I've always said the June in the garden is boring. It's a great time to go on vacation! Everything is planted. Nothing is ready to pick. The only thing you can do is water, weed and wait.
I've been watching this garden on my way to work. They have rallied after their raised beds disintegrated and come back with a bigger plan and a fence. Their posts don't look very sturdy. But their tomatoes are in.
Our next door neighbors have planted their garden. All looks well. I'm waiting for my tigerlilies to bloom. I think they will look stunning against the black background.
This is what I'm calling my "pickle garden" I've planted pickling cucumbers (usually I only do slicing) and dill. The dill has been very sluggish to come up. I planted three different times in May, and then again the middle of last week. I finally have some dill seedlings coming up.
Our clematis vine is putting on a great show. This fall we are going to have to put a cattle panel on the fence because the little store bought trellis is no longer adequate.
I've tidied up the compost pile. This is where I keep a lot of my extra perennials stored so it usually looks like bargain day at a greenhouse with all sorts of mismatched pots sitting around. The spare Rising Sun Redbud tree is in a pot. There are also 2 daylilies in fiber pots waiting to be planted and three porcelain vines and three Siberian Irises sitting on the back wall.
Every bed of the garden has something growing.
Under the wire cloches are cantaloupe seedlings. I planted those in the cold frame the first week of May and they only decided to come up May 25th. I had originally thought I would try them in containers again. But I had an open bed that I didn't have any urgent plans for so I transplanted them and then covered them to keep crows from snipping them off. That will give them the best chance to produce something this year.
This is my spare tomato bed. It was originally destined for bush beans. But a few bush beans go a long way and there is still plenty of time to grow more so the beans went down one side, some spare lettuce down the other and the three spare tomato plants down the middle. I can plant more bush beans after the first cucumbers. Bush beans are never a rush. As long as I get them seeded by the end of July they will be fine. I'm sort of beaned out anyway.
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| Blue Beauty, Absinthe and Lenny and Gracie's Kentucky Heirloom |
Maestro peas starting to form pods.
Usually my second variety of peas is Wando. But Wando grows about 7 feet high, and last year I had to anchor the extra tall pea fence to keep it from blowing over. So this year I tried varieties that should be easier to manage. On the left is Penelope and to the right is Burpeanna. The Penelope were planted the day after the Maestro (Apr 14th and 15th). Maestro is a 61 day pea (bloomed around 45) and Penelope is a 59 day pea and they are not living up to their description because they are already a week behind the Maestro bloom date and showing no signs. They have not yet bloomed. The Burpeanna had a poor germination rate. They are a 63 day pea. I believe I planted them May 5th so they should be three weeks behind the Penelope.
The Buckwheat is coming along nicely
Second planting of lettuce and bed prepared for the second planting of cucumbers in early July. There is a little oak leaf lettuce volunteer which I left to grow.
The first planting of cucumbers and lettuce with some celery and radicchio also.
Of course the main focus of the garden is the tomatoes :) These are my main tomato plants. They are hip high now and blooming. I've side dressed them with worm castings and planted Nasturtium beside them to provide a ground cover to prevent splash up when it rains. I've removed the bottom layers of leaves.
You can remove the leaves all of the way up to the first blossom if you want, but this early in the year that is a little extreme. I am going to try something new this year. It is well know that copper is the main ingredient of tomato disease fighters. You can spray it on. Dust it on. Old timers used to drop a copper penny in the hole when the seedling was transplanted or insert it into the tomato stalk.
Of course pennies don't have as much copper in them now as they used to, so copper wire is the easiest source. So when the tomato stalk is at least the thickness of a pencil, you are supposed to jab the copper wire into it. OUCH! right? Well I tried it. I still had two spares unplanted anyway, so the risk was not absolute.
I didn't do all of my plants. For one thing, it seemed a bit of a risky operation, even on a cool rainy day. But I did three of them and they seemed to take it just fine. Since this is an experiment, I have to have a control group. In a row of six plants, I inserted the wire into three plants. Three out of four of the same variety.
Other odds and ends. I did put in some potato plants. And the only reason I did was that I had some potatoes in the house that were sprouting all over the place and I didn't have the heart to compost them. I've always had good luck with using grocery store taters as seed potatoes. The front row is red and the back row is russet.
And on the patio I put some spare lettuce plants in pots. I started seeing these in nurseries last year and wanted them but refused to spend the money. I stuck them here where the east sun and the west sun is blocked completely. I used Miracle Grow Moisture Control potting mix and they have taken off and surpassed nicer transplants that went into the garden beds a week or two before. You just can't beat that Miracle Grow soil. As much as I hate to admit it, considering it's ties to Monsanto, it really is a great product. This spring I also started with several bags of Espoma Organic Moisture Mix and I can't say I'm all that impressed with it. I don't enjoy working with it. It is heavy and soggy right out of the bag, and so far the plantings have not shown any great growth. I did use it for my tomatoes when they were in gallon pots and you can see those results were great. But in my large planters - not so much. I'll probably try at least one bag again next year.
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