Summer Time Summary

Note:  Although his wasn't finished, but it does have some good information, so I will publish what is here.  It was written in September of 2012.

What a busy, fun, interesting summer it has been.  While not much has been going on in this blog, I have fortunately done better in the garden.  I did keep up with basic records on Sprout Robot, and while it is a good basic record keeper/indicator of when thing should be done, that's all it is.  Nothing is in order, and if a certain crop doesn't work out for whatever reason, there is no way to indicate that.  So, for my own mind, I will do a basic summary here.

April: Put in broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprout, and cabbage plants during the first week.  In the middle of the month, I also planted dill and started picking radishes.

May:  At the beginning of this month, I was able to start picking peas & lettuce.  For some reason, the peas did not do well this year.  They looked like they developed some type of disease and literally shriveled and wasted away.  The lettuce however did awesome, and I had a very hard time keeping up with it. (except the green leaf lettuce which never came up)

By the end of the month, the swiss chard was also ready.  It was really the only green that did well this year. The mustard, kale, collards and spinach hardly came up, and what did never grew very well.  I think some of this is due to old seed.  The spinach was also not in that great of soil.  Now that school was out, I was able to plant cucumbers, summer & winter squash, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant.

June: By the beginning of this month, the broccoli was ready to harvest followed closely by the cauliflower.  The broccoli did well.  I had plenty for a while and was able to freeze a little, although not nearly as much as last year.  The cauliflower would have done well also, but I was unsure about knowing when it was ready.  I let it go too long and it got blackish yellow on the top.  I just had to compost it.  I also put in cantaloupe plants.

In a couple of weeks, the cabbage was also ready.  I was able to make sauerkraut successfully from my own garden!  Again however, I don't think the cabbage did quite as well as it did the year before.

2012 Summary and 2013 Beginning

A lot of things happened in the garden last year.  Unfortunately, not a lot of it got recorded in the blog.  I would definitely say, though, that it was the best year yet.  We got tons of strawberries, leeks, onions, and tomatoes.  We even froze a bit of broccoli and peas.  There were lots of other things harvested as well, but no extra to save.  Unfortunately, the raspberries were taken over by weeds and didn't do more than leaf out.
I also managed to have a small fall garden last year.  The peas and greens didn't do that well, but we did have a lot of lettuce, which was nice.  I ended the year by planting  a half bed of garlic (Spanish Roja).

The garlic has been doing fabulous, and I am well on my way to a great crop in the summer.  I planted peas in late February, and the snow peas are about an inch tall now.  However, the regular sweet peas didn't really come up.  This packet of peas has had some problems even when I bought them last spring, and I have decided (for a few reasons) that I am going to switch buying from Pinetree and now order seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  This company is managed by a homeschool family in Missouri.  The seeds are closer to me (in the same basic zone), and they are all open pollinated (not Monsanto).  I am very late in ordering this year, but I hopefully will get to that this weekend.

I did order onions and leeks from Dixondale Farms in midFebruary.  The onions and leeks I ordered last year did amazingly well, and I was very excited to order the exact same thing this year.  Unfortunately, I got so busy that I was unable to put them in the ground until yesterday.  Hopefully they were not too dried out and will still grow okay.

I also prepped the bed that the brassicas will be in and bought plants at Ace yesterday.  I really need to work on mulching better, so the weeds don't take over in the winter.  (Although I did manage to cover my allium bed with fall leaves after the garlic was planted, and I covered this year's curcubit bed with black plastic to kill the grass that took over last year.)  My goal for this weekend is to get the brassica bed planted, weed the strawberry bed, and see if there is any hope for my rasberries.

Raspberries and Strawberries, Take 2

It has been so nice outside these last couple of weeks. It feels like June, even though it's only the middle of March. (I hope that doesn't mean bad things for August.) Yesterday, I worked hard weeding the strawberry bed again (the dandelions took over) and planted in the bare spots. It seems that the current plants are still producing runners, so I really shouldn't have ordered new ones. I really ended up planting only 5 of the Sparkle strawberry plants. I hope that my mom can find a place to plant the rest of them. The established plants are full of blooms and some have some very tiny berries. Yay!

In the meantime, my sweet husband moved the fence and retilled so that the raspberry canes are now protected from the dog. Once again, I planted 5, and I am really looking forward to raspberries this August. On a side note, as of today, the mustard, collards, chard, turnips, radishes, and romaine have sprouted. The garden is really starting to look alive once again.

March Pictures

Most of this bed is onion and leek plants. There is some spinach and beets that have sprouted, and today I planted carrots and scallions.

Last Thursday, we filled this bed with new mushroom soil. Today I planted the greens (kale, collards, mustard, turnips, chard), lettuce, and radishes. I need to stop by Ace this week and pick up broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and brussel sprout plants.

The peas are about a couple inches tall as of today.

Onions & Leeks

Not too much to say today. It's been an interesting weekend that was almost a repeat of last April with storms that included tornadoes. Once again we were blessed. We did lose a shed, so a new shed including some nice garden storage/work area is in order soon.

My onion and leek order came in last Tuesday, so I made it my first priority this morning to get them into the ground. It took up almost a whole entire bed! I already have spinach and beets there, and there is enough room for a couple of rows of carrots, but that is it. I guess I will have to put the swiss chard in either with the other greens or with the legumes. We'll see how things work out. I will probably put the scallions in with my herb bed.

The peas have sprouted. Yay! I thought the spinach would have sprouted by now, but it hasn't. Oh well. I am using a new calendar/planning system called Sprout Robot. You enter what you want to grow and your zip code and it calculates when you should be planting what and takes you all the way through harvest. As you plant or whatever, you check it off and it recalculates. It's totally free and pretty cool so far. I didn't get to take pictures today, but I will try to do that this week.

Spring Karma

Every year I plan to properly prepare the garden beds for winter. In my mind, I am chopping fall leaves, broadcasting crimson clover for cover crops, pulling up stakes, and doing other general cleanup, etc. It all gets done . . . in my mind. And every year I pay for not following through with tons of weeds (mostly nasty henbit) that I have to pull and hoe before I can do any planting. This year is no exception. I did get one bed completely ready. It will need a new load of mushroom soil before I can plant the brassicas and lettuce, for that is what the greens love.

The root bed should be finished shortly. My sweet husband traded off with me to finish that bed. I started this one by planting a half row of spinach and beets. This week my onion order should come in, so I am hoping to make time this week to get those planted in there as well.

And so it begins...

Today I planted the peas and snow peas. I had so much to do this weekend that I was glad the bed they were rotating to was pretty much ready. I spent a little while doing a bit of weeding, pulling out the tomato cages, and resetting up the trellis for the little climbers. It's been so warm. Today was in the 60's, and it certainly wasn't the first time this year. It feel so good to be outside in the fresh air and sunshine.