Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 200615

June Gloomish. Highs in the 70’s, lows around 50. Rain, clouds, dull. Quick touch of the 80’s on Friday, and then temps plunged into the 50’s. Next week, more of the same.

Not much going on on the production front yet. The lettuce I planted in containers indoors is doing well (I’m trimming a leaf or two every other day), and the outdoor container of radishes has given us three or so, but it will be another two months before anything comes up in the main garden. I’m quietly laughing at all those who ran out and bought up all the vegetable seeds when the lockdown started. They may well be back at work before anything ripens. But hey, at least they’ll have fresh asparagus, right?

Laid down a second anti-squirrel grill in Section 3. Planted chard, bunching onions, and bok choy, all on tape. One row of scattered Iceberg lettuce seeds — they won’t head, but they do make nice leaf lettuce. Squirrels dug up the space between the grills overnight, but didn’t get to the plants.

The aluminum container is coming up radishes. Unlike last time.

Mulched the new trees some more, and added more rock. Continued my war on the burdock.

Real radish

Real effective

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 190722

The weather was surprisingly pleasant, with highs in the upper 70’s, not warming to the 80’s until the weekend. The whole NW is having an unseasonable extension of June Gloom, becoming subject to JAWS — July Abnormally Wet Systems. On Monday, Spokane had the second highest rainfall for that date since record keeping started in 1881.  True, it was only 0.29in, but still. In the past 138 years, it’s rained on the 16th only 21 times. Forecast for next week is more normal — upper 80s/low 90s, no rain except in occasional T-storms. This forecast expected to hold through … August.

Not really seeing much production yet, other than the squash (one Summer, one Genovese, one Cocozelle). Some remaining lettuce. A couple of tomatoes are turning red, but nothing harvestable. Meanwhile, the Bok Choy all bolted.

Here’s the scoreboard. This week’s take includes harvests from previous weeks.

Week Ending 07/22	Vegetable	Count	Total Weight g	Unit Weight g	Grand Total	Total Weight kg
	EG Garden
	EG Container
	EG Bag
	EG Deck
	Other tomato
	Summer Squash	4	1210	302	4	1.2
	Zucchini	6	1948	325	6	1.9
	Spaghetti squash
	Winter Squash
	Cucumber
	Kohlrabi	1	580	580	1	0.6
Grand Total						3.7

I tried using a no-till approach to the garden this year, but it’s not working. Sometimes I have trouble finding the garden plants.

Peas and Carrots and Weeds, Oh My.

There’s actually some radishes in there, also.

We’re ahead of where we were this time last year, except that last year we were already getting big red tomatoes.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 190624

Weather continues its roller-coaster ride. Hot at the beginning of the period, and now forecasting highs in the middle 70s with lows around 50. Typical NENW springtime. We’ve been known to have frost in early July.

Nothing of import happened last week, but this week was Litha and the Midsummer festivities. Here’s what the gardens look like right now. The tomatoes are doing well all over, as are the weeds ground cover plants. Click to embiggen.

The equinox garden

House plants

Deck plants

Things continued to grow. This week we got our first pea harvest and planted a new batch. Due out the end of August. The Bok Choy in Section 3 has finally raised its head above the …surroundings.

The lettuce in the hanging planter is doing well. The tomato plant is big enough I moved the underchard over to the south railing. Planted a container of radishes for MJ, and another container of lettuce.

Bok choy is coming along, as are the carrots. The ground cover is doing best of all.

Peas doing well despite the ground cover. We harvested them all, and got one slim serving each.

Hanging garden. I suspect the lettuce is hogging all the plant food.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130715

The weather this week was hot and dry, then cool and windy, then just cool — cool for July anyway.

As Terry Pratchett said “Remember – that which does not kill us can only make us stronger. And that which does kill us leaves us dead.” This week I learned another important lesson: RTFM!

Back in the cold depths of winter, I planned my garden times using the guidance of a website down in Walla^2. When talking about the difficulties of growing brassicae in the NENW, they said things like “growth slows above 68 degrees, and stops, possibly with damage, at 85 degrees“, and

“planting out in mid-March for an anticipated harvest around the start of June is the best we can figure. It’s a little cool in middle March, so we need to provide as much help as we can–Walls o’ Water or water-filled plastic jugs among the seedlings; but in late May it’s only–as always, on average–about 73 at the daily high, so even if they’re a little slow, we should be OK. And a March 15th transplant date means a February 1st indoors sowing date.”

So I did. Except that black thumb disease struck all my seedlings this year, and nothing worked. Come late April (six weeks past the plant date), I happened upon a bunch of brassicae bedding plants– cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage — at the local hardware store, and promptly forgot everything I’d read. That’s what I planted in section 1 of the KHG, and that’s what bolted all to hell this week. I showed the broccoli and bok choy last week. Here’s the cauliflower and Brussels sprouts:

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130708

The weather this week was, as it will be through August, hot and dry.

My hops are already 12ft high. Pics next time.

I have hit on a method of watering my hanging tomatoes (the S-100 and the Husky Gold). I poked five or eight thumbtack holes in the bottom of an empty butter tub and put it in the top of the hanging basket. Not a self-watering setup because it drains too fast, but it does give the water time to spread out, so less runs out the bottom.

Nothing much doing in the garden. I don’t know if it’s the heat, or just my luck, but some of my brassicae seem to have gone from seedling to bolted in the space of two months. For example, I planted broccoli seedlings (home-started) in section 1 of the KHG. This is what they turned into:

Dude! Where’s my florets?

Also, in mid-march, I bought some bok choy seedlings (’cause mine had died), and planted them in a container. They were little 1/10 scale models of the bok choy you get in the supermarket. Here’s what they look like now.

I wonder if it’s still edible

Finally, we have one (I counted) S-100 tomato, grape sized, that’s started to turn red. Should be ready to give to my niece-in-law to eat on the plane. Assuming that TSA doesn’t confiscate it for being of the nightshade family and therefore poisonous.