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!

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Veggie Progress

I took advantage of the projected warmer weather this week to go ahead and plant out some of the veggie seedlings that have been waiting in the wings for the past couple of months... This week looked pretty safe... with May 5th the projected last frost date, and temperatures projected in the mid 70's to low 80's I figured I'd risk it this past Sunday and go ahead and get them in the ground. Of course no sooner had I finished with the peppers and eggplants then my weather alert went off on my phone predicting frost..... 

Tomatoes!!!!

Yup... those are my tomatoes that started off as little seeds in the basement a couple of months ago! They got so big so fast I had to eventually up-pot some of them into 1 gallon containers! A few of these guys even have blossoms already! I'm hoping for a smooth transition and an early harvest!!!

Eggplants and Peppers

 The egg plants are also well established at this point! The peppers are not quite visible at the far end of this bed... A bit of a debacle with the peppers... For some reason I didn't label each individual pot when I re-potted them from the seed starting trays. I guess I thought I'd remember which was which... Yeah, not so much! Oh well... so much for my strict planning and organization in this bed.... it will just be a "mixture" of peppers!

Tomatoes planted and mulched

Once everything was planted I mulched them in with straw. The open spaces are the turnips which are coming along nicely now. I kept the pots out for the night and used them to cover the tomatoes to protect them from the frost... Everything made it through the night without any issues! The only thing I realize now that I forgot was that I wanted to put some broken up egg shells in with each one for some calcium... but oh well! I'll have to just be sure to work some in.

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Vacation Progress

Having spent most of my Spring vacation tucked away in a basement... (don't ask :-) I did manage to get in two glorious days of digging and planting. Mostly I worked on the foundation plantings since we started with a mess that took most of last year to tame. I needed to get in some shrubs that will eventually fill in and give some structure to the beds.

As a reminder... this is what things looked like a year ago when we bought the house:

 Then we got to this early last year after the trees were removed:

.

And after a bit more progress in July of 2011:

And now a few shots from this week's progress:

 LEFT: View from the front walk showing the new veggie garden beds. Went with a rose standard in the center pot for now. The blue pots will be ornamental peppers and nasturtiums once the weather warms a tad!  Hard to see in this photo but I added some bright red azaleas in the main bed right under the planter boxes. They should really pop in ta few years. RIGHT: The front entrance. Sadly only one of the evergreen standards survived the winter/remodel... I replaced them with two holly bushes which will be a bit more forgiving of the lack of sunlight in the winter. Eventually I'll trim them up in a formal cone shape. They need to settle in first. All of the mums and pansies in the pots are still going from last year! I also planted two pieris bushes right behind the planters which are small now but will eventually fill in on either side of the steps.

East Side Bed

This bed (ABOVE) is where the little veggie garden was last year. The only repeat here is the very happy hosta. Everything else is newly planted including a butterfly bush and three day lily clumps from my buddy Marc. I also planted in a few Bleeding Hearts which I love. 

 This is the new bed that I made last year with the blocks from Dan and Jo on the west side of the front. It was completely empty past year except for the rose and a false indigo bush (not up yet!). On this side I planted two purple rhododendrons, a pieris, three columbines, three day lily clumps (from Marc), and one of my baby lilacs that I propagated from  root divisions last fall. I also used some of the left overs from this year's tree removal project to make some stepping "stones" into the bed so I can tend to the climbing rose. I think they look pretty nice. 

I also planted a few additional plants in the East side shade garden outside of the library:

This bed is filling up delightfully! I added three foam flowers, and three hellebore plants (aka Lenten rose). I have some coral bells still growing in the basement and will get those out there too in the next month or two! 

I also replanted the planters on the pedestals since I use annuals there:

NOT pictured but also accomplished.... I finished the trench to bring the water line and future power line from the veggie beds to the house. Hopefully I'll finish the water connections this week so the watering will be a bit easier (especially now that I can't drag the hose through the empty east side bed... I also planted two tree peonies and 4 mungo pines to spruce up the area right inside the front gate. What you might be able to see is I also took the time to label nearly everything in the foundation beds so that I know what/where they are and of course so that visitors know too! I've used 100+ labels just in the foundation beds!!! 

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Recent Progress

Just realized that it has been more than a month since my last post.... In addition to some out of town travel, things have been pretty busy around the house. We're getting into some of the LARGER and more long-term outdoor projects at the moment, which means that the progress isn't as fast and quick to come as some of the early wins, but the pay-off's will be pretty good in the long term! Here's a quick look at a few of the more recent outdoor projects:

Astilbe near the back walk

The first "new planting bed" that I managed to complete was this tiny patch next to the sidewalk heading around to the back door. As you can see, it isn't a huge space, but had completely been taken over by weeds. It doesn't get much sun and stays fairly damp, so I figured it would be an excellent spot for some astilbe. I had originally thought about doing some hostas here, but the space was so narrow that I was concerned that they'd end up just flopping out all over the sidewalk. These three grand dames were snapped up on clearance at Lowes and are very happy in their new local!

"Temporary" veggie garden

This decision met with some raised eyebrows from Jason, who wasn't sure how he felt about having veggies planted right out in the front yard. I assured him that this arrangement was just to get us through the current season since right now we lack any other suitable location. I didn't exactly have time to lay out and dig beds for an entire garden, and I wanted to have at least a few peppers and tomatoes this year. Lacking the cash-flow to actually complete landscaping of the front bed I decided that the best plan would be to temporarily put the veggies out there so it wasn't just a bare mulch spot for the whole summer. I managed to fit in a few tomato plants, a few peppers, and a cucumber, zucchini, and some herbs. (The GIANT hosta was already there and I didn't really want to move him until I know exactly what is going to be happening out here long term!)

East side shade garden

The third project was a general clean-up of the shade garden just off the parking area on the east side of the house. Again, it was mostly overgrown and run down after years of neglect. We also have a very bad drainage problem where all of the water off of the parking area ran right into this bed. Consequently the mulch (if there ever was any) from the bed had been washed away a long time ago and things were looking a bit ratty! I solved that problem by using some pot hole repair cold patch to build a small berm around the perimeter of the bed so that the water now runs down into the lawn without flowing through the bed. You can probably see it better if you click through to the full size photo.

The only other update here was the planting of my formerly potted hydrangea n the front center of the photo above. She's been in a pot for the better part of three years, so I'm hoping she likes her new permanent home! All of the other plants were already here, so mostly all I did was get rid of the weeds and then put down a nice thick layer or mulch. I'm going to be adding to this area eventually, but for now at least it cleans up the appearance of the side of the house.

You'll notice in the two later photos the pots up on the concrete plinths. I placed one of these on each side of the side entrance to sort of form the entrance way. The bases were found on the property. They're concrete and at one time were actually outdoor light fixtures of some sort. (There are a few other discarded ones yet to be excavated from the woods.) I thought it was a pretty clever way to reuse them with a bit of flair.

I've got a couple of other projects to share, but unfortunitely I had a slight file transfer malfunction, so I'll have to re-shoot a few pictures and share those later!

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First Day of Spring

A day of firsts... First day of Spring and first planting at the new house. We spent most of the weekend doing spring cleanup at the current place so we can get it sold, but I did make some time this afternoon to get over and turn over a little bit of earth. Nothing major. Planted some primroses in pots near the door and transplanted some mums that used to be in the front window boxes. I was actually surprised that they made it through the winter, but they were greening up. Unfortunately they didn't look nice enough to stay, so I dug them up and moved them over to the little triangle by the back door. Not sure if they will make it, but mums are pretty hardy, so we'll see!

Transplanted mums and some primroses for color.

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Weekly Update: June Week 1 - 2010

Now that I have only ONE count it ONE more week of traveling left this year I'll be getting back to much more regular updates to the garden blog. And not a moment to soon as you can see from the early harvest that has already started rolling in!

Four of our delicious heads of Romaine lettuce... The lettuce has been CRAZY productive this year. I think we've gone through about 16 heads so far and I have probably 16 more ready to pick as soon as I can find someone to eat them! The leaf lettuce really didn't turn out to be that great, so I think that in the future I'll stick with the Romaine. Not pictured, but also delicious was the huge crop of Radishes that were actually the very first crop to come in this season.

Also first out of the gate were the delicious turnips. They're all up now, but we still have a few left in the fridge for cooking up this weekend! Apparently I didn't take any pictures of the turnips themselves, but the picture to the right are the greens from the turnips... and you can see they pretty much overwhelmed the counter top! I cooked most of them up in a really simple recipe which included both the greens and the turnips along with some cornbread dumplings. Delicious!

Planting

Right after first banking.

 So the potatoes are also in flower now. They've come a long way in just a few short weeks from just a collection of little tubers to really quite intense plants as you can see below! Hopefully the little bags are filling up with new potatoes down there!! We'll know soon enough!

Potato Plants on June 5th

In addition to the potatoes, other veggies are starting to show signs that the harvest is progressing right along. While weeding and feeding today I found evidence of the very first peppers and tomatoes!

(Left: Fennel bulbs developing, Center: First Bell Pepper starting to ripen, Right: Green Tomatoes!) 

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Weekly Update: April 11th - First Signs of Spring!!

After the crazy snow in February I was beginning to have  my doubts about whether or not I'd ever be able to get thing out into the garden... Seems that 2010 is shaping up to by a very climatologically unpredictable year as just as sudden as the snow fall was an early (and extreme) spring warm up that shot temperatures up into the 70s and 80s in late March and early April! Insane!

The sunny days have not gone to waste, and I've been out prepping the garden for the year ahead as well as planting out the season's first crop of cool-season veggies! Things are up and growing with lettuce, peas, spinach, turnips, beets, and radishes already popping up! Meanwhile the basement is crammed full of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and herbs just waiting to go out once the danger of frost has passed!

One of the new things I'm trying out this year is growing some potatoes. I ordered up some gourmet organic potatoes and they arrived just in time to plant last weekend! I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't this:

They arrived in a cute little box looking for all the world like specially packed Easter eggs complete with colored shredded "grass" or a box of gourmet chocolates. They even have the little card that tells what each type of potato is much like a box of assorted chocolates! Too cute!

I don't exactly have a ton of space for growing potatoes, so I'm trying out a new product... potato bags. This allows you to grow potatoes above ground and almost anywhere. I have them lined up along the corner of the yard where the bird bath sits, so we'll see how they do.

Next week I'll post a few snapshots of the spring veggies. by that time they'll be big enough that you can really tell what they are. Right now everything just looks kind of like mini green sprouts! In the meantime, here are a few of the sights of spring from around the yard:




(L: Hellebore in bloom. This has been an awesome year for them. Every other spring we've had a late freeze that has pretty much knocked down the blooming. R: The perennial bed heading back to the garage. Everything is so small right now it's hard to imagine that in just a few weeks many of these plants will have shot up waist high or higher!)

(T: The front porch complete with new "window" boxes on the front railing and new porch furniture. The branch jutting in is the beautiful flowering tree in the front bed. R: The hedges along Herr Street. Some day they'll be nice and full and tall enough to block the snow in winter. (Theoretically!) Despite the rough snow right at the end of winter they still put on quite a show of yellow blooms this spring. We only lost a few branches even though they spent weeks under a snow drift 6' tall!

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And they're off.....

With the garden still encapsulated by a ton of snow from the snowpocalypse of 2010....

It seems strange to have just completed planting of the very first seeds of the 2010 garden season. We're right at about 10 weeks out now from the last frost on May 5th... so time to get rolling with things like lettuce, peppers, and egg plants.

I also expanded and reconfigured the shelving units and lights to give more space for the forthcoming seedlings. I'll post some pictures once the little guys start emerging... right now all you'd see would be dirt!

Even with the nasty weather there's a certain satisfaction to be had in the first seeds of the season. Knowing that that one tiny seed will (hopefully!) yield a summer full of delicious fresh veggies!

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Weekly Update: October wks 1 & 2

As the days get shorter and the garden winds down, I'm finding that having interesting things to share on the blog is slowing down as well. One of the things that I enjoy so much about gardening watching the whole process come full circle. Last years plants were composted to feed this year's crop which grew from tiny seeds and fed us for month. Now they too have come to and end and are tossed in the compost bin to begin the cycle all over again. There are so few things in life that lend that sort of completeness and satisfaction. There's the sense that even though one thing has come to an end, it is only a matter of time before something new begins.

Fall is actually my favorite seasons of the year as everywhere you look there seem to be new and constantly changing displays of color. I'm thrilled this year to have finally managed to see the fruits of my efforts from last year come into their own and help celebrate the season.

Photos will have to follow later because something seems to be wrong with Blogger's upload tool at the moment. Stay tuned!!

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Weekly Update: September Week 4

This weekend was nearly a wash-out, but I did manage to get in a bit of work in the garden in between rain showers. If everything looks wet in these pictures... its probably because it was wet!

New this week are two lovely additions thanks to our recent trip to the NY Botanical Gardens, a lovely fall blooming anemone (two pics on the left) and a painted fern. I originally intended to plant both of these out in the front beds, but I changed my mind at the last minute and put them in the back. I hadn't intended to buy another anemone since I just bought a few others last week, but I happened upon this lovely fall-blooming variety that was just about to blossom and I couldn't resist. I just had to have it out back where I can see it and enjoy it every day.

Also blooming away are a billion or so mums, including my favorite ones which have just started blooming this week. They're a great reddish-purple hue. They're actually a bit deeper in color than they turned out int the photo on the left. Also now in bloom is a fall blooming Asiatic lily. This one is a beautiful deep rust red color. So perfect for the fall.

Lastly a snapshot of my next round of plants going in (hopefully) shortly. I started to flats of ornamental cabbage and a flat each of spinach and lettuce. So far so good, but if you can see in the photos my poor cabbages are absolutely being slaughtered by cabbage worms. I've been trying to stay after the darn things, but its a non-stop endeavor. If they'd just let the cabbage get big enough to plant out, I wouldn't mind them eating it so much. I'm hoping that we can come to some sort of agreement before they just destroy the whole lot!

I may be pushing my luck with this one, but I also just sewed another square of turnips and radishes. Technically they should have time to get up before a hard frost... but we'll see. Things held on up to the last second of summer, so I didn't have any space before to get them started. We'll see how it goes!

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Weekly Update: September 20th

Well this weekend marked the last weekend of summer. Still quite a bit of activity going on in the garden, even as signs are starting to point towards the winding down of the season. The white flies and aphids won the battle for the tomatoes, so I had to end up just cutting them all down. Next year I'll be better prepared to wage war. They just got to far out of control before I had a chance to fight back! The photo on the right shows the bed now that the tomatoes are gone. The poor peppers look pretty lonely. The only good thing is that I may now actually have some space for the fall lettuce and spinach that I started earlier this week!

(I'd actually forgotten that I hung up Jason's iron pieces on the fence this spring. They've been hidden behind plants all summer.) I also pulled out the rest of the zucchini as it had run its course and mildew was setting in on the leaves. I did manage to pick enough for 4 more loaves of zucchini bread!

I tackled a couple of small "infrastructure" projects since the planting and harvesting tasks are winding down. I installed edging around the border of the lawn. This one is pretty cool, made entirely of recycled cardboard and plastic bottles. It was a pretty easy process and should be a big help in keeping the edges of the beds and what's left of the lawn defined. The two constantly seemed to be creeping into each other, and in some cases it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.

Quite a few things are still going pretty strong: (From Left)

• The New Guinea Impatients are blooming again in full-force. I just love the bright pinks against the dark green/black foliage. The hosta and coleus in the background have also been extremely happy campers!
• The bush beans are pretty much done, but these Kentucky Wonder Pole beans are still going strong. We get almost 2 lbs per week at this point. It looks like they are slowing down, but we'll probably get one or two more pickings before the end of the season.
• A really stupid photo, but I was trying to demonstrate the height of the towering okra plants. The tallest one (pictured here) is now officially about 6" taller than I can reach. I'm thinking almost 10 feet tall now? AMAZING!

Putting this week's post together, I was going through photos and happened upon this photo from earlier this summer. Take a look at the obelisk and nasturtiums in June week 3 (on the left) and compare the photo on the right taken this weekend. It's amazing that at one point I was actually worried that they wouldn't fill in the tower fully enough. Keep in mind that I have to prune this monster every week to keep it from taking over the entire yard!

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Weekly Update: August Week 4

I've been waging war on the white fly infestation in my tomato plants for the better part of the summer. Just when I think I'm getting ahead of them, they seem to explode. I started out trying not to use pesticides at all, but it was really hard to watch my precious tomatoes just fading away with my natural remedies doing little if anything to stop them. I finally decided to go with the "if you can't beat them join them" approach and try fighting fire with fire. Or in this case, fighting bugs with bugs.

I can now add ladybugs, lacewings, and wasps to the things that I never thought I'd actually buy, let alone have shipped to me via UPS. I bit the bullet and ordered up 1400 lady bugs, a bag of lacewing larvae and the little cards which are loaded with wasp eggs. (not the scary kind of wasps). The goal is that these little guys combine forces to eat up the white flies... I turned them all loose one evening and so far it seems they've done just about as good as anything else I've tried. I panicked initially because the day after the release I couldn't find a single lady bug in the garden. A few days later I was coming in after a brief rain shower and suddenly there were lady bugs everywhere. So I guess they hung around long enough to help at least a bit! No sign of mature lacewings, and the wasps are so tiny its hard to tell if they're hatched or not... but the overall infestation of white flies has slowed considerably. I should probably plan on ordering another round of lady bugs, but we'll see. Here are a couple shots of the ladies at work:

Last week I posted the first look at our resident spider. It seems like she's had a busy week as well, crafting not one, but two impressive looking egg cases. They are both about the size of a ping-pong ball. It is funny, and I'm not sure if its scientifically true or not, but if you compare the pictures of her from last week before the egg cases to this week, she seems much thinner. They look absolutely amazing close up. I haven't touched them because I don't want to get all up in her space, but they look like they're made of very densely woven fibers. It will be interesting to see what happens. I'm not sure exactly how many spiders might be in there or where they'd all set up shop when they hatch, but we'll see how it goes I guess! (Knowing she's harmless makes it much easier to feel good about letting her hang around. It also makes me feel better about the fact that I routinely exterminate the spiders that try and take over the front porch!)

Speaking of eggs, the other eggs growing in the garden have actually started ripening as well. Check out the crazy bright yellow colors of the eggs on the Easter egg plant. It is an absolutely crazy sight!

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