Summer Harvests Begin

Provider bush beans, 27 May 2015.

I took the pictures to the right yesterday morning, early, before the sun was fully up and before I drove to work. The lighting, as a result, is a little weird, but the idea comes across: The first of the summer crops are ready to harvest!

We still are eating lettuces and other spring crops from the garden, but three days this week my lunchbox has included home-grown green beans. Soon, our home-grown zucchini will join them, then raspberries, then cucumbers, onions, garlic, potatoes, blueberries...

In my mind, I can see our garden crops coming into the kitchen in sequence, like waves rolling to shore. 

Meanwhile, I am still planting warm season crops. The okra and nasturtiums went into the ground just this past weekend.

I Needed a Bigger Basket

For weeks, the little basket was plenty big enough for the 1-3 pounds of produce that I brought in from the garden each day, but last week we finally reached the point of needing a larger basket.

That "I needed a bigger basket" time of year has arrived.        PHOTO/Amy W.

The zucchini are almost done, because the pickleworms have found my zucchini patch, and I pulled up the last of the raggedy cucumber vines over the weekend, but tomatoes and peppers are just now hitting their stride, okra is flowering, and the earliest butternut squashes are beginning to change color from pale green to that buff/tan that indicates ripeness. The tomatillos are producing, but in little waves, so that some days I bring in several of the green fruits and other days none are ready.

Meanwhile, I've dug up the last of the white potatoes, planted buckwheat in the empty cucumber patch, sowed some cilantro seeds, another bush-bean patch, and a few late cucumbers (an experiment...). I also planted some basil seedlings into the space where the last potatoes had been.

The popcorn has produced a few small ears on each stalk, and I noticed that something had climbed up one of the stalks and nibbled at the base of the lowest ear of corn. Luckily, the kernels had already begun to harden and be less easy to eat, so the critter gave up without doing too much damage.

I've had to put netting over the peanuts, because the neighborhood rabbits thought the plants were delicious. The daily damage was going to drastically reduce my peanut crop, but the bird netting propped over the bed seems to have stopped the ongoing damage (for now, at least).

The biggest task for August will be transitioning to fall crops. Three of the tomato plants will be done soon -- they are some of the more disease-prone of the heirlooms -- which means that space will be open, and other crops will be coming out, too. I like to have some of the fall crops in the garden beginning around August 10, so I have plenty of gardening to look forward to in the next couple of weeks.

Hope everyone else's gardens are growing well!

I Planted Carrots

This was a busy weekend of tidying up, amending, and planting. The bed that got "tidied" (everything pulled out) was the one that had held the zucchini and most of the cucumbers. After pulling up the old plants, I spread a wheelbarrow load of compost over the bed and then used my grub hoe to "till" the bed. If the bed hadn't been for carrots, I probably wouldn't have worked it so deeply, but I wanted the roots to have no trouble growing long and straight.

After raking the bed smooth, I added a little of my own mix of organic amendments, then sifted those into the top few inches of soil before planting.

One of the great things about planting the carrots is that I get to use my seeder. Most of my crops aren't planted directly into the garden as seeds so solidly in the beds, but carrots are. It's always fun to roll that seeder down the row, and great to know that the seeds are planted with pretty good spacing at the depth that I want, covered up and tamped down, all in one pass!

Grub hoe and seeder help make short work of planting the carrots. PHOTO/atlantaveggies@blogspot.com

I planted five rows of carrots and then one row of winter radishes.

The day wasn't super hot -- only in the 80s -- but it was humid and still, so in the mid-afteroon -- rather than working out in the blazing hot sun -- I worked on the shady front porch on transplants for the beds that aren't far enough along to clear for fall planting.  I started a tray of fall greens and bumped up my cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower seedlings into larger pots.

Meanwhile, the summer crops are coming in at a good pace. I'm especially happy about the success of the peppers. We've been putting a couple of pounds of them, chopped, into the dehydrator each week for awhile now, and they will make our winter meals very tasty.

A day's August harvest in a rainy garden year.  PHOTO/atlantaveggies.blogspot.com

Hope everyone else's gardens are doing well!

Garden Schedule for the Next Few Weeks

We are just about four weeks away from the average last frost date for Cobb County, which means that I am counting down to the time when I can really fill the garden again with food-producing plants.  The potatoes and peas are starting to come up, making the garden look a little less bare, but most sections of the garden are looking fairly empty. The spaces that still have some cool-season crops (spinach and green onions, for example) will be cleared over the next few weeks to make room for the next round of plants.

Meanwhile, the seedlings that I've started for spring planting all need tending, including watering and moving to larger containers as needed. I've put sweet potatoes into a flat of sand-plus-potting mix to make slips (which won't be planted until May). Some of the lettuces that I've started indoors will be ready to set out in a week or so, and the parsley might be ready then, too. I'll be putting out seeds for radishes each week through April, because Joe likes radishes and Moonpie LOVES radish leaves.

Depending on how the next couple of weeks go, weather-wise, I might plant a little patch of bush beans when I set out the lettuces. That would be a small gamble, but I have lots of bean seeds for replanting if a freeze knocks out the first round. Otherwise, there's some impatient waiting ahead.

One thing I've been working on while I wait is a more firm crop rotation schedule than I've had in the past. I've assigned numbers to the different planting areas in my yard, to make a six year rotation. However, the most "needed" crops are in two beds each year. This is how it looks so far:

Bed 1 year 1 - Green peas, followed by sweet potatoes, okra, and sunflowers, which come out in October and are replaced by onions, shallots, and garlic.
Bed 2 year 1 - Onion family comes out in June, followed by late tomatoes and Southern peas, followed by a winter cover crop.
Bed 3 year 1 - Zucchini, melons, and cukes, followed by buckwheat cover, followed by carrots, cilantro, and parsley.
Bed 4 year 1 - Corn, underplanted with beans or peanuts, followed by cabbage family plants, followed by green peas (leaving a little space for the early potatoes).
Bed 5 year 1 - Potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, with early potatoes followed by bush beans, then replanted with late potatoes, then mulched.
Bed 6 year 1 - Zucchini, melons, and cukes, followed by buckwheat cover, followed by beets, spinach, and Swiss chard.

What's missing, of course, is a space for the lettuces and chicory. Hopefully, in the next three or four weeks I will have sorted out that little detail. And this year, it will take a little finagling to get the rotation right, because what's in the beds right now doesn't exactly match what I have mapped out.

Part of why I'm working this out is that many of the planting schemes I've seen don't take rotation (moving plant families around the garden) into account, and they don't use succession planting at all. I'm working on getting more cover crops into the rotation but also to keep quite a bit of space in production.  The plan isn't quite right yet, but I'm pretty sure the work will be totally worthwhile.