Backyarden Update...

By
So our garden here is doing okay... and I say okay because we got everything in late, the cabbage worms have been at the cabbage, some tomato plants showed early signs of blight and needed to be removed, and the groundhog that disappeared is back, or another has taken its place. That said here it is!
The big tomato plant here in the front looks good..note that all the red cabbage in this first box was chomped by a groundhog...
Salad needs to be picked in this front box, this being the second time, we have a bunch of mixed carrots and lettuces here. After our first planting some animal tore up the whole bed mixing it all  up and tearing up the seed.
The herb boxes in the back are coming along nicely, there is a big tomato here that came from the compost...which means our compost is not getting hot enough, but I will take it because it looks strong and healthy!
Some of the big terra cotta pots just have flowers, I love these "Love Lies Bleeding", beautiful flower with a gruesome name.
this was a rotten pumpkin added to the top of the compost that sprouted, we could not resist throwing it in the ground. It will need some serious cutting back because apparently all the seeds were strong and sprouted. We definitely do not have room for that many pumpkin plants in our little yard!
This fruit is not local or from our garden, but I am excited after eating so much green from our CSA, the Sumner garden, and our garden here to have access to all the wonderful in season fruit at the store...fresh figs!!!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garden and Seedlings

By
Image
We have been getting the compost turned, giving the raised beds some extra composted manure and getting everything ready for the seedlings to go out. Hopefully this weekend we will have everything in the backyard garden and will only have the big garden left to work on. Our lettuces are ready, so our first salad from the garden is coming shortly...the kale and spinach have taken a beating though from the squirrels, for some reason they want to dig them up. I added a lovely aluminum pie plate on a stick to scare them a bit and it works until the plate gets free. I hate having what looks like junk hanging in my garden, but I also don't want the groundhog eating my lettuce and the squirrels digging up my other greens! The seedlings are holding on even though I have had some dampening off and the garlic spray seems to be helping some of them. I was glad that we put in grow lights for them because it has been so cloudy and rainy for the past couple weeks, although you can tell we had s
Read more

Adding Garden Soil to the New Garden

By
Image
The composted manure garden soil was delivered in the rain, and then the rain continued for a couple of days. That produced a soggy wet soil pile in the middle of our driveway. Saturday morning, the rain had stopped, and we were ready to lay down some cardboard and maybe some paper to kill whatever grass we were not able to destroy hand tilling it. The whole plan was a failure. The hand tilling we had done last week was nowhere near the kind of shape we needed it to be. It's funny to feel defeated so early in the process of anything you want to do, but there we were soaking wet topsoil covering our driveway and hand tilled slightly turned up grass in the backyard. We realized the mix we had bought was going to hold too much moisture and it would likely not work well for a garden if it was sitting on top of composting cardboard, this would have been the easy and quick answer to our garden dreams but we knew it had flaws already. We had to get a second opinion even though we knew w
Read more

Pest of the year so far goes to....

By
Well, a quick update on pests and the weather. Aphids are decreasing in numbers after hitting them with "Safer Soap" from Paris Farmers Union. An approved for organic garden option that appears to get approval from lots of people. Squirrels have been hiding out and not digging in the garden, probably due to the horrible weeks of rain. Which brings me to our worst "pest" so far, the rain! We lost our melons (there is still one pathetic looking vine, but I think it will not produce melons before it gets too late. We lost our kale, lettuce and spinach to the rain as well, just started getting yellow, it did not mature correctly and got bitter while still small. We tore it all up and stared new this weekend. Hopefully this will get us going into the next weather pattern ans we will get more sun and better looking crops. The tomatoes, basil, and peppers are looking a little weak as well, but the couple days of sun gave them a boost. Cabbages, broccoli, brussel sprout
Read more