Garden

September garden






Green beans and strawberries. Not visible are a few tomatoes, cucumbers, and onion seed pods. 



A watermelon!  A 10 pound watermelon!



That was pretty delicious.  Sweet and juicy, and full of seeds unfortunately. 


*Photos posted from Instagram may not show up in emails forms of this blog post, please visit the blog to see photos at http://smiles4u2have.blogspot.com/

Happenings

I'm procrastinating going to bed.  I don't want to. Though I'm tired and I'm sure I'll be out like a light the second I actually lay down and close my eyes.

I'm procrastinating a lot lately.

The going-ons around here:

Garden is doing great. I've harvested more lettuce than we could eat and gave some away.  As well as some carrots, kolhrabi, and chives. The radishes are pretty much gone.  Broccoli florets are starting to show up so I'll soon have those to put up.

Green beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers are in.  As well as some herbs, more strawberries, and pumpkin.


(slideshow of Yard and Garden 2014 Flickr album, click arrows on either side of photo)

The kids have been out of school for the summer and rotting their brains with too much TV, video games, and other fun - like mustache straws.


Carus has been learning to ride thanks to some amazing friends (who loan horses and teaching).


Robert and I spent our 13th anniversary at the beach and it was a GLORIOUS weekend.


And of course, there is work and other boring stuff.

Radishes

So far I've only been able to harvest radishes out of the garden.  And I got a kitchen scale to weigh my harvests this year because I'm curious...or weird...or crazy...or all of the above.  I just think it would be fun to see how many pounds of produce I can grow.



This 5 ounces brings my total radish harvest total this year to 13 ounces (harvesting 4 oz twice before).  I don't have much more radishes to harvest and I'm not planting more as I have green bean and tomato seedlings to go there.

Or I will when these pop up.



I plan on planting radishes again in the fall, along with my other cool weather crops, and this time I'll try successive planting.  This amount of radishes is just about right for us for 3-5 days depending on the amount of salads and snacking, so I could plant a couple rows for harvesting about a week apart.  Each square in my bed holds 6 rows of radishes.



We removed the hoops from the bed this past week too as we are staying above freezing at night and are in the 70s and 80s with the occasional 90 during the day (Fahrenheit).

Garden bed 1 was planted without string lines to help me keep things neat and after this weekend of really nice weather it has gone crazy!  I will be putting in lines soon because bed 2 looks so much neater.



The broccoli was supposed to be ready to harvest this week, according to a tracking app based on when I planted the seeds, and it's no where near that.  The broccoli is in several places, but the largest ones are in the back there, taller than the clump of kohlrabi that I never thinned out.  I have problems thinning out seedlings - I don't want to throw away a plant that has potential of growing food. Which probably goes hand in hand with my problems throwing food out of the fridge. I don't like wasting food and will do all I can to prevent, including not thinning seedlings.  It might take longer for those kohlrabi to mature to harvest-able size, but I haven't had problems (yet) with harvesting the bigger ones and letting the littler ones stick around longer to be picked later.  (Speaking from experience growing radishes and carrots for a few years now.)

Yard and Garden

Garden view for March 2014


These photos are a few weeks old.  I took them thinking of a blog post and then didn't get around to doing it so now they're old and things have changed a bit. (Flickr has changed some things and the below photo is now slides - just hover over to see the arrows to click through the photos in the Yard and Garden 2014 set on Flickr.)(You might not be able to do that if viewing this post in your email.)



The garden bed furthest from the gate was planted first.  I planted carrots, radishes, kohlrabi, lettuce, and broccoli.  Those have all come up; the lettuce and kohlrabi the first to make an appearance.  I planted the other bed this last last weekend with the same (minus kohlrabi because I was out of those seeds) and to make things a bit more organized (and to help keep track of where I planted) I marked out sections with twine.


Garden view for April 2014


I have the hoop houses open during the day and closed at night (if it's predicted to be below 40F).  It's getting about 30 degrees warmer inside when all closed up which means I could have them up this fall and growing things until November or December.  Then next spring I should be able to start in February or the beginning of March.