I suppose it goes without saying that our first year of real gardening has been an adventure in trial and error! So far the best outcomes have been with the peas and lettuce, and we did yield a fair bit of broccoli although we discovered upon harvest that some of it was infested with nasty little bugs. Yuck. The potatoes appear to be doing really well, but we won’t know about that for awhile yet! Those root crops are a test of patience! Last night Chris attached the final boards to the potato bins and is bringing home the remaining dirt to fill them tonight. We keep finding little mole hills around the bottoms of the bins and were afraid our precious fingerlings were being devoured before they saw the light of day, but our neighbor Jerry assured us moles are meat eaters. Maybe he’s actually doing us a favor and dining on tater loving pests!
Maverick likes to supervise our work in progress.
They can go no further. I hope there are several pounds of potatoes growing inside!!
Other plants showing future harvest are the tomatillos, peppers and tomatoes. Hopefully we’ll get to make a few batches of pico de gallo!
This isn’t exactly how I imagined things when I planned the garden. I purposefully planted the tomatoes in the sunniest corner, then for some reason thought it was a good idea to put them next to the peas… which block all of the morning light from the tomatoes! I thought the peas would be over and done before they really affected the tomatoes. I was wrong! The last pea harvest is coming soon though, and we’ll get those tangly vines out of there ASAP! They’ve all but destroyed the beautiful trellis Chris made! And I thought the other side of the trellis would be climbing with cucumbers and beans right now, but the cukes have not done very well at all and silly me bought bush beans as opposed to the climbing pole variety. The garlic appears to be kicking butt, as do the Walla Walla Sweets. The leeks seem pretty small to me and the green onions still stand at about three inches. I don’t think we’ll be eating any of those!
This is the second year I’ve planted Joe’s special variety of cilantro and I just don’t like it. It’s leggy and it bolts like crazy and it just doesn’t look like cilantro. As you can see here it has taken over the whole corner of this bed! I’ll be pulling that out soon.
We returned from a long weekend to find the deer had spent a long weekend munching on all sorts of good stuff around the yard…. strawberries, beans, lettuce, hostas. Yesterday I chased away one who dared nibble on a bunch of red romaine right in front of our eyes! Not quite sure why “spray deer repellant around garden” was not on our list of things to do before we left town. Oh well… next time!
