A Video Tour of the Food Garden as of Today

This morning I watered everything that needed it and planted some more seeds as companions for the vegetables. These included some nasturtiums, dill, basil, and Pastel Carpet Alyssum.  These are not only supposed to help the vegetables by attracting beneficial insects and repelling  or attracting the pests away, but they also make the garden look beautiful. The dill seed is eight years old, so we'll just have to see what happens. 


I suppose gardeners are always seeing in their mind's eye how the garden will look, not just how it looks at the moment. That vision of tomato vines loaded with plump red and orange tomatoes,  squash and cucumbers and sweet peppers growing large enough to eat, all surrounded by colorful flowers -- that what keeps us watering, weeding, and and hovering over our gardens as often as possible. 


This afternoon I took a tour of my vegetable garden, as well as the orchard and the flower and herb gardens, video camera in hand. Over the next few days I'll be sharing some of the videos with you. Today we will look at the raised beds and the container gardens, with special attention to new growth. Let's start with the container garden and the vines. I would like to correct one error in the video. I accidentally called a coreopsis flower a calendula in that first group of three container herbs.




The raised bed tour is much shorter, since there are only three of them and you've already seen them in still pictures earlier.



Hope you've enjoyed my tour for today. 

Experiments and Outwitting the Jays and Gophers

When all other things are equal, I try to plant by the moon. My husband is razzing me about this. He's a scientist and thinks it's all based on superstition. Because the people I talk to in nurseries and at farmers market are divided on the issue, I have tried to stay on the safe side. If there's nothing to it, I haven't lost anything. But to humor my husband without risking too much, I decided to plant the remaining three lemon cucumbers in a six-pack tonight (Actually May 22, since I'm writing this after midnight), not a great day for moon planting. These three plants were in dire need of planting, and were already beginning to yellow, so I felt they would gain more by being set into more nutritious soil than they would lose by being planted on the wrong day. Time will tell. 

When I was at Farmers market this morning, one of my favorite vendors who supplies many of my tomato and pepper seedlings, Ralph Johnson, confirmed something I'd read about getting rid of gophers. He says he killed eight large ones by putting bubble gum down the gopher holes. I immediately went out to buy some, and put it in a lot of holes this evening. Time will tell whether this experiment will work. 

Today my first borage seeds have sprouted and so did a couple of radish seeds. I knew if they are to remain, I would have to protect them from the hungry blue jay (See picture)who has been supervising my planting from the top of the fence. I contrived a way to prop an old screen door over the largest seed bed, and I propped a couple of flat gopher cages over the radishes about to sprout in the raised beds. I'm hoping these measures will insure that we will actually get some radishes this year. 

Big Mulching Job Today.

I acquired about 17 bags of mostly dead grass from dethatching a lawn at our other house this week, and I finally had a chance to spread it today. It hasn't been a great year for gardening this year because of our wacky weather. I have written about my poor frostbitten tomatoes and their slow recovery here. They only really began to get as green as they should be after I used some organic tomato food, watered well, and added some mulch. But I didn't have enough good mulching material because there haven't been any grass cuttings to speak of. That's why we had to get rid of the thatch.

As soon as we brought the first batch of about ten bags home, I applied mulch immediately (after a good watering) to the raised beds on Thursday. Today was overcast, so I watered well again and added more mulch to the container plants, which hardly had any.

I just reread my blog from July of last year, and it's interesting to compare. Almost all my tomatoes have blossoms, but only two that had been set back by the frost have produced ripe fruit so far. We do have lots of peppers about the size of ping pong balls and smaller, and lots of blossoms but few fruits yet on the cucumbers. I'm hoping the lemon cukes will start bearing fruit soon. We had two very small cukes which resemble picking cucumbers, one of which was bitter. I can't remember what variety they are, but I think they were supposed to be bigger. The leaves have never looked healthy, and I don't expect I will get much from it. We have a large variety growing in one of the raised beds, but it isn't producing yet, either.

I have had to slip parts of old pantyhose over my green tomatoes because something -- probably a bird -- is eating them from the top before they start changing color. I'm hoping this will protect them somewhat so they can ripen. I'm not trying to grow anything else but the tomatoes, cucumbers and sweet bell peppers at the moment. The lettuce and radishes I planted in the spring never sprouted. When I bought some lettuce seedlings, we had a heat wave almost as soon as they were in the ground and they bolted. I did harvest some garlic that I planted last fall, and it is very good. As usual, the zucchini is only pretending to grow, so I'm not even counting it as a crop this year. Maybe someday I will learn to grow summer squash here, but not yet. The picture at top shows the attempt to grow summer squash (left pot) and the lemon cucumber as of last week (August 15). The lemon cucumber is about twice as big this week and full of blossoms. The summer squash is still sick, but it is a bit bigger than when this picture was taken. I'll be taking more pictures with the added mulch soon.