Welcome to the 2016 version of my 20'x40' garden plot! Well, one of them anyway.
Please enjoy the horrible pictures that go along with this post. Hopefully your attention will be diverted away from the bad photography by the scintillating writing.
Actually I'm kind of tuckered out so not on my A game. Maybe just look at the vegetables and squint your eyes a bit and skim over the words.
Other than those few things you're in for a GREAT post!
Weird fact #1 about my garden. Half of it is in shade for most of the day. This creates photos like the one you see above. This is what's known as a bad photo.
But it's all I got.
I waiting and waited for an overcast day to take my photos so the lighting would be even but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen this summer.
All it is is sunshine, heat and humidity. Every. Single. Day.
I don't know how you Californians do it.
The potting bench I made from pallet wood last year is holding up extremely well. By the way when Pinterest tells you to build something from wood pallets please know that THESE PINTEREST PEOPLE HAVE NEVER ATTEMPTED TO TAKE A PART A PALLET IN THEIR LIFE. It's hard. It is really, really hard to take apart a pallet and even harder to take one apart without breaking the wood.
So there. You've been told.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, that's a half decent photo of garlic. But you're wrong. It's a half decent photo of Elephant garlic. Which isn't garlic at all but a member of the leek family. Want proof? My actual garlic was planted in the same bed and all died from some sort of virus in the soil. The elephant garlic however did fine. Why? Because it's not garlic.
The right side of my garden From left to right, carrot bed, beet bed, pepper bed. Beyond the pepper bed, which you can't see are 2 potato beds.
I planted ALL my potatoes in straw this year. No soil. At all. Well, I plunked the potato down on some soil and then covered them with straw. To date I see no evidence of potatoes growing in the straw. It appears as though I've spent a great deal of time and land on growing air.
The left side of the garden has an empty bed because of the whole garden in the shade thing. Nothing will grow there. I had zucchini plants in there (you can see one in the corner) that I planted in May. It has grown approximately 4 inches since May. I took 2 of the sad little zucchini plants out of the shaded bed in June and put them in a sunnier bed and this is how they look.
It's an actual plant. With actual zucchini. So that's proof that most vegetables need sun to grow for those of you still trying to grow your tomatoes in complete shade.
Most years I grow every colour of carrot imaginable because I LOVE colourful carrots on a plate. Purple, white, yellow, red ... I've tried them all. Easily the most delicious is the Lunar White carrot, but you know what? When you make carrot soup out of white carrots, add a dash of this and that and what you end up with isn't a bowl of startling white, beautiful soup, but rather something that looks similar to cream coloured, imitation television barf.
Also when I make stew I want my carrots to be bright orange for colour and so I can distinguish them from the potatoes and parsnips.
So this year I'm growing mainly orange carrots. Scarlet Nantes and Bolero are my carrots of choice this year with a few Purple Suns just to have on hand. Purple Sun is a purple carrot that's deep purple all the way through.
Even though I have a huge bed of Bulls Blood beeds I wanted more. The bulls blood will be mainly for making pickled beets and the Kestrels will be mainly for shoving in my mouth after roasting them and adding a bit of goat's cheese, nuts and a honey balsamic dressing on them. Here's the recipe for my Easy Beet Salad. You can make it without the greens as a hot side dish too.
And yes, you absolutely can plant beets in a pot. I have these big pots from Lee Valley all around my garden with every imaginable thing in them.
This year I've planted pots with:
Tomatoes
Beets
Sweet Potatoes
Potatoes
Ground Cherries
Something else I can't remember, but I'll let you know when I go back up to the garden and check.
See? Potatoes. This is a BIG pot and I planted 1 seed potatoes in it. ONE. Here's a lesson for you newer gardeners.
I know that your instinct is the plant MORE. To shove as much as you can into a certain area. Because ... why wouldn't you?? In terms of size this pot could easily accommodate 6 potato plants. So why just one?
Because vegetables are smarter than you think. Potatoes in particular know, they sense how much space is around them and that dictates how many and how big they'll produce. If a plant is rammed in with 6 other plants it senses that and only produces enough potatoes it thinks it needs to fill out the space around it. Which isn't very much. So it'll put out some small potatoes.
On the other hand, one potato plant in a big pot (O.K. I probably could have planted two but this was an experiment) and the potato senses it has all KINDS of room and puts out BIG potatoes.
Don't believe potatoes or other vegetables can sense things?
Then explain how a seed knows to grow roots downwards and leaves upwards when covered under 2 inches of soil in complete darkness.
Another experiment this year was to cage in my sweet potatoes. It was a HUGE pain but the end game is having a bunch of sweet potatoes that don't have vole bites all over them.
Last year I convinced everyone up at the community garden to grow sweet potatoes and we all had the same problem. VOLES. MICE. TINY LITTLE ANNOYING THINGS that we discovered had eaten half our sweet potato crop when we dug them up.
So this year I volunteered to experiment with my crop using hardware cloth screwed over the plants. The plants grow through the hardware cloth and the voles cannot under any circumstances get through the hardware cloth to the sweet potatoes.
If they figure out they can tunnel underneath the raised beds I'm screwed.
I had GREAT luck with melons this year because it was so hot for SO long. Just hot, hot, hot like I mentioned before. Hot and dry. It's like gardening in Africa.
If you follow me on Instagram you know all about my summer adventure "Karen versus the stupid raccoon" It's a cantaloupe eating competition and as of today the raccoon is in the lead.
But not anymore. I'll be showing you the raccoon proofing of my melon beds in an upcoming post.
I've also harvested the most delicious Honeydew melon in the history of the world. And so did a raccoon.
I'm really bad when it comes to watering. I'm REALLY lucky that our community garden has water, I just don't do it enough. Which is why my onion bed looks like the dead front lawn of a haunted house.
Even my Kelsae onions which are well known to grow the the size of a St. Bernard's head are still small.
So sad. Luckily they haven't stopped growing so I still have a shot at bringing them up to size. You know an onions is done-for in terms of growing when it flops over at the neck. If the greens are still standing straight up you still have a shot at them getting bigger.
So I'm promising myself and my big headed onions that I'll water my garden once or twice a week with about 3" of water. Why 3"? Because the hotter and dryer it is the more water the garden needs. You may think you're watering enough because it's what you've always watered, but if your area is hotter and dryer than normal this year your stuff needs more than normal water amounts.
That's the bucket of rocks I'm growing. They're doing well.
Again, because of the incredibly hot weather all of my peppers are doing GREAT. I've never seen so many peppers on my pepper plants. Red peppers, green peppers, banana peppers, jalapeño peppers. It's a never ending menagerie of peppers.
Once every two weeks or so I make a batch of my 38 calorie Jalapeno poppers and stick them in the freezer to keep me popping all winter long.
The luffah vine.
Yup. That thing you use for scrubbing your back. Nope. Doesn't grow in the sea. It grows on a vine like a cucumber or squash. My season isn't *quite* long enough to ever get me fully developed luffahs but here's hoping because of the weather this is the year.
Since it's August and the vine is just starting to flower I'm a bit concerned.
Redbor kale! The kale that was so in demand I had to ask for it behind the counter at the seed store like I was asking for a big glass of methadone.
It's really pretty but kind of false advertising if you ask me. I was expecting the entire plant and all the leaves to be red, but it's only some read streaking and the top leaves.
Just a few potatoes I dug up from vines that were dying. Those aren't the ones I planted in straw by the way they're ones that volunteered their services this spring after I missed digging them up last fall.
The biggest and best improvement I made to my garden this year was definitely putting in a hand washing station.
I hate dirty hands. They feel gross. Bleh. So I put a splitter on my hose, ran a small length of hose up to the top rail of my fence, attached a bendable spout, threw a bar of soap in an old knee high and laid out a hand towel.
Hand washing station done.
The hoop house is a little bit shorter than the last time you saw it because the week after I built it we had a huge storm and huffed and puffed. Yup. It blew that little hoop house away. Not quite away but it definitely tore the insect barrier to shreds. I shortened the hoops so it isn't as high and I leave one flap of the fabric open so any wind can blow right through it.
It's the happy home to anything cabbage moths like. Kale, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage, and ...
Swiss Chard.
It's a cozy little house. You could probably live in it. In fact if you aren't living in a hoop house, pooping in the soil for compost and chewing your vegetables down to the stalk without any cutlery, you aren't really a homesteader. Are you?
Attention everyone in Zone 6! You still have time to grow things. Just barely, but you do. A week ago I planted peas and beans which will be covering this structure by the end of September hopefully.
I got my romaine lettuce in a week ago too.
Plus some beets.
Along with some radishes, that will be ready once these that I planted on June 25th are done growing. That my little gardeners is succession planting.
And since woman cannot live on vegetables alone ...
Have a great day and thank you for suffering through this, the world's longest, most poorly written, horribly photographed post on this year's community garden.
Lila
You have such a beautiful garden :)
Heather (mtl)
Holy cow I wrote a lot!
Time to make my dodos.
'night y'all.
Heather (mtl)
Boy, do I understand about this heat! It's unrelenting and making lots of things bolt - before they even produce. My red beets are miserable and have been from the start, yet the golden (usually long to germinate for me) and the Choggia are fine, as is the chard. I got one zucchini (so far...) and my peppers (6" long jalapenos?!, cayennes and cubanels {14 on one plants alone}) are doing stupid but I think my toms are wild. I can honestly say they are a prolific success. I received 2 free tomatoe plants from the city (as well as the cubes and holla peppers) and had no idea what kind they were. Turns out one is yellow (yay!) and other beefsteak (yay!). I have fantastics, too.
What is not doing well? Rhubarb! I have 5 plants in total and all are miserable. Too hot for them even though everything is well watered. We need rain and the change in temp it brings.
I noticed you have a colony of cucumber beetles on your plant - ouch! Japenese beetles are chewing on my double peach hollyhock (waaa) as well.
This summer really is a southern summer (serves me right for missing my beloved Austin so much) where so many plants are as exhausted as I am.
Frankly, I'm tired of taking soo many showers and washing so many sweaty clothes!
PS: thanks for sharing the update - your summer has sure been busy!
Ev Wilcox
Your garden is wonderful! Looks like a lot of canning/freezing work ahead for our girl, though!
BTW-eons ago, when I lived in Riverside, Ca (there was no river) the heat was nothing because it was NEVER humid! The heat/humidity in northeast Ohio is kicking me this year though! Love your blog Karen!
Gayle''
I planted potatoes in straw like this several years in a row with success: I let them sprout really well before planting, and used a bulb planter to put them 4 inches deep. Then I arranged a soaker hose in the bed. Placed 6 inches of straw on top. Once the plants were 4-6 inches above the straw I covered them with another 6 inches of straw. I must have had 2 feet of straw on them when I harvested a few fingerling potatoes from the side. I let the tops die back before digging the whole crop. My only "pest " was a momma rabbit who made a nest in the corner. My Lab found it for us.
Melissa Keyser
In defense of us Californians, we don't have humidity. Which is why we can't grow sweet potatoes. Or something. Not quite sure, actually- but seed catalogues won't even ship them to us.
You might want to try growing your greens in the shady beds, not sure how they do there, but we can do lettuce, kale, etc. in the shade here in perpetually sunny California.
Flash
try cutting the pallets apart. Use a sawzall with metal blade and cut through the nails or screws. MUCH easier.
Great garden. where ever do you find the time to do all this and get in any fishing? LOL
Korrine Johnson
You are a badass. May I ask how you reheat your poppers? I need some asap.
Karen
Hi Korrine! I don't reheat them, I cook them. When I prepare them I get them ready and everything is raw then I cook them as described. :) ~ karen!
Shirley
Karen, please post some pictures of the raised planter you did for your mom this year. I planted my new raised planter this spring with cherry tomatoes, peppers and herbs (basil, mint, cilantro). The cherry tomatoes have done amazingly well. With suckers duly pinched, they have grown so tall (6' plants plus 3' high planter) that I need a ladder to reach them all. I'm waiting to see the results of your espaliered tomatoes so that next year I can hopefully train mine to grow horizontally rather than vertically!
Eileen
My veg. garden is depressing this year. It's been too hot for the tomatoes to set fruit, and this morning I discovered 2 of only 3 green zebras have gone AWOL. I guess the bunnies are still around. I thought they'd moved on once I started sprinkling the beds with cayenne pepper (after they ate all the leaves off my green bean and okra seedlings). I guess I haven't been watering enough either, succumbing to heat/humidity inertia and mosquito dread. Although I did get one of those bug shirts, so now I only have to spray my ankles and neck and head. That way they just get behind my glasses and bite my eyelids. There is a head-covering with the bug shirt, but I get a bit claustrophobic in it, and it inhibits vision somewhat too - meaning I might not have enough visual acuity to see when the "authorities" show up to take away the dangerous hooded lunatic.....
Jody
This is my first year with a community garden plot. It is 8x11 ft. Just the right starter size. With the never ending heat and never coming rain, I haven't watered the garden enough. I originally thought my little seedlings needed to tough it out like they were on a huge farm in the middle of a dust bowl. I have relented and am now watering almost daily. Most of the veggies are doing much better now. Swiss chard has been the most prolific. My loofah is still a tiny seedling with 6 leaves--no gourds. It isn't even big enough to scrub a mouse's back.
I'm still enjoying my "farm" and lessons learned for next year
Karen
" It isn’t even big enough to scrub a mouse’s back." Ha! I've found Loofah's to be notoriously delicate when transplanting. Hence, the trying to seed them right in the ground next year. But when they take off, they TAKE OFF. Like insane! ~ karen
Gayle''
I grew loofah maybe 20 years ago and had tremendous success. Got some loofahs the size of my forearm I dried and cut in half. I have been told you can eat the gourds when they are small. They are similar to zucchini inside , so harvest accordingly -- smaller is better for eating, so you might have an edible harvest only thisthis year.
Patty
I made a kitchen island very similar to your potting bench this past winter. The key to getting those pallets apart... a sawzall (reciprocating saw) with a good blade. You can zip right through the nails and no broken boards.
Jennie Lee
Karen, knowing you, you probably know all about this already, but if you think you'll ever take pallets apart again, search on Pinterest under "pallet breaker". They have a lot of posts on gizmos that they claim will enable you to take one apart "in minutes". What's better, (this is where I think you'll be interested) they show how to make the gizmo YOURSELF. I make no claim to any personal experience, but I thought you'd be interested, IF you didn't know this already. :)
Karen
Nope. Didn't know. :) ~ karen!
Pam
I am so happy to see your garden, since you are in the same zone as me. I tried your idea of straw over the potatoes and mine is doing great. I put my sprouted seed potatoes just under a little soil and covered them with straw. No other maintenence except watering. I picked some out yesterday. Next year I am going to cover the brassicas too. I have been swatting the cabbage worm moths with a tennis racket but I can't keep up.
Karen
I have all kinds of leaf growth on the potatoes Pam, it's just that the potatoes aren't growing up the stems. They're there, they're just in the 2 inches of soil I planted the seed potatoes in. They want NOTHING to do with anything above the soil line, lol. ~ karen!
nanabobana
I posted above that the same thing happened to us. I think that stacking idea is a bunch of loofah! :)
Linda in Illinois
I absolutely love your garden.! I have the 4 x 4 raised beds I made for this year and in one I have a watermelon plant that was doing great, produced 6 melons, the biggest about the size of a quarter when I weeded it, then the vine died, completely died, one of the melons had a bite out of it so I wonder, was it a mole that killed it. ?? I didn't even think about that until you mentioned it and my cat brought me one for a gift.. anyway, I always enjoy your stories, love the photos, can't wait for more..
Darla
Your garden looks great!!
Envious of your beans. All mine burned to a crisp. Even with automatic watering.
This was our first year to plant potatoes. The ones that had the best "eyes" on them did great, but the ones that had tiny eyes didn't do so well. It was a waste of a row in the garden. Oh well, it is all an experiment at this point.
UrbanFarmKid Marti
What the heck do you need with onions the size of a St. Bernard's head?
Thank you for saying a virus got in your ground.
I had a little chat with my tomatoes last night. Septoria is apparently not an empty threat in my area.
Tanya
I may be growing air instead of potatoes, too, as I'm attempting them in a rain barrel this year. We'll see how that works out. Ground cherries and pumpkin are growing like gangbusters in the shade, and I'll be moving my lettuce to the shade next spring. Tomatoes -- I meant to prune and kept putting it off. Now there's a tomato jungle. My zucchini leaves are monsters, which had me worried for a while, but the plants are producing well now. All my beans are trying to climb this year. Never had that happen with bush beans before. Peppers are not producing well, but peas and herbs are.
Do you know what makes those tiny holes in the radish leaves? Mine are holey, too, which is a shame because radish leaves are yummy.
Karen
Those are flea beetles Tanya. There really isn't anything you can do about them other than putting the radishes under some sort of row cover. You'll still get the holes, just not as many. ~ karen!
Donna
Karen! Get up before dawn and shoot at first light. You have about an hour of beautiful light at .. let's see.. 6:16 am. Tripod...bring your tripod.. and get a scrim for close ups once the sun is too high.
Karen
LOL. Yes, I remember you and that whole, let's shoot the garden at dawn business. Uch. :) ~ karen!
Jen Topp
Thanks, Karen, you have completely depressed me. My garden looks awful this year and it's my own damn fault because it's too f$%@ing hot to go out there much. Getting that fall garden planted for when it's civilized!!