Garden Update: It has been a week.

The garden looks pretty good right now.  It still needs to fill in a lot to look really good, but things are coming along.  We had our first thievery this week.  When we planted our large Jalapeno plant it has a few small peppers on it already.  They are mysteriously gone now.  I didn't think they were ripe yet, but someone must have thought they were good enough.  I hope very much that this is not a yearlong problem.  It will make me sad.  I said at the beginning, that we are just doing it for fun and to make a beautiful garden, but it just feels icky, knowing that someone just decided to enter our garden while we weren't there and help them selves.  I can just picture them watching us tending the plants and saying to themselves, "those saps, they are working their rear ends off out there.  I am going to show them how stupid they are by just walking over and picking there stuff as soon as they are gone."

I sincerely hope that is not what is going on.  My aunt said it right.  I was telling our garden before we left that it should bite the persons hand off if they came back, but my kind hearted aunt added, "unless they are hungry.  Then you can let them have what they need."  She is so positive.  Here I was planning how to catch and punish the culprits, and she was thinking about people who would be desperate enough to steal produce.  Well, I hope the person was hungry and they needed the few calories and vitamins that those unripe peppers gave them.

Human scavengers are not our only problem, however.  We have some house sparrows eating off all of our lettuce now.  It keeps growing more leaves and getting wider, but not taller because all the leaves are eaten off about an inch off of the ground.  The edges are all jagged and pecked.  Very sad.  I had to thin it today, and did not get to keep any baby greens like I had been planning on.  I did however pick every other radish.  They are over an inch in diameter and were almost touching each other.  They are nice ans spicy too.  I will take some of them over to uncle Kevin. 

This picture is actually from last Thursday.  My aunt took them and sent them to me this weekend.  It is amazing how fast the radishes grew.

Here they are today, all ready to eat.

I had to add ties to the tomatoes because they have grown quite a bit and were starting to grow off sideways.

This is the top of the cherry tomato of the Sungold variety.  This one is actually two plants.  It came that way when we bought it at Bimart.  I tied those tops over to the stake and now it is strait as an arrow.  All the other tomatoes have grown quite a bit, also.  The little Roma is still pretty small.  I have no picture for that one, though.

Here is an updated picture of the washed out, radish/onion rainbow.  See the first two posts if you wonder what I am talking about.  The radishes on this side are considerably smaller than the other and the onions are also not as far along, but they are going to make a full recovery it seems.

This picture of the spinach and the lettuce is from last week as well.  The spinach is now much more full.  You can also sort of see the bird damage I was mentioning above.  They apparently prefer lettuce to spinach.

 This picture shows the cucumber starts that we planted last week.  We also planted cucumber seeds in the four hills you can see.  as of today at least one sprout has come up in each hill.  I didn't take a picture though.  The starts are turning a little yellow.  I have never had much luck with buying starts or vine plants like cucumbers, melons and squash.  That is why we also planted the seeds, for comparison and to hedge our bets.  The seeds are spacemaster (a.k.a. bushmaster).  My mom recommends them.  You can also see the early girl tomato in the background.  All of the tomatoes and peppers now have stakes as well as tomato cages.  My parents had a bunch of old bent up cages laying around on there property, and I scavenged them.  I had to use hedge trimmers to cut the vines that were growing over the pile of them.  My dad made some wonderful strong tomato cages a few years ago, from welded rebar, but I didn't want them to get stolen, so I went with the old bent up store bought ones.

Here we are looking down on the scarlet runner beans.  This is a week old picture, as well.  They are now starting to send out the climbing stems and get second and third leaf pairs.  They will be so beautiful when they are blooming and covering the fence with dark green foliage.

Here are the peas.  They are not doing very well.  I think it is just too hot for them.  We planted them very late and our garden spot is between sidewalk concrete and parking lot asphalt.  It is going to be wonderful for the heat loving things like the peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers, but the peas, not so much.  When these finally give up the ghost, either voluntarily or by force, the pumpkin vine will be trained over to grow in their place.  The pumpkin seeds we planted a week and a half ago still have not come up.  I hope they do soon.

This is last weeks picture of the bush bean rectangle.  You can see that almost all of them sprouted and have their true leaves showing.  Do not be concerned about the varying colors.  Remember we planted a mix of three bush beans (the Tricolor mix package).  You can tell them apart at this stage.  They also did not come up at the same time.  The purpler looking ones came up first, then the paler yellow ones followed by the normal looking green ones.  However, I am a little concerned after our visit to the garden today.  Several are now missing there tops.  I hope the birds have not, now developed a taste for bush been leaves as well.

The rest of this post will be an update on the porch containers.  They are really looking good.

Today I picked the last of these radishes to put with the thinned ones from the community garden.  Then I dug up the green onions and replanted the small or eaten off ones.  (my cat chewed on a few of these, you may be able to tell)  I may be able to get some small onions from these later.  The rest will be delicious in tomorrows dinner:

They look delicious.  That ridiculously shallow tub with no drainage holes is turning out to be a very fun experiment.  You can see that the tiny Roma tomato that was found in one of the pots is growing nicely, too.  I will have to buy yet another pot for that when it gets larger.  I am too attached to it now.

My hanging pots of nasturtiums are now hung from some very sturdy hooks I got at Lowe's.  The guy in the hardware section was very nice and helped me pick them out and told me how to put them up.  It worked out just right and they are very strong.  They were also the cheapest ones.  Awesome!

This old hanging pot is a little shabby, but when the plants get larger you won't even see it.

This is the heirloom variety, Belgian Delight, or something like that.  The plant is getting very large and looks very healthy.  It has had a few blooms, but I still can't really tell if they were pollinated or not.  I will just have to wait and see.

This is one of the small Romas that I split apart.  There were two in the pot.  Bonus!  They are both doing very well.  Actually, they are both doing much better than there non-twinned counterpart in the community garden.  That may be the difference between the required organicness of the community garden and my zealous applications of chemical fertilizer in my pots on the porch.  I will have to see if I can get my hands on some chicken manure for the community garden plot.

This one is the tallest one and actually has about ten small tomatoes on it already.  It is a Sungold cherry tomato.  These are my favorite cherry tomato, very sweet and juicy.  I pinched off the terminal end today to make it fill out a bit.  This one got the last cage I had left from the salvaged ones from my parents house.  It looked like it needed it the worst.  All of the tomatoes have a 4 foot bamboo stake and are tied up nice and strait to them, though.

This is the jalapeno pepper.  You can see the little corn in the corner, and the nasturtiums are getting too big already.  I may need to get those out of there, for the peppers sake.  The corn plant is a funny story.  I was planting the nasturtium seeds and there was a random corn seed in the package.  I don't have a clue what kind.  It was a little pinkish.  I just tucked it in the corner here.  It will be fun to see what is does.  I will have to hand pollinate it, though, for sure.

Here is the eggplant.  It hasn't really done anything since I planted it, but it has only been a week and a half.

The basil that I bought and planted at the same time as the eggplant, however has really gone to town.  I wish I had some tomatoes to eat with this.  I have planted about eight small pots with cinnamon basil seeds, because I am afraid this one plant will not be enough once the tomatoes come on and it may start flowering long before.

A friend of mine at work gave me some hop roots in a baggy last week and told me I could plant them in pots, so of course I had to try it.  Here are the two pots of hops with twine for them to grow up.  If this works, we are going to have the coolest balcony/porch in the apartment complex.  I put one at each end to frame the porch and I will add twine going across over the top as they grow.

Here is the other one.  You can see one of the small basil pots, too.

This is the rosemary.  You can finally tell that it has grown.

The lavender plants are growing quite a lot.

Here are the hens and chicks, cute as buttons

My husband, my daughter and I also spent the better part of the last two days helping my husbands parents plant a gigantic garden at their house.  I will try to create a plot map and have some pictures of that project at some point.  I have now become pretty busy at work lately and have not had time to keep up with posting as much as I did at first, but don't worry.  I will make sure that I at least post often enough that you can see things growing and keep up with what we are harvesting.  So far we have just harvested radishes and green onions.  It is only May 30th, though.  In our zone that is not bad.

After a Weekend of Rain, Surprise the Beans Are Growing

It rained all weekend, as I posted earlier.  I didn't go down to the community garden all weekend.  We had a funeral and a friend come over and visit and since it obviously would need water, I thought I would just leave it be.  Wow three days made a huge difference to the beans:

You can see the scarlet runner beans all have their first true leaves and are pretty tall.  They just need to find the fence to grow up and they will be off to the races.

The peas are growing well, also.  Some of them are a little far from the fence. As I posted before the end of the row got a bit more like a clump.  I think they will be fine.  We may need to tie them up until they grab on.

Here is the first bush bean to show its true leaves.  If I look really close I can see the little elbow shaped stems of the rest of them poking out.  They will all be up soon.  It looks like we are getting very good germination, even though we didn't soak the seeds. They may have come up faster if we had, but it has been pretty cold, so I don't think it would have made much difference.

Here you can see the rainbow carrots (the ones we were afraid had gotten washed away)  If you squint you can see them as a few fuzzy lines.  They are really coming up now.  I am no longer worried about them at all.  We will need to thin them really well pretty soon.  The lettuce is also due for some serious thinning:

You can't tell one plant from the next.  There is also another row off the right side.

Here is a picture of the carrots on the non flooded side.  They are some kind of short sweet carrot, check the first post to find out specifically.  These also need some serious thinning

Last but not least the spinach has its first true spinach leaves on.  I already thinned these, and they look really happy.

I didn't take any pictures of the tomatoes and peppers because they look the same.  The plants on the porch are growing well, but I didn't think to take pictures of them until it was too dark.  Tomorrow I will post pictures of the new bean sprouts out there, a total of 8 now, and the radishes and how huge they are getting.  I told my aunt I will replant those after we harvest. They grow so fast they are fun.

It Rained All Weekend

I didn't have to water anything this weekend,  It rained a lot. That is not a common occurrence here in Wenatchee, but it is a welcome one. 

The Italian pole beans I planted about 4 weeks ago along the edge of the balcony pots are finally starting to come up.  I have five of them now.  I planted about 5 in each pot for a total of twenty or so.  I hope more come up.  I will be training them up and onto the balcony railing. 

Those pots are going to need lots of water and fertilizer, because there are going to be roots of several plants sharing each pot.  You can probably guess that I am not a stickler about gardening organically.  When it comes to fertilizer, especially.  I have never found a good organic fertilizer that works in potted plant situations.  I do not have a way to compost or improve the nutrients in my soil naturally.  When I have a garden in a yard of my own, I will be willing and able to do all of that. 

I had a little scare earlier when I remembered that my radish tub does not have drainage holes in the bottom.  I quickly ran out and moved it under the eave.  It should be okay now.

I did share the radishes with my uncle, by the way.  He is the only reason I planted them.  I do love watching them grow.  They grow so fast, but I was really not that excited about eating them.  They are good in salads.

I Picked Some Radishes Today

Here is the first harvest of the year.  I wasn't really harvesting.  I was thinning, but the radishes are big enough to eat. 

Look at this handful of radishes.  One of these days I will get a real camera, instead of my iPhone camera.  Hey, uncle Kevin, what do you think?  Good enough to eat?  Maybe, I might share.

I just thought I would share a picture of our dinner the other day.  I found some morel mushrooms and some "wild" asparagus and fried them up with some spicy sausage.

Then I tossed all that with some farfale.  Yummy.  Look at that crispy fried mushroom.  It was sooooo good.  I would tell you where I found them, but then I would have to kill you.

I am so excited, I found two scarlet runner bean sprouts against the fence.  The bush beans haven't sprouted yet, though. 

iPhone cameras are not meant for macro pictures, but here is one of the sprouts.

There are more and more rainbow carrots coming up, too.  We had thought most of those were washed out when the water go turned on full blast by some careless person.  I think we will get at least a few of those, without having to replant.

Rainbow carrot sprouts.  You can barely see them.

Also, I had to very quickly, on Tuesday, run down and put stakes up for the tomato and pepper plants because a big wind storm hit.  The little Roma was getting whipped around pretty bad.  I think it is okay now, but it looks so funny tied to that gigantic wooden stake.  The peppers have 3 foot sections of bamboo and the tomatoes have 4 foot pieces of square wood stakes (1" by 1").  They are tied on with stretchy plant ties.

Here you can see the relative size of the Sungold and the Roma tomatoes tied to thier stakes.  It is kinda funny.  The Roma will grow, though.  I hope.

The peas are growing well, but not in a strait row, lol. It seems my daughter got a bit carried away at the end of the row and made it more of a cluster:

All the green is pea sprouts.  Oh well, they will just have to be trained up the fence a little more carefully, that's all.  I hope we get this good of germination on the bean side.  It looks like every pea came up, and more.

Here is what the whole thing looks like right now:

You can't see the sprouts, but it is looking better and better.

And here, once again, for comparison, is the radish/onion rainbow by the spigot, where it got washed out, for comparison to the other side:

Neither is perfect, and the spigot side is starting to look better, maybe by the end of the season you won't be able to tell.  After the radishes are harvested for sure.

The Peas Are Up!

Yay!  I forgot to take pictures, but the peas against the fence in the back (see garden map in first post) are sprouting.  Almost all of them are poking there little leaves out.  I went and watered today.  The weather was beautiful and warm.  I think they will turn on the automatic sprinklers soon.  Everyone's gardens look like they have planted at least something in them.  I also thinned the spinach and radishes.  The lettuce is just too small to thin yet, although it will really need some thinning as soon as it can be done.  Well that is all for now.  I still haven't gotten potting mix to fill the last two pots on the porch.  I think I will have to do that this weekend.  Things are getting hectic and very busy around here.  I have to go clean my house.  We are having visitors this weekend.

P.S. I am learning to roller skate.  Today was my third day.  I am starting to get the hang of it.  My lower legs are really tired, though.

The Tomatoes and Peppers Are Planted

We went down to the community garden and planted our tomatoes and peppers on Sunday, yesterday.  It was a nice mild day with some off and on rain, just perfect for our little transplants.  We also squeezed in six very pungent, smelly marigolds.  That is how I selected which ones to buy.  I smelled them all and picked the stinkiest ones.  I hope they work.  They are supposed to help keep away caterpillars and attract pollinators.

This is a picture of the whole thing. It looks a bit sparse, but trust me it will fill in.  When the peas and beans grow up the fence in the back and the cucumbers are covering every available inch between the bush beans and the spinach there will not be an inch to step. Although by then the lettuce and radishes will be done or almost done.

Here is a close up of the left hand side where the washout mentioned in an earlier blog happened.  you can kind of see the onion starts struggling to recover and a few radish sprouts coming up through the flood deposits.  The jalapeno pepper, left front, is huge and already has a pepper or two growing on it.

This is the other side. The onions look better, but not great.  The radishes make a perfect little semicircle.  They need to be thinned already.  You can see the larges of our tomatoes, the sun gold cherry tomato in the background and the marigold.  The peppers on this side of the garden are still quite small and hard to see in this picture.  These were the ones that Cooper, my cat, chewed up.

Close up of the left side peppers and tomatoes and marigolds.  I am craving a fresh tomato, so bad.  I hope they grow fast and well and no one harvests them for us.

I also planted the tomatoes and peppers on the pots on my porch.  I still have two empty pots with no potting mix, but I had enough pots to put all the starts I had.  I am thinking about planting some climbing cucumbers in one pot and an eggplant in the other. First I have to get some potting mix.

This pathetic little guy was hidden in a pot with two larger Roma tomatoes.  I decided to split the two Romas into separate pots, against my better judgement and discovered there was a third stunted little brother plant.  I put it in the radish/green onion tub to see if it will thrive.  If not I will get rid of it, but I can always use another Roma tomato plant.

This is a jalapeno with nasturtiums in the corners.

This is another large sun gold cherry tomato.  I love these small orange tomatoes.  They are so sweet and the plants make alot.

This is one of the Roma twins with nasturtium.

This is the other Roma twin also with a nasturtium.  He is a little bigger.

This is the weird heirloom variety we decided to take a gamble on.  It is a slicing tomato that is supposed to be purplish green when it is ripe.  I hope it makes lots of tomatoes.

The above and below are my hanging baskets.  I planted at least 5 nasturtium seeds in each and have gotten only three sprouts total, so far.  That is a little disappointing and weird considering the fact that each of the seeds I planted in the tomato and pepper pots came up.

Here is a fresh picture of the miniature hens and chicks my daughter rescued.  They are greening up and one is even flowering. I don't know if that is good or bad.

The lavender plants that my daughter rescued are coming along well.

The rosemary hasn't died yet. That is something.  It also hasn't done anything else yet, either.

Here is one of the two empty pots.  I will have to buy four more cubic feet of potting mix to fill them.  I hope the cucumbers and eggplants are worth it.

This is a better picture of the radish/green onion tub.  I am always amazed at how fast radishes grow.  It is almost time to thin them again.

Here is the one flower I am growing that isn't edible.  I do love million bells even though you can't eat them.

Well, that was a lot of pictures.  I hope you aren't burnt out with pictures of our garden, because I am sure there will be lots more.  I just saw the cucumber and basil sprouts at my aunties house and I am excited for these to go out in the garden.  I think in a week or two, maybe.