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!
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.
