Reach for the Sky

Time for a quick veggie garden update. I managed to finally get the rest of the greens planted on Sunday... a week or two behind schedule but they should be fine. At the top of the picture you can see the early romaine lettuce is just about ready for harvesting. Jason will be happy! In the open spaces we'll soon have spinach, swiss chard, radicchio, and more lettuce. tucked into the straw at the top of the bed is the summer and winter squash and cucumbers as well as the okra and sun flowers. To the left all of the cole crops are still very happy and growing away!  The drip irrigation is on during this photo so you can see how well the set up is working.

The Greens Bed... circa 5/20 

Many of the early plantings are well on their way and so I spent most of the morning fashioning their supports for the season:

Tomatoes with stakes and arms in place.

I'm re-using my "Ultomato" stake system from the past few years... I do have to say that it has held up pretty well. The only complaint that I have is that I wanted to swap out the 5' stakes that it comes with with 6' stakes since half of the tomatoes I planted are indeterminate and when I went to do that I discovered that all of the new stakes available are a smaller diameter and the old arms were too big to grab them snugly. After several futile searches at various retailers I just solved the problem by wrapping each of the stakes with duck tape in the area that the arm needed to connect. Not the most ellegant solution, but working for now anyway. Hopefully by next year we'll have relocated the garden to the back, and at that point I'll devise a bit more permanent and re-useable trellis or support system . We'll see!

This is a shot of the egg plant and pepper bed... neither of which need staking just yet, but for some reason I do finally seem to have a few peas trying to make it up. They should have already been up and harvested by now, but they just weren't cooperating earlier in the season. I decided to just let the ones that came up keep going so I made some little tee-pees with some shorter stakes. Well have to see how that turns out. We may or may not ever actually get any peas... that still remains to be seen! Here's hoping!

And then my pièce de résistance (hopefully anyway!)... My bamboo bean trellis:

Bamboo Bean Trellis

In the past I've done single poles and used a round wire ring at the bottom and then strung twine from top to bottom. Since this bean patch is slightly larger and I'm doing three different types of climbing beans I decided to try something different. Instead of supporting 1 sq ft of climbers, each tee pee here will support 4 sq ft of beans. Then I connected the four at the bottoms on either side, the middle on either side, and the top. That gave me support for the twine to be strung up and down which ensures that the beans have plenty of surface area to work their way to the top. In the old set-up by the time the beans got to the top of the pole there the amount of surface area was so constricted that everything turned into a big jumbled mess. Even though there is still less room as they get to the top of this trellis, it still should give them a much better opportunity to space themselves out. I checked on progress today and the beans are all up and well on their way towards reaching up to the bottom rungs to start their ascents!