis! It was the size of a mosquito. On further inspection, I got closer and realized there were tons of them! They had just hatched that afternoon from an ootheca (praying mantis egg) on our porch! Ian and I had noticed two strange, coccoon-looking things on the porch that were positioned directly across from each other: one on the wall, the other on a table leg)ages ago. We had no idea what they were so just decided to leave them, thinking they probably housed some caterpillar/butterfly or something. But lo and behold, we were so wrong. Those things hold anywhere between 20-400 baby praying mantises! Oh they were so cute! The second one hatched yesterday.
I took four from the first batch and four from the second batch and relocated them all to our garden in hopes that they might find it full of nourishment for their little growing bodies! We had dumped hundreds of ladybugs in our garden a couple of months ago, but we're certain most of them defected and moved to Clifford's yard up the road. Hopefully these new little bug-eaters will do the job for us!
I'll try to get more pics of the garden soon! Must go to bed now!

Harvesting kale, working in the garden....

Harvesting kale (looks more like: fan dance with kale to me)

So....this is harder than I thought...

I have these two blogs going and just threw together another web-site for a potential client, which was good, because I got the job this weekend.
But let's talk about the garden...I'm going to include some photos from the past few weeks here, I've been taking a lot of pictures, but the time it takes to upload them is killing me. So, you'll just have to make due with some recent, but not today, photos.
Here's what's been going on in the garden:
They were all growing nicely, then I thought I killed some by spraying too much soapy water on them, but they all pulled through. The peas don't look so nice on the bottom, but they still survived. We'll get to that in a moment.
Then, we had some unseasonably cold weather for a couple of spells, and that freaked me out because I thought, "oh no, they're all going to die..." but they didn't. The tomatoes and peas had some strange spots on them, and an herbologist at Natural Gardener informed me it was cold damage and they had a lot of that going on. She convinced me to buy some concentrated liquid seaweed to spray on the plants to give them a boost. Healed overnight! Amazing. Now all of my plants get a little seaweed every once-in-a-while.
I also add a little liquid compost from our compost bin sometimes, but not too frequently.
I meant to trim/prune the sweet peas to get rid of the extra weight, but never really got around to it....Good news is, many of them have made it to the fence and are still climbing. I'm certain we'll see some flowers on them soon!
We have been eating the lettuce from the garden a lot lately. Just pulling enough out for salads and its wonderful! Lowell loves it so much, every day he gets to pick a leaf of lettuce and he just shoves it in his mouth and chomps away. He loves it!
We took out both kale plants and had them with a stew the other day. Both plants had leaves going yellow on the bottom, which I read means they are going to go bitter soon. So we took them out and they were just fine.
The spinach didn't make it - I think they were just too hot. So we put a strawberry plant in that square and it is doing really well.
I pulled some beets out the other day because I thought they looked about ready. Well, when you plant beets, they come in a pod and a pod holds 4-5 seeds. I didn't thin them out when they were coming up because I didn't know this at the time. So, when I dug a bunch of beets up the other day, there were four plants. No beets, though. Just some strong looking roots. I separated them all out and re-planted in various places - and I thought they were all dead the next day. They were flat, wilted and lifeless. I poured a bit of the seaweed on them, chopped off the dead leaves...two days later, new leaves were popping out and they're back in business!
(I'm thinking I might need to drink this seaweed).
I bought some more tomato plants to replace in the kale squares. There are currently three or four, that I can see, tomatoes on the roma tomato plant. Our squash had two blossoms yesterday....
Oh, and yesterday morning I woke to a loud crack of thunder and then the horrible click-click-ping sound of hale. And I thought, "oh no, they're all going to die" but the quarter-sized hail was short lived and everyone made it out alive.
The onions are making it, I think. Some have been destroyed by something underground, and there is the odd ball that "accidentally" gets thrown in there and crushes at least one....
The broccoli by the sweetpeas is incredible! Two of them are more than 2 feet tall!
Waiting to see what to do with the carrots! Very excited.
Four of the society garlic have been transplanted to the front. Two in the back have bloomed.
Ian thinks I need to scrap the parsley...its not growing at all really. Sort of stunted.
My attempts at marigolds keeps going awry for some reason.
The shallots are doing well, all except for one that was in the direct center of the square. When I pulled it out, there was a colony of doodle bugs squatting in the middle of the bulb. Little buggers - I swear they took out all my bush beans.
We have a new 2' x 4' rectangle that is going in the garden for more tomatoes and squash....
That is all I have for now!

DinoTour Week 2:

Here our little Dino is standing in a Green Comet Broccoli space....
directly in front of him is where we are expecting carrots, (some little stubby French kind)
Diagonal from him is some escarole Lettuce selection...
And to his immediate right: baby spinach..

DinoTour: Week 2

Our dino here is standing in a square for flowers...
To his right is some Green Comet broccoli, behind him is a Toscano kale and to his left, an Early Prolific Straightneck Squash...

First week

Lowell's plot week one:

Carrots and peas

Love getting dirty!

Week one:

My garden hand....

First week....

Such a helper!

The first week cont...

Unexpected visitor:

Was quickly relocated to an empty lot...