Peas and Carrots

 Today I planted my first row of peas.  I have discussed my pea planting plan before.  This year I am planting two beds with two rows each.  I have been saving pea seeds for several years now.  I decided to clean house and use up all of my old seed.  I generally plant somewhere between 2.5 and 4 ounces (dry) of seeds per row.  I have a little over 12 ounces of seed left, so 3 ounces a row it is.  I am going to plant one row a week on Wednesdays to try to spread out the season a bit.  I am planting only my saved Penelope Pea seeds so they may all catch up to each other.  Today is cool and rainy, but I prepped the bed two days ago with Garden Tone fertilizer and dug the rows.  I soak my seeds over night so all I have to do is walk out there and pour them out.

Then I rake loose soil over the seeds until they are well covered and tamp it down with the rake so there is good soil contact.  It is raining on and off today and will continue through the night.  At some point I will sprinkle lettuce seeds along the side of each row to act as living mulch.

While I was out prepping the bed the other day I dug some carrots.  For years now I have been growing carrots in containers which works very well, but with the thinning and daily watering, they are fairly labor intensive.  Last year I ran a seed tape of YaYa carrots along the back of the Strawberry bed where the soil is rich and deep.  Besides watering them now and then I completely ignored them.  I have been digging them since fall.    One of the last things I did last fall was rake loose mulch up over the tops of the carrots to insulate them from cold.  Carrots protected thru the winter will grow exceptionally sweet and crisp.  These carrots have been excellent.  I don't think I will bother with the container carrots this year.  I'll just run a double row of seed tape back there.

In the workshop everything is growing like crazy.  I started my Indeterminant Tomato seeds today.

Marigolds transplanted 4 days ago

Ornamental Hot Peppers and Dwarf and Micro Tomatoes

Cabbages, Cauliflower and Broccoli.  Lettuce to the right

One of two rogue Petunia volunteers getting ready to bloom

My next gardening chore will be pinching back these Dahlia seedlings.

Carrots

The weather is finally becoming more fall like and the only things I have left in the garden are Carrots and Dahlias.  It will still be a few more weeks before I will dig the Dahlias.  

The carrots have done exceptionally well this year.  They germinated well in the mild April weather and then thrived in the cool wet May.  I planted four varieties in containers and one variety in seed tape along the back of the strawberry cages where I previously had Parsnips.  With my shallow raised beds I have to choose my Carrot locations carefully.  They need deep, loose soil to grow long and straight.  I have been growing them in containers with potting mix for quite a few years now and get very good results.  But it was kind of nice to have some growing in the ground because the containers require dedicated watering.

I pulled Carrots from containers all summer to use in salads.  When the foliage started getting a little rough looking, as it does every August, I just cut it all back to about two inches to see what would happen.  It came back fresh and green and one container has started putting out flowers.  I've never had this happen and assume this is because I cut the foliage back and tricked the plant into thinking that it was the second year.

Nantes and/or Sugarsnax flowering like Queen Anne's Lace

These carrots had become next to impossible to pull one by one because they were so rooted in.  I dumped one container and was curious to see what the overall root systems looked like.  They had pretty much taken up the entire pot.  

That's a pretty strong secondary root situation!

I started breaking the soil away from the side and the carrots came out easily.

Rotild on the left and King Midas on the right

I cut the foliage off and rinsed the worst of the soil off and put them all in a plastic bag in the hydrator.  The less you handle them the longer they keep well.  I will probably end up cutting these, blanching and freezing them.  

The Carrot tape did very well despite infrequent watering.  The soil is pretty good here, but they are still pushing themselves up out of the ground.  The variety is YaYa, which is a sweet, Nantes type. I like the Nantes Carrots because of their blunt ends.

  I feel somehow that there is less waste if I know where to trim the root as opposed to a tapered "Imperator" type Carrot where you have to decide just how much of the root is useable.  But I still plant those too because I love pulling a long, slender Carrot.

Last year's Sugarsnax Carrots

The great thing about Carrots is that they get sweeter in cold weather.  I cannot leave them in containers over winter because they will freeze solid and turn to mush, but the Yaya Carrots in the ground can be left for quite awhile.  If I were to cover them deeply with straw or leaves to insulate the ground I might be digging them in the middle of winter and adding fresh, sweet carrots to my Crockpot meals.

Early July Vegetable Update

 I like to go through about twice a month and just take photos of each raised bed so i can compare year to year.  This year's garden is feeling pretty good... that is until Facebook popped a photo of mounds of colorful, blooming Nasturtium from a few years ago.  Okay, my Nasturtium are still tiny this year.  But overall, this is one of my best tended gardens and the list of things to change next year is very, very short.

The peas came out yesterday.  They were still green and beautiful, but completely picked clean.  The best part was - not a weed to be seen.

That bed has now had mulch added, the open pollinated Dahlias from seed I saved last year are transplanted and the other end is set up for a later planting of Cucumbers which are seeded in cells.  The Dahlias were starting to suffer, and their little tubers were poking through the drain holes, but they will turn around quickly.

Here are the rest of the beds one by one:

Pickling Cucumbers and Slicing Cucumbers
I am going to keep these from mingling in the center so when the pickles have been made, the vines can come out.

From the other side.  They are flowering, and will soon be shading the Celery

Solstice Sweet Corn planted May 20th

Gotta Have It planted June 1st

Clarimore and Dunja Zucchini together
It took about three tries and a dozen seeds but I finally got a Dunja plant.

Cantaloupe and Pumpkin

Cole Crops

Cauliflower

Golden Acre Cabbage

Indeterminate Tomatoes

Carbon babies

Bell Peppers full of buds

Potted Bells

Havasu Peppers

Havasu Baby

Sweet Potatoes, Carrots and Herbs
I have been pulling a lot of carrots

Dill, Sunflowers, Sweet Potatoes and Eggplant

Sunflowers soon

The Pole Bean bed still looks ragged, but things are good in there

First seeding of Seychelles is climbing

Dwarf Tomatoes and Onions

I am still learning about this growing Onions from seed thing.
The one in the middle is one of mine, and the larger on each side are the nursery grown Candy Onions

Dwarf Tomatoes

Setting fruit

Micro Tomato

I am proud of this Eggplant.  These are the two spare plants I hid on top of the potting bench which ended up rallying and out growing the other pair I had in a larger pot.  I have switched the pots now so the larger plants are in the larger pot.  Not long ago Aphids found these and I spent about a week spraying with Neem Oil every morning.  Now I am getting an occasional flea beetle but the Aphids are finally gone.  I wrote at length in this blog entry about my love of soft, blemish free Eggplant leaves.

Yukon Gold Potatoes
I dug a plant the other day and they are beautiful and scab free.  Iron-tone (with a 17% sulfur content) seems to have done the trick on that.

Fertilizer Friday

 Friday is the day that I make sure everything has been fertilized as needed, both the annuals and vegetables.  I use a combination of side dressing with dry fertilizer and watering in with some fish emulsion.  We sure don't need to water considering the inch and a quarter of rain we got on Monday, but following up with a liquid fertilizer makes sure any dry fertilizer is off of the leaves.  This week I am out of the general Garden-Tone, so until I get back into town to stock up I am using the amendments I have on hand.  Bone Meal (Potassium) for the root crops and Blood Meal (Nitrogen) for the others.

The Cabbages, Broccoli and Cauliflowers have been enjoying the cool weather.  And they are also completely protected from the hail.  They have no idea what all the fuss is about.

The Peas and Lettuce also miraculously sustained little hail damage and are going about their business as if nothing has been happening,

That last storm on Monday was a doozy.  We got over an inch of rain in about 20 minutes combined with 5 to 10 minutes of huge hail.  I have spent the past few days picking up dead leaves and putting away frost cloths and the garden in general looks more like a garden and less like a war zone.  The tree leaves that came down in the hail made the whole area look as if it had been put through a blender.

The Dwarf Tomatoes and the Onions look pretty good.  The Micro Tomatoes in the pots are blooming and the Dwarfs have buds on them.  They will not be early like last year but otherwise they should be fine.

The Indeterminate Tomatoes are growing slowly but are nice and green.  They need some sun.  We have had rather overcast days and cool nights.

The Bell Peppers in the ground look abominable but they are all flowering and producing peppers.

The same Bell Pepper varieties in the pots look better but are not producing yet.  I guess it must be true that when a plant thinks it is going to die it gets busy with the reproduction end of things.

Havasu Hot Peppers

The Sweet Corn is fine.  There are some tattered leaves but they have been making good use of the rain and growing well.  This crop could use some heat too.

Solstice Sweet Corn

Gotta Have It Sweet Corn

The Pole Beans are fine.  Last year the timing was such that the new plants put out their first leaves right before the June heat wave and got burned to a crisp.  This year's weather is much more gentle on them.

Monte Gusto Yellow Pole Beans

I frequently have a problem with grass hoppers or earwigs or something munching on the green beans as they put out their cotyledons.  I reseeded the row below and covered it.  I was planning to complete the row down the center of the bed with a second seeding next week, but I will probably wait until the end of the month now.

Seychelles Green Pole Beans

The Cucumbers and Cantaloupes will soon be ready to transplant.  The 6 pack that looks empty is one kind of Cantaloupe that is just now cautiously popping through.

Dill and Sunflowers

Perennial Herbs, Sweet Potatoes, Carrots

Potatoes
with Bone Meal on their leaves

The Flea Beetles have awakened.  I seeded some Mustard along the Potatoes that is just now coming up.  That should attract them away and I can sprinkle that with Diatomaceous Earth.

The annuals surrounding the Dahlias are showing color.
You can't see it in the photo but I have corner posts and have constructed a protective room out of netting.  It saves me a lot of spraying.

The other side of the Dahlias

This spring I ordered in a container raspberry plant.  They are supposed to stay compact and bush like.  It has just begin to put on some real growth.  All I want is enough to nibble on.  Something that I can protect from the birds and bear without too much trouble.  They can have all of the blackberries in the briar patch on the other side of the fence.  The Raspberries are mine!

Bushel and Berry Raspberry Shortcake

The strawberries are producing well now but they are not sweet because we have had overcast days.  They only sweeten in clear sunshine which is not a problem if you are making jam, but is a bummer when you are just snacking on them.  I need 4 cups to make a batch of jam.  Even though half of this bed was just planted this spring, I have not given up hope of a batch of freezer jam.