January 6, 2009

Well, I've been holding out on you since the weekend when I took these pictures, but EG convinced me not to pain you with one loooong post and then nothing for the rest of the week.  So, today is the day for my garden tour.

But before I do that, a reader suggested rather than starting my seeds under a light system, that I try out wintersown.org and winter sow instead.  I actually fully intend on winter sowing this year.  I love Trudi's site and am a big fan of Verna over in Eastern Washington who is one of Trudi's chosen few, if any such exist.  But for some things I want to give them a head start before Mother Nature would.  Tomatoes are one of them.  If I waited until they sprouted on their own, I would miss out on a month or two of prime growing for my plants.  So I'm going to do both methods, along with direct sowing.  They all have their benefits and I want to experiment with everything I can.

Now for the garden tour, but don't jump to the end for the secret I've been teasing you with for days.

Starting with my tiny bed, here are what's left of my cauliflower plants.



Not looking good are they?  If I needed the space to plant, I'd rip them out, but I think I'll just plant some more someplace else.  Why not, seed's cheap.

Of course, the freezing temps killed my cole crop, but my green onions?



Still looking pretty good.  They'll come out when I have new onions to take their place, which should be early spring.  Until then, we'll keep grazing.  And next year, less onions. hehe

Next is my spinach bed. 



I know it looks bad, but there may very well be something salvagable out of there.  We shall see. 

And behind the spinach, my peas...



Not much hope for those guys huh?  Well, I think beans are going there next year so I've got time to see what happens, though I'd be shocked if these came back.

Now to my bed #1.  My son loves carrots, so I was hopeful.



Ewww... yuck.  Drat.  Ok, how about my lettuce?



Again, like the spinach, I may very well be able to salvage something from that, and I could be wrong, but is that new growth coming out of some of them?  Maybe.  Again, no reason to rip them out yet.

And the best plants that survived fairly unscathed through that mess?  Yep, my succession lettuce.



So, the moral to this story is to harvest sooner, more often, and completly if ever we get long-term freezing temps again.  But wait, let's go back to the carrots for a second.  Scroll up and try to spot any of the candy-sweet carrots that I was soooo hoping to share with my eldest.  You know, let him truly realize just how important it is to grow your own food.  Scroll up, I'll wait...

Couldn't find them?  Well neither could I.  What's more, when I opened up the back of bed #1 to pull from my original patch, this is what I found...



And this...



Those, my friends, are clearly paw prints from the masked bandits of fresh produce everywhere.  My winter garden was raided by raccoons.  Silly me, I stopped putting down Shake Away in the fall thinking they wouldn't bother my garden in the winter.  Oh, how wrong I was.  Double drat!  I was so looking forward to sharing my root crops with my family.  And to add insult to injury, look what I found in my radish patch.



Guess they didn't like the spicy raddish.  Grrrr.  Thankfully my son was fine with not having any more carrots.  Though he did say we should feed the raccoons something sweeter than his carrots so they wouldn't want his carrots.  Ah, the mind of a child, how cute!

So, the moral to the story, in additon to harvesting better, is to continue to use my means to deter the coons year round. /sigh

Well, if I can ever find time to get home at a decent hour I plan on heading out to check on pricing out the pieces for my light system.

Enjoy your garden!

September 30, 2008

Well, I got out in the garden after work again. In fact, the kids were outside when I got home.  I must say I didn't do a whole lot, mostly puttered.  Theraputic. 

Only two of the last batch of peas sprouted so I took a cue from Rebekah and soaked some more peas.  After an hour I just planted them haphazardly in the in the squares that I had one or two seedlings in the hopes that something grows.  It's reminding me of the bush bean incident all over again. You'd think that area of my garden is dead or something, but once they get going they grow fine. 

The reason I'm so adamant about these squares is that they're in the middle of the bed.  The planned trellis configuration will focus all the growth to the middle so it fits under the hoop cover.  At least that's the plan, if I can get these seeds to grow.

After planting I sprinkled some of my doctored 5-10-10 veggie fertilizer with bloodmeal over it and watered it in.  Maybe it's just me but I think the lettuce I fertilized yesterday looks perkier, and so does the cantaloupe!  It's probably just wishful thinking. 

Finally I watered and checked on my next harvest.  My cukes are going gangbusters. I swear I've got 2 more jumbo slicers and a half dozen pickling cucumbers that are either ready now or will be ready this weekend. That and I counted a handful more just starting out. I even hand pollinated one that looked like it needed it.  Insane!

Oh yeah, I found reference to a cool idea for deterring raccoons (and other nocturnal pests).  It's a solar powered red light that blinks like an eye.  Apparently nocturnal animals fear being watched, so they stay away from this.  Not sure how many I'd need but at only $30 a piece, it would be a reasonable investment if the number was small enough.  Interesting.

Well, I'm going to hit the sack early tonight. I stayed up way too late last night getting re-acquainted with GardenGirl's forum.  Whew, I'm on a ton of forums.  They're all great.  Each has their own special people who are equally passionate and knowledgable about gardening etc. But what's a guy to do?  Is it too much to ask for a universal forum and community site.  I must say even in beta mode Freedomgardens.org is the best design, and with over 1,000 members it's always hoppin', but GardenGirl has some high powered contributors and she's very very active on the boards herself.  Then there's Gardenweb and Ft2Garden.com.  Both have dear friends but at least GW it's mostly a few of us helping out others.  Don't get me wrong, it's fun and I love helping others, but I hate it when someone asks a question of me and it takes me a week or more to get back to that thread and see it.  Whew.  I've been thinking that for quite a while now and it's good to get it out.  I'll still be active on all my favorite sites, just maybe not as timely.  And of course all my garden buddies are near and dear to my garden!  And look at the bright side, I've learned a TON this year.  I've got a ton more to learn and experience, but it does me proud when experienced gardeners compliment me on my knowledge and are surprised to find I don't have a full season under my belt, hehe.

Lastly, it's all about the gardens!  Enjoy!

September 7, 2008

Not really sure why I broke up these two posts, but there's just a lot going on, so make sure you check out yesterday since I just posted it, hehe.

This post will be about my garden and bread.  I'll start with the bread to make sure the gardeners actually read it.

I'm not sure what happened with the bread this time.  The dough did rise high up the sides of that Tupperware bowl.  However, when I turned it out on the well flowered board, it stuck firm and was messy.  As a result, the dough didn't fold as much as it was molded and squished into a square.  Even the dough blade got coated and sticky.  Grrr. 

I had hoped to try DoubleD's method (I've been messaging her countless times over the last two days, THANK YOU!).  She uses a clay baker, but upside down.  Her bell pot is down with the flat bottom as a lid.  I figured that's how she gets her bread so tall.  I've since figured that I was mistaken, it doesn't help much. It's just her vast experience.  I had planned on using a pyrex bowl, covered with my pizza stone, to recreate it.  Unfortunately I only have one bowl of that size, so I couldn't bake with it since I used it for the final proof.  The problem is that I couldn't preheat the dish and use it for the final proof.  Silly me.  So I went back to the old standby. 

And yet again, the bread stuck to the pizza stone.  I wonder if folks oil it or not.  Not sure.  It's just really annoying to have to scrape it off.  I did salvage the bottom crust this time though.  Unfortunately, it was think and a bit over browned. Again, not sure why.  Not particularly logical, but whatever.  It still tastes great!



It's also a bit hollow inside.  More experimentation is in order, and maybe some emails to Eric at Breadtopia.  And what the heck, it's only a little flour, natural gas and time.

So, now on to my garden.  I'll finish up this post with a garden tour.



I'm getting more and more tomatoes ripening, this nice weather really is doing the trick!



And see all the new green bean production!  I just harvested last week or so!



The cukes keep plugging away.  I even saw a ton of new females starting to form.  Soon I'll be able to play matchmaker again.

And for the grand finale, I was almost done with my broccoli that I'd harvested, you know, the one EG was drooling over.  Well, I think he flew over here and harvested it.  And didn't do a good job of doing so.  Look at it!



Sure enough, some coon got past my ancient Shake Away application and found the broccoli too tasty to pass up.  Grrr.  I was looking forward to it.  So I put down another layer of Shake Away.  If I can track back to the last time I put it down, I'll know about how long it lasts.

Enjoy your garden!

August 7, 2008

Well, I know it's not the weekend, but the weather was so nice that I wanted to get out.  Besides, my kids wanted to go outside and play and my wife was complaining about all the bugs in the kitchen compost.  So I went out to fluff a pile and rebuild a compost bin.  And since everyone likes pictures, I took tons.  So bear with me.



Here is the crater I made and the kitchen compost bucket along with one of the 5 Starbuck's ground bags I used.  I've still got more in the garage.  Nobody wants them now a days.  They love putting as many together for you as you want.  The only question I've ever been asked is, oh, what are you going to use them for... I love to answer that.  What other free material is an inch away from being fertilizer?  Nothing.



Here is a close-up of some fo the kitchen waste mixed into the coffee grounds (watering each layer to keep it moist in this summer heat).  Notice I've got egg shells for calcium, and tons of garden veggie scraps!  Even a sucker or two from my pear tree.  Whatever works.



Here is a good angle of how I fill the middle from the outside in.  I had already fluffed the pile to the outer walls.  I've got it down pretty good now. 



The whole process only took about a half hour or less, including stopping to swing my youngest for ten minutes. I got more tired doing that than my composting.



Then I ripped out the bolted lettuce plants that had been flattened by coons.  You see I found they were covering my carrot sprouts.  Not good.  Anyway, I ran out of brown material and the pile was getting too big as it was, so these will need to be chopped up or smashed and composted this weekend.  Maybe I'll use some of the remnants of my first bin with all the sawdust in it as my brown.  Who knows.  Maybe I'll shred some of my wife's news papers.



Here is the bare bed #1 where I removed all the bolted lettuce.  I've found my lettuce square has sprouted, as with my carrots, radishes and cauliflower.  Not bad!  Only one cauliflower failed to germinate. I replanted that square tonight. Oh, and that green stuff at the top of the picture above are my funky leggy broccoli that were trying to grow over my mature cauliflower.  Then after I harvested the cauliflower they grew into an S and reached toward the light.  Now they're taking up two squares, so I moved them such that one is growing out over the path and the other is growing over the trunk of the first.  I kept thinking I would pull them since they couldn't support a head and weren't trying to grow one, but lookie what I found today!



And here is some of my carrot crop.  My son over picked the bed because he "likes carrots" despite my wife telling him we only harvest what we're going to eat.  So we had raw carrots with dinner tonight (I can't bring myself to cook them they're so good raw). 



Finally, I wish someone out there knew when to harvest my cukes,  I have no clue and don't want to get it wrong.  Maybe the big flat one will get harvested this weekend to test.  I also hope they keep because I have a good amount growing but I won't have enough to pickle at any one time. /shrug

Enjoy your garden!  I can't wait for the weekend to play in mine some more!

August 4, 2008

Man something is going sssslllloooooowwww tonight.  Thankfully my posts autosave every twenty seconds so I won't lose much.  And tonight is pic heavy.  Let's see how this goes.

Today was one of the best weather days of the year, so we decided to go for a walk after work.  I finally snapped a pic of the neighbor's garden.  I was really excited when they started building the raised beds against their neighbor's fence.  You see, their front yard is immaculate!  It's very bonzai with beauty bark all around and little islands of beautiful flowers.  They did that first.  It's a nice retired couple and they spent a ton of time in their front yard.  So I was excited to see what they'd do with the raised beds.  I figured good idea, they were going to grow some veggies.  But everytime I pass by, it looks like they're growing flowers and bushes.  Odd, but to each their own.  Guess I don't have a local gardening buddy.



I wanted to thank Angie for the wonderful comments.  Trust me, I really am just learning.  If you read the comments, I mentioned that I'm flying by the seat of my pants, especially with my corn.  Right now I'm waiting for the 10-12 day period when the silks will produce pollen and I can snip an end off and hand pollinate.  Every night I flick the silks to see if I can see pollen floating in the air around it.  Still nada. But tonight I found some are starting to get hard and shrivelly.  I sure hope I didn't miss the opportunity to pollinate and get nada for corn kernals.



And the tassels are spreading out and getting seed-like things that are flapping in the wind.  If I didn't know better I'd say they were corn seeds, but as I planted the kernals I wonder what these do?



And speaking of dilemmas, my potatoes are confusing me.  As you know I've been complaining about my russets flowering for months and my yukon golds haven't so much as thought of flowers.  Then I find out that potatoes don't start growing until the flowers die.  So what do I see today... new buds on the russet.  Grrrr, can you use Round Up to help it along? hehe. Don't worry, I don't support Monsanto and it's quest to rule the world through it's food. 



I've been told we here in the PNW have the perfect weather for growing poatoes, and that Washington is the second largest producer of potatoes in the U.S. (behind Idaho).  But does it have to take this long?  I'm so tempted to unscrew a board to see what's going on, but I decided early on that I wouldn't do that this year, just let them run their course.  Now I'm changing my mind, hehe.

And stretching for segways, speaking of blooms, here is a pick of Judy's marigolds. Thanks again Judy, hope you're garden is doing well!



I really think they're doing their job, because I had not hand-pollinated the cukes behind the marigolds (because I couldn't see them under all the tomato and bean foliage), but when I digged around under there tonight, I found cukes growing.  As for the cukes, they're great, but I sure hope the prickleys go away before I pick them.  I'm guessing it's a defense mechanism to ward off raccoons (good idea), but I would hate to make pickles out of them and then cut our tongues. hehe.

And here is a pic of my cuke bed.  I still have to find homes for all those green onions. I like them but don't cook with onions much.  But you can see behind the fence of onions that the cukes have taken well to being trellised but to-date are still growing all the fruit along the ground under the leaves.  I've got flowers out on the trellis so I'm hopeful that I'll get cukes there too.  Oh yeah, and I've got cauliflower sprouts in front of the onions.  I want to get the onions out of there to start more cauliflower soon so they don't get shaded from the ones to the south of it.  Anyone need onions?



And lastly, since Angie talked about how wonderful my garden looked (btw, she hasn't seen the bad parts, which I conveniently don't capture on film), but take a look at how well my lettuce is growing in the heat of the Seattle summer.  Remember that this is 8 Salad Bowl plants... Insane!



Thankfully the Salad Bowl is not showing any signs of bolting here (not so in Bed #1 where I have yet to remove the bolting lettuce), but the Italiensheir may be and the Red Sails definitely is starting.  I hope it all holds out for the company picnic.  Every time I bring a caesar salad so I will eat the salad, but this time I'd hoped to share my garden with the office again.  Not so much if it's all bolted.  And so far no signs of sprouts from the first fall lettuce square and for some reason the tons of fall spinach I planted (early per Territorials chart, but I planted it before I saw the chart) is doing nothing.  Odd.  I even planted them in never-been-planted squares.  Ah well, wait and see.

As for research, I've been looking at GW and EngineerGardener's fencing solution to help with the raccoon problem I have.  He confirmed what the materials were for me (Thanks Jeff!), but he said that he grinded the bottom plate off the fence posts. Not sure I can accomplish that easily.  Grrr. Do I do a ton of work to protect my corn for a month or two or hope my predator urine holds up for another month or two.  Decisions decisions...  Ah well, it's midnight and I've got work in the morning. I'm not as young as I use to be.

Enjoy your garden!

August 2, 2008

Not much gardening happened today.  I helped my wife get the word out about our preschool by watching the kids at a "kids festival" in nearby Bothell.  The cool part was that my kids loved the ducks.





And aren't these cute...



There were also "wild" chickens and roosters there, just running around the pathways between the country village shops.  I heard from a shop owner that a mother hen and baby were newly arrived the other week.  Somebody had them and discarded them there as unwanted.  She was worried since they were pets, not wild chickens that could survive in the open like that.  It makes me wonder if someone like myself saw the many videos online for chicken tractors and urban homesteads and got themselves a chicken and rooster, only to find that they are hard work and maybe loud etc.  So they just dropped them off on the side of the road to be done with them.  Sad sad sad. 

Anyway, while I was walking the village looking for activities to for the kids, I couldn't help but notice something.  Hehe I see raised beds everywhere I look now that I garden.  And all I could think of was boy those are cool, permanent and need veggies growing in them.  Of course it would have been out of place there, but I admired the craftsmanship.



I figure it's a 2x10 bed, and there were two of them.  Hehe, I'm twisted, I know.

Tomorrow I've got the boys to myself again. I'll let them play in the yard while I get some work done.  In fact, I didn't even make it out to the garden tonight we were out so late. I hope the coons left my garden alone. I used enough of the stuff to choke a horse...

Enjoy your garden!

August 1, 2008

Well it's Friday, and the day couldn't have been more perfect for a garden. Rain in the morning and sun all afternoon.  Well it SHOULD have been a perfect garden day.

Unfortunately, I came home and saw this...



That's right, coons are back.  And only a few weeks after I sprinkled Stay Away brand predator urine for dear and raccoons.  Grrrr. At least a dozen stalks were flattened.  I tried to use 8 inch wood stakes to brace the stalks, but I doubt they'll hold.  I am so mad I could scream.  About the only good thing is that they only plowed down the Precocious corn that isn't doing as well.  Small favors.

Speaking of corn, look at this tassel.  I did what Judy suggested and flick the silk to see if any polin flew off, and nothing.  I sure hope I didn't miss the window of opportunity.

They also trampled my bolting lettuce plants. Which isn't such a bad thing since I was going to pull them and compost them anyway.  I've got plenty of seed left so I don't need to save any this year. Besides I'm chicken to try.  One leap at a time...



 And lastly, the coons visited my yukon gold potato bins again.  I can't tell if they're digging. I don't think they are. But this time I'm not going to try to fix it. They seem to be surviving so I'll leave them flat.



I can't believe that Judy said that I have to wait until the flowers DIE to START growing potatoes.  First off, the Yukon's have never flowered (unless like Tim said, I may have missed them).  But the Russets have been flowering forever.  At least 3 months.  And now I'm told they have to die before potatoes start to grow?  What the heck have they been doing all this time in there?  There have got to be potatoes growing inside these bins.  I sure hope I don't have to wait forever.  I'm not sure how much longer I can keep the coons off them.

Well that's all the coon damage today.  I reapplied more than half the canister of Shake Away.  Let's hope it works this time. I don't know if my plants can handle it... especially these babies...



Funny how they all ripen at different rates.  We've already eaten one each.  They were bitter.  I hope they get sweeter as they ripen more.  They should fall off in your hand and the ones we ate didn't.  I sure hope I can keep the birds and coons from these. They're all I saved and didn't pick off to allow for root and cane growth.

Another cool thing to bring me out of my coon doldrums. In less than a week of crappy weather I went from one true leaf on my cantaloupe plants to two.  Funny thing is that the first leaf didn't get bigger, but a new leaf grew huge!



And it seems that my pole beans have heard my complaining about how slow they are to produce. Here is what looks a ton like the spot where beans will grow.



And finally, and I say finally because it was the last thing I saw before I headed in to go on a walk in the nice weather.  It appears that my playing match maker with the cucumber plants.  Lookie lookie!



But now I find other flowers that haven't done anything. I don't know if I should try again, but I am not even sure if I can find another male flower to propagate more cucumbers.  All I could find last time were females.  Glad to see it because that means more cukes!  And if Toasty told me this I've forgotten again, but when I showed them off to my wife and kids, I found out the cukes are prickley. Ow!  Hope it keeps the coons off of them. 

Anyway, I didn't go back out after the walk.  Tomorrow I'll get more done.

Lastly, if you've come over from Judy's blog, she's my mentor and the one that convinced me to start this adventure.  I hope you like what you see and keep coming back. The more people who care to read about my experiences keep me writing about them.  And I need to write about them since I'm terrible about taking notes, so next year I'll be re-reading to see what to do when, hehe.

Enjoy your garden!

July 29, 2008

OMG I'm tired. Let's get through this post fast and furious... I woke up at 4:30 and rushed to work. I missed the first bus and got to work at 5:30.  I didn't leave until 5:15.  Not quite 12 hours.  My eyelids are tingling, hehe.

Let me start by saying I love the comments. I proves people are actually reading what I babble about.  Sure the stats tell me I get around 200 hits a day, but how "real" is that? 

After work I went for a much needed hair cut and then out to dinner with the family.  When I got home I put the kids down and went out to the garden.  I hadn't been out there in two days so sure enough the tomatoes were not quite bone dry, but not full like I like it.  Give those babies as much water as they want!  I ended up watering just about everything a bit, and then it started to rain so I let nature take over.   Mostly I wanted to get the SWCs watered because one of the two at least is a closed system so rain doesn't help.

Speaking of my SWCs, I was surprised to find all three of my cantaloupe plants have gotten their first true leaf.  Not bad considering it's been cloudy and in the mid 60s for a few days.



While I was out there I decided to try to help along the cucumber growth by hand polinating.  I was speaking at work today to one of my garden buddies and she mentioned that she hand polinates her zuchinis so I decided it couldn't hurt with cukes.  So I searched and searched and found one male flower in all 6 of my plants in bed #3 and tickled the female flowers with it.  Not sure if I did it right. Only time will tell.



While I was snapping the pictures of my cantaloupe, I watered the potato bins and my apple tree.  Here are some dark shots of my two potato bins. Both have bounced back decently from the attack of the raccoons.



And



Boy I wish they'd hurry up and die already, hehe.

I'll end with a question... How can you tell if a bush bean is ready to harvest?  Here is one of the bigger ones. It's still pencil thickness but it's long.  Here's a good shot of it.



Night! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

July 27, 2008

Man, I felt lethargic today.  The weather's been humid and cloudy.  Ugly weather when it's showering all day long and the kids just want to stay in side and play.  I did take a moment to go out and let the kids play so I could get some stuff done in the garden.  I planted two squares of carrots in the front of bed #1.  I ripped out the dead basil and planted a fourth square of spinach, plus replanting the blank spots in bed #2. 



I planted three squares of cauliflower in bed #3.  In each case I threw a few handfulls of my first compost and mixed it into the top few inches as Mel suggests.  It's not the best compost but it should do fine considering my Mel's mix is only a year old.

The problem I'm having with the whole spacing and shading part of my fall/winter planting plan is that my existing summer crops are interferring with my plantings.  By the time my beans and cucumbers are done and ready to pull out, I expect my cauliflower to be too tall to effectively plant anything north of it.  Not sure what I'll do but I guess worse case scenario is that I let those squares go fallow for a "season". 

I also found what looks to be evidence of raccoons sitting in my yukon bin this time.  Grrr. I put down a bunch of deterrent, especially around my bins.  This time however, it looks like the stems are resilient enough to bounce back without tying up.  We'll see.  Hopefully the potatoes are almost full grown.  I swear I never saw any flowers from the Yukon Golds, but I guess what Tim says is possible, that I missed the flowering.  I'm assuming that potatos are growing fine in there.

I didn't get around to yanking out the three foot tall lettuce because I'd like to compost it but didn't feel like setting up the chipper to cut up the big stalks.  Look how tall they've grown!



I still think the lower leaves are edible. I didn't try any yet but I won't eat them if they're "woody" like I've heard they can get.  In contrast, here is the new monster patch of lettuce.



I'm not sure this patch will tide me over until December when my September planting should be ready. I may want to plant one square of lettuce mix (two salad blowls, an Italiansheir and a Red Sails) to tide me over until then.  Maybe tomorrow after work I'll plant it where my cauliflower was.

We've been wittling away at our carrot stock, which is part of the reason I planted so many. They taste so good and the kids love them as much as we do, so these mokums are a hit in my family.  Not huge but a good six inches long.  I'm sure the spacing has something to do with the size, and maybe the lack of light. Here's what the current stock looks like.  The bare spots you see are some of the succession plantings for fall and winter that I already did last month.



You can also see in the lower right corner the marigold square starting to blossom.  Thanks Judy!  As you can see we've got quite a few carrots left, but we only eat them for a treat right now.  I'm sure we could go through an entire bed of carrots if we had the space.  Maybe if I don't do corn next year I'll devote much more to them.

The tomatoes are doing quite well. The Early Girls are fattening up quite a bit (no pun intended), in fact I bet some are just about full sized if the smallish size I expect is what will be the end result. That and I found another set of three Momomato's growing farther up the plant.  I keep shaking the cages to hopefully polinate the flowers. I've got a ton of them.  Would be great if I had tomatoes for every flower!  I'd be able to make sauce or even freeze some.



Lost in all those beans and tomatoes are a few cucumber leaves right above the marigolds.  I hope they don't get smothered out because they'e got nice flowers under all that mess.  Who knows.  They're a random pickling variety is all I know about them. Oh, and as you can see, I still haven't removed the peas, mostly because there are still two stalks producing late and boy was the one I had sweet.  Also, as I commented below, I'm not certain I'll save the peas this year. I've got tons still in the package and I'm not sure if I'd be saving snap, snow or shelling peas. I don't necessarily want to save anything but snap.  They were our favorite so that's all I'll grow from now on (starting in a September).

And so far my bush beans are kicking my pole beans tail.  Who'd have thunk it.  Those little tiny things at the base of the tomato plant on the right are my bush beans. They're not even a foot tall and producing beans left and right.  My pole beans on the other hand...



Are all leaf and no bean.  I don't know what's worse. Pole beans that won't produce or bush beans that won't sprout but will produce like crazy if they do sprout.  Here's to hoping the pole beans start producing.  Either way, I think when I pull them I'll throw them directly into the corn bed to "fix" the nitrogen as they decompose in anticipation for that bed becoming my primary bed next spring.

Speaking of the corn bed (gotta love segways, hehe)...



It's nearly as high as an elephant's eye sometime in July, if not by the 4th...  Look how it's almost to the top of the window now!  Here's another angle.

As you can see the last succession planting is really benefiting from the fertilizing I did a week ago.  Unfortunately they're still leaning out over the gravel...



Sorry about the tire. I have no idea where it came from. Likely my father-in-law came by to "store" more crap.  I sure wish they could build a garage for him to put all his stuff.  Not that my garden is particularly beautiful, but I'd prefer only my junk in it, hehe.

Now for some close-ups of my corn.  As you can tell I'm pretty proud of it.  Is it just my imagination, or is there a cob forming in this picture?



And here is my first clear 2-cob stalk.  It's more towards the interior, which is a good sign as I have been warned that this intensive gardening method will only form cobs on the very outer edges. 



Oh, and Judy, if you read this, be forewarned that I'll likely need to call you again to discuss what to do from here on out with the corn, and more importantly, when to do what... Don't worry, it won't be as long a call as we had convincing me to go the SWC route.  hehe.

Finally, as the sun was going down, I went out in the front yard after dinner and weeded a bit.  It has been sad to drive by and see brown grass and weeds that my neighbors have long since removed from the new parking strips and that's the only green in the area for me.  Odd that the native grass in my yard is still green, but the newly seeded grass from the sidewalk project is brown for everyone.  Nobody's watered since we're all so used to not having to with our high water table.  /sigh.  So I got a full 5-gallon bucket of weeds. They came up fairly easily as it rained a bit over the last two days, but I almost never got the entire root, so I'll see them again.  Again /sigh.  But I feel better and i won't see weeds sticking up as I drive by and nobody else will either.  I've still got tons of weeding to do, but I hit the high points.  No more weed and feed for me as I'm composting.  Apparently it's bad.  I'm sure I can get rid of the bag I've got in the garage. My neighbor does it three times a year.

So this was a slightly relaxing weekend. I took naps both days and didn't get out much but I got some stuff done and we got some much needed rain.  Enjoy your garden!