Monday, June 15, 2009

How my garden grows

In the absence of any significant baby news, I thought I'd entertain you with pictures from my garden.A whole mess of garden peas, climbing up both the sunflowers and the sunflowers' stakes. Every once in a while, I have to detangle the top of the sunflower so it can continue to grow. It isn't working quite like I planned, but I think that is because the sunflowers were planted much later than the peas. Had they had a chance to get bigger before the peas went crazy, it probably would've gone better.
This happens to be the flour corn, but all the corn is doing fabulously. It is taller than our knees so far.
This is one of the beds of tomatoes that I did inside tires. They seem to be doing great, but the beds without are doing great as well.Here is a picture of tomato blossoms. Can't wait!A little spider, ready to take on any insects that decide to crawl on my tomatoes.
Cabbage! It has gotten huge. Way bigger than I expected from my Square Foot Gardening book. It's completely shaded out the next-door celery. Rather than 1-sqft of space, it's taking a good 4-sqft.
One of the first peppers. We also have a jalapeno growing already. Mmm...
Our lettuce bed. I planted a 4X8' bed. I probably needed 2X2'. We are overrun with lettuce. More than we could ever eat! But, it sure is yummy! Our May Queen is on the other half of the bed and has become these deliciously full head of butter lettuce. So incredibly tender. I love it.
Those are 4 zucchini plants across the front of the bed and some cucumbers along the back. I cannot get over the size of the zucchini leaves. They are bigger than my head!
We have 5 beds of potatoes and they are growing like crazy. In fact, between the beds of potatoes, it is impossible to get through on the path!
Baby's breath...just because. There are a few flowers tucked here and there in the garden, simply for our enjoyment. Of course, the marigolds have an insect-repellent job to do, but the others are just for looks. Don has been digging for the foundation of my greenhouse, with the help of Caleb, Meagan, and my dad. The trench is huge, 3 feet deep and about 3 feet across, in a square. We'll pour concrete footers in and then build up with concrete blocks. Tonight, though, we are supposed to get a couple inches of rain, so it is covered with a tarp. Pictures of the actual ditch will have to wait.But, today, we had the supplies for building the greenhouse delivered. It was quite a heavy load, with all the concrete blocks, sand for the floor (it'll be an insulated floor, covered with sand and pavers), and mortar mix.

I love to see it all coming together!

6 comments:

Unknown said...

We are doing SFG for the first time this year too, although on a much smaller scale. I was wondering if you could expound on how you did your potatoes, how deep are the beds, how many did you plant per square foot, etc. They look fantastic!

Emily said...

Heyyy. How come mine grows so slow and yours does so well?

It looks GREAT! (And hopefully you'll have baby news next time.)

Missus Wookie said...

My corn is tiny compared to yours but our tomatoes are about the same... sheesh.

Great news on the greenhouse - are you putting in underfloor heating? That is on my plan for whenever I get one. :)

OurCrazyFarm said...

Beautiful garden!

sarah in the woods said...

Your garden looks great! We had stuffed peppers last night with green peppers from our garden. The peas won't grow though.

Gina said...

Missus Wookie,
We are not doing underfloor heating, but it will be insulated. It will be 100% solar-heated. Don has been researching the angle of the sun and all that jazz to figure out the best slope of the roof, and we'll paint the back wall black and keep a few full barrels of water inside to help hold heat to release overnight.

Feminine Pursuits,
The beds are double-dug, which means they are loosened down to about 2 feet. I believe the new SFG book has you putting a weed block down and new "dirt" on top, but I used a different method for bed prep. The potatoes are about 9" apart. I dug "trenches" along the length of the beds and then planted the potatoes so that they had about 2 inches of soil on top. The plan was to go back and then cover up the newly emerging plants with more soil until I eventually had a mound going, but we had a massive rain that pretty much made the soil flat. I used a thick mulch of grass clippings and just kept piling more and more in, instead of mounding soil. I did this until the plants were so thick that I could no longer actually get in to mulch! And since then, I've left them alone. They haven't been watered because between the mulch and the density of planting, the soil is staying moist enough. I may have to water as we hit the drought of summer, but we'll see.

Now, the disclaimer. The plants look great. I DO NOT know what is under that soil! It remains to be seen how the potatoes will produce. They may be too crowded or too shallow or too...you get the picture. The report of success will have to wait until later!