While I know that showing pictures of individual plants in your garden is like showing family photos, some of you may love photos of baby vegetables as I do. For you, here’s a short slide show of the growing corn, artichokes, tomatillos, tomatoes, squash, edamame and cucumbers mid-July. Some of them show the red mulch in the background.
The rest of you can just skip this post.
This is the labyrinth this morning. I can see the plants grow from one day to the next. I’ve let the salad mix and some herbs go to seed in the labyrinth, hoping I’ll see new seedlings soon.
Herbs include all the common culinary herbs, plus borage, hyssop, lemon verbena, summer and winter savory, lemon balm, Thai basil, fennel, rue, feverfew, along with five or six kinds of lettuce, three kinds of chives, and dozens of flowers.
The rest of the front is all flowers.
Along with the stone work, there is drip irrigation, so no watering issues (for once in my life) other than figuring out how often and how long I want the water to drip.
The back, aside from a plethora of poppies, is all vegetables, chickens, and bees.
Here is the famed red mulch, chicken coop in the background.
The baby cucumbers, artichokes, tomatillos, corn, and beans:
and four of the seven pullets, happily eating scraps.
When Larry discovered me baking egg shells this morning before adding them to the compost, he said:
“This is a farm my Okie relatives wouldn’t recognize.”
Indeed! I hope this is not like someone’s dull slide show of their vacation–but I couldn’t resist.
This morning I went out to look at the garden, and a little junco was nibbling under the cucumber—hopefully eating weeds! Can you see it between the plants?
Yesterday was devoted to putting down red mulch and building potato towers. I first read about potato towers in Sunset Magazine (waiting for the dentist!), then saw them on the Bennington Garden Blog. Now they seem to be all the rage. The idea is to put in a bunch of potato pieces and keep adding layers of straw, soil, and compost as the potatoes grow. They grow up instead of sideways, giving a tower of harvestable potatoes.
Everyone likes to try something new, including me. They seem like an appealing, space-saving idea. I like the thought of just reaching in for new potatoes as the rest keep growing. I went to Urban Ore my favorite shopping spot for the garden, and picked up an old wicker hamper for one. I made another one out of a remnant of chicken wire and a bamboo shade. It took most of the morning, and I remembered the best home improvement advice I ever read. “Never think anything is going to take 15 minutes; it takes 15 minutes to find the screwdriver.” Or in my case, to assemble wire cutters, pliers, scissors and glasses.
The red mulch (according to its label) is “a recent innovation to maximize the effect of reflected light on plant growth…red has been found to enhance the growth and yield of several vegetable crops, including tomatoes.” I decided to give it a try, especially as the foggy east bay is not the best tomato-growing environment in the world.
First I weeded, then top dressed the plants with compost, then put on the mulch. I had to cut and paste a bit to fit my odd rows, but it went pretty well. We’ll see. I think I’ll put it on the eggplants and cucumbers, too.
And the first baby cucumbers are as cute as any newborn. Meanwhile, I’ve been eating and giving away lettuce every day, and enjoying the bumper crop of peas.
I realized, reading the Bennington Garden Blog this morning that I have neglected to document my miraculous garden. I am lucky to be planting on soil that has been uncultivated for years; it’s rich and full of worms. With the addition of some compost to lighten up the clay, it has produced what seems like instant results. I started planting in February, and now have more lettuce than we can eat (just ready to transplant the third crop of seedlings), snap and snow peas, kale, baby tomatoes, and vigorous corn, tomatillos, cucumber, squash, artichoke, eggplant, edamame and bean plants. I also have first year blueberry bushes, raspberry, and blackberry vines, a young Celeste fig and Hachiya persimmon, and a pepper tree. Here come the photos:
The peas grow visibly taller each day!
These are planted with a technique called Mayan gardening. The corn should be a stalk for the beans, tomatoes or tomatillos, the cucumber provides ground cover.
Can you spot the slug in the lettuce seedlings? I didn’t know it was there till I looked at these.
Here’s the front. You can see the beginning of the labyrinth here:
Some of the herbs and salad greens in the labyrinth are already going to seed—I’m letting that happen, figuring I’ll have a summer crop later.
The garden is a world of pleasure, changing each day. Soon to come: red mulch for the tomatoes! Stakes for the berries, taller stakes for the peas.
