Backyard Garden

Garden update July 12. We have had more rain and sunny days mixed so that makes for less watering needed which is good. We are seeing some pests but nothing we can't manage for the time being. Flea beetles, cabbage moths, cucumber beetles, and slugs are the main culprits right now. The garden in it's crazy glory. A shot of the rows that have gherkin cucumbers, green beans, dwarf variety zucchini, patty pan squash, storage cabbages, napa cabbages, onions, peas, nasturtiums, marigolds, some stray tomatoes and basil. The nasturtiums have flowers finally! Gherkin cucumbers, so excited to see how this works out. Patty pan... Tiny zucchinis are forming. Scarlet runner beans and pickling cucumbers climbing and flowering. Red flowers and baby beans. Yellow flowers and tiny cucumbers forming. Ginger is sprouting slowly, we may have to bring it inside but we are hoping it will keep going long enough for a harvest before it gets too cold. Marigolds and tomato plants. Brandywines are start...

Garden update from June 12th. Lavender bed Lettuce (asian greens mix) gone to flower already in the background and the salad we were eating in the foreground. Kale! The herb garden and the beautiful sage flowers. Napa cabbage. Tomato plants and marigolds in the large tubs, we grow them on the south side of the house by the driveway and they do very well there! Plus they don't crowd out the other plants...they get very large. Flowering chives int he herb garden. Storage cabbage. Beets coming up. Daikon radish coming up. White turnips ready to eat. More lettuce... Scarlet runner beans and pickling cukes in half barrels.

So it's a bit of a gamble, but it shouldn't be. The weather has been great this past week, hovering in the mid-60s. We hit 80+ degrees one of those days. It's Memorial Day weekend and should be a perfect time to transplant the seedlings Jen has been growing and raising for the past month. Maybe more than a month. We spent the day planting the seedlings and sowing the seeds in the garden, then watering the little beasts in the hope that they take and grow. Looks good, though. It is a gamble because last night, around 11:00 just before heading up to bed, I decided to check the weather. I never check the weather at night because I'm going to bed and I don't care. It's going to be colder than it was when the sun was out. Maybe it will rain, maybe it won't. I don't care because I'll be sleeping. But I checked it, and it said it was going to get down to 38 degrees. Not quite a frost, but along with that temp, the app gave a frost warning. I...

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...

We bought our house 12 years ago, and our backyard was filled with concrete and a giant pool. It lasted one year before we had it filled in because it was a pool, and we live in Maine. Our entire property is only .15 of an acre, and we've always wanted it to be a garden. You can see on this blog a few of the things we've tried with some success. Our first gardens were raised bed square foot gardens with the fluffiest soil we could put together. They looked cute, and they did alright. Those morphed as the wood we used to build the raised beds decayed like they were supposed to. For the past five years, we have had one long raised bed in the back yard. The first year it was full of vegetables, and it was insanely full. The following year we did the same, but weeds took over, and we ignored it. The next year we changed the raised bed into an herb garden, and it was perfect. We grew tomatoes in pots around the driveway and back porch, and the raised bed was full of mints, flower...