It appears that come July there is a garden explosion!
In June I was lamenting the state of the garden thinking that I’d planted too little, too late and not enough in between.
Whereas in fact, I seem to have planted too much, too close and just at the right time.
In July the garden explodes with greenery, fruit, veggies and all the work put into it in the spring comes to fruition.
Zucchini’s abounding, blueberries ripe, carrots, peas, beets and greens keeping us fed every day.
It’s wonderful when you can just go out to the garden each evening and pick what you want to have for dinner.
Because it’s impossible to explain it, I thought I would do up a video for you.
It’s a little shaky and sometimes it’s like following the bouncing ball, but you’ll see what I mean about a garden explosion.
I’ll put some notes below the video of the different plants or anything I’ve missed or needs some more explanation.
The squash mentioned in the video are:
- small sugar pumpkin
- small wonder (spaghetti squash)
- vegetable marrow
- sweet mama (buttercup)
- table king (acorn)
- black beauty (zucchini)
- golden zucchini
- pattypan (scallopini)
Beans:
- black turtle (drying) – saved from last year
- taylor horticultural (drying)
- scarlet runner – saved from last year
- romano (pole) – saved from last year
The snap peas and the shelling peas that are growing are seeds saved from last year.
The lettuce is planted in an 8-12 inch row with the seeds just sprinkled in (3:05) Then as they mature I just give them a haircut and they regrow as well as taking some out and replanting in other areas of the garden to get heads.
That way I always have lettuce at different times and use the smaller garden leaves for juicing and sandwiches and the heads for salads.
I try and plant lettuce about every 3 weeks so we have a continuous supply.
At 12:25 in the video you can see some lettuce on the bottom of the screen and that is actually the second head. I cut off the first head that grew at ground level and just left the roots in the ground.
The next thing I know they are starting to make a new head and they are just as tasty as the original.
I started just about all my plants from seeds with the exception of a couple of tomatoes, the soybeans, chickpeas and onions.
Next year I will start the sweet potatoes a little earlier as I just got the slips out into the garden so I’m not sure if they will mature in time.
The potatoes are all from stock that I’ve kept year after year and those that don’t get eaten by spring get planted back into the garden.
I mention having some hugelkultur raised garden beds and they have a base of logs and twigs with soil on top. This help keeps moisture in the soil as well as feeds it.
The sticks that you see throughout the garden are to keep the quail and racoon from digging and having dust baths. You can see on one of the beds by the compost that it’s covered in netting for the same reason and I will take that down as the plants get bigger.
In the greenhouse, the trellising is working great and we don’t have tomatoes out in the pathway.
Also, the bucket idea for watering works a treat and I don’t know if you noticed but there isn’t anything growing in between the plants so no extra weeding.
When we planted all the plants in the greenhouse we dug a hole, put in compost, epsom salts and composted chicken manure. Seems to have worked.
This year was the easiest garden I’ve ever planted.
As I mentioned in the video, we put down shredded leaves and composted chicken manure on the top of the raised beds as a mulch and then I just pulled that aside to plant and then cosied up the mulch to the seedling.
Have had very few problems with slugs this year, just a few on the beans when they first started.
All in all, I’m pleased with the garden this year.
Dinner tonight, fresh from the garden…
