How the veggie garden is flourishing

I was looking at my past posts and looks like I never got around to posting the photos of veggie garden when the season started. That makes it difficult to give you a before and after picture (pun intended!). Nonetheless I hope you will enjoy looking at how the various vegetable plants are thriving.

      

Photo on the left: The front rows are radish on the left and arugula on the right, behind them is (starting from right) spinach, lavender and mint (there’s some spinach behind it as well). In the second raised bed, there’s summer squash (4 of them – we’ll probably fall short on the space, eeks!) and then tomatoes at the back.

Photo on the right: The front rows are cilantro on the left and strawberry on the right then couple of rows of beans followed by marigold. In the second raised bed we have zucchini followed by tomatoes at the back.

DH harvested some radishes yesterday and did they look beautiful?!?! While washing the radishes we discovered a baby slug that had come in with it. Yes that was an eww moment and no not all babies look cute!

Seeing the plants grow so well, really fills our heart with joy!

Harvest time

Here’s a peek at what’s growing our garden. A few posts back you can see that these were all little seedlings and now these plants are producing harvest for us! Beginning of the season had it’s hiccups as we were not able to give enough time to the garden. As a result we lost some of the plants. Good thing we planted multiples of each. However now we’re back in business and I’m happy to report that our plants are doing quite well!

Look at that cucumber!

Lavender and mint thriving! While we use the mint, we don’t know how to use lavender much. So if you’ve any simple ways do let us know!

Strawberries! I think we planted only one of these. This is probably the best that a strawberry plant has grown in our garden. Look at the baby strawberries! Given that there’s only one plant, the yield is not too bad.

Summer squash and zucchini always make us happy! They do have an either/or relationship. Either we get summer squash in plenty or zucchini This year it seems to be the summer squash.

Tomatoes getting ready to be plucked!

Some more green ‘maters!

Finally the beans! Again a good crop for the northwest. It has never disappointed us.

It’s time to transplant!

(Clockwise from left: Stupice tomato, Marigold, Basil and Cherry Tomato)

The seedlings are ready to be transplanted! We’d put in the seeds quite some time back. The earliest to germinate, as always, was marigold. Our seeds are quite old now, probably 3-4 years and we weren’t sure whether they would still be good. But looks like they are. Most of them. We made a hole in the bottom of these containers and filled them with vermiculite. Then placed them in trays filled with water. Vermiculite absorbs the water and only as much as needed. So you needn’t worry about watering the individual plants nor about how much to water. Just refill the tray with water when the water level is down to the bottom. Put the seeds on vermiculite and cover them with another layer of vermiculite. I also covered the containers with a tray so that no light would get through to the seeds. When germinating the seeds to no need light, most of them.

(Clockwise from left: zucchini with the sturdy sapling, jalapenos with thin saplings and yellow squash which didn’t germinate)

The first germination happened around 6-7 days after sowing them. The last germination to happen was around 3 weeks after sowing them and it was the jalapenos.

A closer look:

 

Zucchini

Jalapenos

Soon they’ll be transplanted into 3” pots and then a month or so later to the vegetable bed outside. This year the weather has been quite warm and I regret that we didn’t plant these sooner. Next year, maybe we’ll start the seedlings in January.

Gardening update

Here’s an update on how our veggie garden is doing. As you can see it’s thriving! The sun god has been very generous this year (and so has the heat goddess!). While both are too much for me to take, I take relief in the fact that the veggies are relishing it!

Unfortunately I forgot to post photos when we’d just planted all these veggies In the above photo:

• In the front square: onions on the bottom left, lavender just next to it. Red Pepper on the top right an spinach adjacent to it.
• In the back square: tomato all along the vine and then a summer squash plant.

In this photo:

• In the front square: Strawberry plant in the bottom left, onion on the bottom right. Beans in the rest of the area.
• In the back square: Cucumber all along the vine and a zucchini and summer squash plant in front of it.

Can wait to harvest the veggies!!

Its time to plant!

Once again its that time of the year when activity in the garden begins!

I too these photos 1-2 weeks back when we cleaned up the bed to get it ready for spring plantation. Oh I should’ve taken the before photo! The beds look so good now – am so proud of them!

We got a staple gun this year and stapled the chicken wire as well as the weed barrier to the raised bed. The beds look so neat and tidy after that! {pat our backs}

The two little plants that you see are basil and lavender. With some regret I need to report that the basil is probably not going to make it After we planted there’ve been plenty of nights where the temperature dropped a little below 40F and I thought that wasn’t much to worry about; but I guess that took a toll on the basil. I’ve never had luck with basil. This is probably the 3rd year but somehow I don’t lose hope with it. I know hot peppers won’t do well in our climate and probably the same is true for basil but I think I chose to live in denial. When I see Lidia (from Lidia’s Kitchen) pluck fresh basil from her herb garden I want to do exactly that. I guess that’s what keeps up the hope Maybe this is the last chance basil gets! Enough about basil. Let’s talk about other veggies. We also planted a little strawberry plant; then spinach, radish and coriander – all from seeds. Finally some 80 onion bulbs! Yeah we don’t know what we’ll do with them So stay tuned and I’ll post a new photo in a few weeks with the updates!

It’s that time of the year again!

Yes the seeds have been planted inside! We sowed – cherry tomato, stupice tomato, summer squash, zucchini and jalapeno pepper. We also put some fenugreek and cilantro in bigger pots. I’ll share a picture of them later.

Yes some of the above pots are the remnants of single server yogurt . Unlike last year, this year we’ve sowed the seeds directly in compost and have bypassed the vermiculite. From my observation, I think the seeds sprouts quite fast in vermiculite as compared to compost.

Activity in the garden

 

What’s growing in our garden

I wanted to share what our garden is giving us. It’s such a source of joy! This year most of our vegetables are heirloom varieties and of course they’re grown organically. In fact I’m waiting for next year when (hopefully) we’ll have our own compost from vermicomposting! That’s another post I want to do sometime.

The joy cooking doubles when you go to the garden, pick the vegetables and then decide what to cook. The aroma of fresh oregano, the juicy homegrown tomatoes, soft and tender summer squash – sounds like a recipe for pasta :) Without much ado, here are the photos.

Marigold… lots of it!

Some basil

Little bit of green peppers

Bountiful summer squash and zucchini

Aromatic oregano

Loads of tangy tomatoes!

Seeds springing into seedlings

This year we're trying to plant our vegetable garden right from seeds - yes that's a big risk we're taking and I'm keeping my fingers crossed! To add to our experiments all our seeds are heirloom seeds - good luck to us!

Like the vegetable garden, for germinating the seeds too we followed the instructions given by Mel in his SFG book. For the containers, as you can see, we used some disposable bowls and yogurt containers. DH drilled some holes in all of these. It took at  least a week for the first sprouts. Since NW is on the colder side, we kept them inside the house.

Spinach seeds

Cherry tomato, stupice tomato, summer squash, zucchini, basil and oregano

Marigold

Bush beans

When waiting for these seeds to germinate, I realized that it's not only the investment of money that worries you. When you invest your time and energy in something it's equally important to you. I read somewhere:

Don't read a child about miracles, plant a garden.

That is so true. One day you see a seed. Another day you've leaves coming out of it. It's like magic.

Tomatoes

A peek at our edible garden

After our tryst with vegetable gardening last year (you can read about it here, here and here) we decided to go full blown this year. I don’t know how but I came across a new method of gardening called the Square foot gardening. My DH always asks me where do I come to know about all these things…honestly even I don’t know! Serendipity I guess! We went and bought Mel’s new book, All New Square Foot gardening. If you’re lucky enough to be in WA you can get it at the Half price book stores. Buying the book was just the start of the journey. Then we’d to collect the ingredients for the special mix – five different kinds of manure/compost, vermiculite and peat moss. Once we’d the ingredients it was quite a project to setup the raised bed. Mixing of the soil requires quite some muscle power. Of course and then there was the most pleasant part of it all – getting the required veggie starts. Picking veggie starts is like asking a child to pick a candy. However many you take, you’re never satisfied! There’s always that one veggie that you wanted and couldn’t get!

I do remember taking photos of when we planted the bed but don’t remember where they’re. So unfortunately I can’t show how much the veggies have progressed but I can vouch for it that they’ve come a long way! Here we go with the photos…

The Square Foot garden bed – the first 4 squares are zucchini and summer squash

Monrovia blueberry bush – if you look closely you’ll see a lot of berries on it

Back of the bed – the larger plants are tomatoes, front left and right is onion and the lots of small plants are spinach (we’ve harvested it a couple of times now!); the lone plant is pepper.

Strawberry plant in a container of it’s own – look at all those little berries!

Mint – we harvested a lot of this and probably not too frequently which kind of stunted the growth of this plant. Lesson learned – harvest mint frequently!

Both the plants above are blueberries – can you see the little berries?

Only the raised bed is done using SFG. All the others are using regular soil.

So what do I think of SFG? It’s hard to say right now since we' haven’t had much fruit except spinach but I can say that all plants look quite healthy. It is a lot of hard work to put up a SFG bed so I hope the harvest is equally good. We did put a weed fabric and a chicken wire to prevent gophers and other rodents – so that was good. I’ll update as and when we get fruits on our plants.