This year's garden

[Rhawn]

[Okie Boarder]

LOL, I'm sure there is...not sure I want to get on another forum. Thanks.

[Okie Boarder]

A bit of an update...

We took a pretty good hit from hail recently and it took a while for things to recover. We replaced a few of the young plants and others have worked their way back. We were able to have our first salad out of the garden Saturday and everything seems to be growing well.

We've built a structure for allowing the area to be fenced in and the ability to use welded wire as trellis for tall and climbing items. This idea should work well for if we wanted to cover the area for hail, install shade material for the hot part of summer, and it does hold the potential for putting clear plastic over to create a greenhouse. As you can see in the pictures, the fencing around the outside is up as are all the structural supports. I put the first piece of welded wire up on the back of the box against the fence for the green beans and cucumbers to climb on.

So far, so good...hopefully we will continue to see good growth.

[jgriffith]

Wow, that's a serious backyard garden structure. Good luck, hope you get a nice crop.

[Okie Boarder]

Some more pictures of the progress. The turnips have been harvested...ate some this weekend in a medley of roasted root veggies. The spinach has also been removed since it started to bolt. I've planted eggplant, okra and a couple sunflowers in the place of those items. All the welded wire mesh has been installed and ready for the climbers and tall plants to be tied off to.

Broccoli, carrots, peppers.



Lettuce, onion, green beans, cucumber, tomatoes. This box had spinach and now has sunflower in the empty square.



Basically the same with different lettuce and cucumbers. Both of these had spinach in them and now have the eggplant and sunflowers. One tomatillo plant is in this box, as well.



Cauliflower, carrots, squash, peppers.



Onions, garlic, green onions, squash, tomatoes, tomatillo. Turnips were in the square that looks empty now. Okra has been planted there.



Parsnips, garlic, green onions, squash and tomatoes.







Potatoes

[Okie Boarder]

Update. Some of the maters are starting to turn red and things are growing well. We harvested quite a bit of lettuce and spinach and really enjoyed that. The cauliflower didn't do too well in the garden...never seemed to want to grow heads, just leaves. I had a couple in pots that got some decent heads started and they got hit pretty hard with worms. We've planted some sunflowers and okra in a couple of the empty squares until we plant something for fall. All in all, things are going well and we are seeing some good growth of the summer crops.

[chavez]

Hmm I thought for sure your garden would have gotten tossed into the Gulf of Mexico by now from all the crazy WX you have had in those parts.

[Okie Boarder]

LOL, nope. It's come close to us, but not right where we're at.

[Dragonlady8]

So far this year and there's more.

[eeven73]

my brain just exploded

[Okie Boarder]

Looks like you're doing quite well, Dragonlady8. That's quite the interesting mix on that cuke. What zone are you in?

[Dragonlady8]

9b
It wasn't intentional. The plants are 1/2 foot from each other.

Decided to cut it down this evening. Probably going to make sweet & spicy chips. The cayenne peppers are about the size of baby carrots too.

[Okie Boarder]

I'm a 6b or 7a depending on what you look at. My friends back home are an 8b. I've noticed lots of friends that have quite a bit further growth or already harvesting compared to me and it's one of those things that initially makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. But, then I have to take a step back and remember I'm in a different zone.

Sweet and spicy chips? Kind of like bread and butter?

[Okie Boarder]

[Swass]

Cucumbers have alternative uses. I saw it in a movie once.

[eeven73]

If you don't pick up the innuendo in those pics your helpless.

[Okie Boarder]

LOL, duh. Wasn't thinking along those lines...that one slipped right by me.

[Dragonlady8]

Yes bread & butter type pickles.

I mix a lot of organic Tomato fertilizer into the soil. Calcium is key.
I use this:
http://www.gardeners.com/Organic-Tomato-Fertilizer/07-200RS,default,pd.html?start=19&cgid=VegetableGardening_TomatoGrowing

and/or Epsoma
http://www.espoma.com/p_consumer/tones_overview.html


Your garden is looking good. Get some preying mantis eggs. that should be fun for your boys.

[jason_ssr]

Funny story, so I grew up eating these amazing tomatoes that my dad grew. They had that great cherry tomato taste, but they were regular sized. The plants would grow well out the top of an 8ft tall tomato cage. My dad stopped growing his garden in the early 90's.

So, over the last couple of years, Ive tried to replicate it, searching for different varieties looking for this unique tomato. Absolutely no luck. When I asked my dad, he just said, "yeah, those were cherry tomatoes." So I tried growing cherry tomatoes this year and they are outstanding, but no where near the size of plant or fruit he got, so I thought it was probably something in the soil from back home. I asked him over the weekend, "how ddi you get those cherry tomatoes to be so big?" He finally told me that the refinery he worked in was right next to the water treatment facility, and they would let him go in with his pickup and fill the bed with dried sludge (class A biosolids) and he would put it in his tomato box.

[Broccoli B]

Around where I live the city's waste water treatment plant pays the farms to spead the sludge on the fields at the beginning of the growing season.

Wash your corn!

[Okie Boarder]

[Okie Boarder]

jason_ssr, amazing how well the natural organisms can work to promote growth, huh?

[jryoung]

I have a friend who is into tomatoes and he uses the fish head and asprin method.

[jason_ssr]

[Okie Boarder]

Here's a few pictures of the two spots I planted the melons. Also, you can kind of get an idea of how the tomatoes and tomatillos are growing. Most of the plants are around 3-4' tall.

[Okie Boarder]

jryoung, that's a lot of maters...looks like quite a few heirloom styles.

[Dragonlady8]

If you didn't know - Tomatillos require 2-3 plant to reproduce. You'll get a bunch of flowers but no fruit if you don't

The problem with planting fish heads - if you've got a lot of cats or wildlife running around your neighborhood - they won't be in the ground long enough to be fertilizer.

[Okie Boarder]

Here are some more new pictures. We've harvested about 1/2 our carrots and all the parsnips. The harvest was decent, I think. We have several herbs that were ready to be cut down a bit and I decided to dry them this year, so I made a "tree" to hang them from. The tomatoes are growing nicely and we are picking 3-4 cherry tomatoes a day now. The sauce tomatoes have several fruits on each one and those are started to ripen, as well. Our peppers, squash and cucumbers are still pretty small, but seem like they are doing OK. The pepper plants are making peppers even though they haven't grown much. Our green beens are climbing up the mesh quite well and I'm looking forward to seeing some production out of them before too long. Our tomatillos and a few tomato plants are close to 6' tall and the mesh trellis design we did seems like it is going to work quite well. I had some issues with the potato plants drooping and starting to wilt. I thought it was from the heat and wind, so I watered heavily and it got worse. I took a couple lower sides off the box and the soil is pretty wet, so I put spacers in between the boxes and left some sides off, hoping to get the soil to dry up a bit and save them. We'll see.

[jgriffith]

[Okie Boarder]

Here are some new pictures of the garden. We harvested the rest of the carrots and all the onions and garlic. The onions were all a little on the small side. We chopped the onions and carrots and put them in vacuum seal bags in the freezer. We have about 8 cups of each for cooking...not bad. The onions and garlic were both on the smaller side and I've been reading about planting them in September and letting them grow through winter to get better yields. I plan to give that a try this fall. The potatoes got really wet with all the rain and ended up starting to wilt really bad, then died. I've been digging out the box and only found a few potatoes. I think I'm going to plant more since we still have enough time left in the season. Everything else is doing well and we've had a steady supply of tomatoes. The squashes are just now starting to produce some, although our zuchinni is still really small...not sure if we're going to have any luck with that one. The sunflowers, okra and eggplant I planted late are doing pretty good. All in all, things are progressing well.

[Okie Boarder]

The cantaloupe is really starting to vine out...watermelon is doing OK. We're finally getting some squash producing, which I'm really happy about. We bought a couple praying mantis egg pods a few weeks ago and I saw our first one the other day.

[Okie Boarder]

So, here's the latest. We cleared out several areas to plant more stuff for a fall harvest...in addition, things are growing well. We've had some issues with the pole green beans so we pulled out half of them and replaced with bush beans to see if we have better luck. The eggplant and okra are doing well and the sunflowers did good. We now have 3 cantaloupe growing, but the watermelon seems to be lagging behind. The tomatillos are starting to produce...we have about 20 "lanterns" formed up with tomatillos growing inside. The patty pan squash has gotten huge and almost taking over that box. I think next year the squash are going to get their own space.

[Okie Boarder]

I realized I haven't updated in a while. The praying mantis has reemerged and it looks like we might have two. We see them every so often anow and they've grown quite a bit. The fall planting is growing quite well and it looks like we will have a good harvest of some bush beans, along with more greens. Carrots, parsnips and turnips are growing well, and the potatoes are coming along. The okra is producing well and the eggplant is doing pretty good. We ended up only getting two cantaloupe and one of them seemed to look bad, but once cut open was just fine. We had a rabbit get at the others that were growing, so we may need to consider some other options next year. A coworker brought us a watermelon, which we enjoyed and we also made some watermelon rind pickles from. Here are some updated pictures of growth and some of the produce...you can see the praying mantis' in a couple of the pics, as well.

[Okie Boarder]

Well, the garden will take a hit this week with a hard freeze coming. It seems like the tomatoes decided that they wanted to grow like crazy the last 6 weeks or so. Since we were going to freeze, it was time to harvest everything that couldn't take the freeze. As you can see the garden still looked really good and was growing well. We cut everything back and tried to harvest as much as possible. We cut the tomatoes on vine sections as much as possible. We got quite a bit that we are going to try to let ripen indoors. Some of the cool weather items like root veggies and potatoes are still in the ground, so we'll see how they do.

[Okie Boarder]

Final update...all those tomatoes ripened quite well...got another 12 pints of chopped tomatoes canned up. We harvested some of the horseradish recently and made some prepared horseradish. Now it's time to plan for next year.