Harvest Season Gets Underway

The other day I went to all the trouble of taking and uploading pictures and then I completely forgot to update my blog with them! It's 35 days after my main planting on July 17th and already I'm harvesting things. Here are some photos from August 19th, showing the progress of the garden and some of the fruits of my labors. These are in no particular order.

The garden, just over one month after planting. The tomatoes are almost as tall as me and I've given up trying to stake them up. So far they have lots of flowers and green fruit.

I planted this cabbage from seed and it might just have a chance of setting fruit before the snow flies. No flowers yet, though.

Scarlet Queen turnips--they are just so beautiful. Their greens also grew a lot taller and straighter than the other turnips, making them even more distinctive.

My first turnip harvest! Definitely the most adorable vegetable, I am looking forward to making them into tasty pickles this weekend as more mature.

I was too exhausted to do anything with the greens so I guiltily composted them.

Here's a closeup of some of the caterpillar damage.

Amazingly, though, the cabbages are starting to head. I may need to sprinkle them with bug killer again once the rain lets up, but they are well on their way to being sauerkraut now.

My first bean blossoms. Come on little guys, you can make beans before winter, I just know it!

And hooray! My first tomato of the season (Rutgers variety). It was tomato-tastic, though one side was home to some kind of naughty bug. I ate the rest though and it was like mainlining summer.

So that's the update as we zoom headlong into fall. Yesterday at the bakery I took an order for a cake for the day after labor day! It's really just around the corner. It's amazing that I was able to pull off this garden and it's been very rewarding, even though harvest is just beginning. It's my first real garden and the results are amazing. After our deluge a week ago we had more dry weather, so I started watering again. Today, though, we had a nice gentle rainfall that will help the plants to fill out.

Carrots are Catching up, General Update

Carrots

My carrots are starting to emerge, so perhaps I didn't doom them to rot in the ground after all. The dill and cilantro seeds I sprinkled around at the last minute are coming up too, so perhaps Apiaceae simply take a little longer to get going.

Other Veggies

On the other hand, many of my collards and beans have not yet emerged, so I may have to re-plant. We're going out of town this weekend, so I'll give them until Monday to hustle up out of the soil.

One of my cabbages died (a Red Acre) out of the 15 or-so others. That's pretty good for a plant that's known to transplant poorly. I still have a few extra seedlings, so I'll put another one in. The red cabbage has looked the most unhappy, so I don't know if it's the variety or how they were treated before I got them. Hopefully the green varieties will keep doing well.

The peppers are back to wilting again, but now they're growing dark green leaves up top. I can only assume that's a good thing, as I have no idea what to think at this point.

Water Management

I think I was over-watering things, so I'm going to pull back a bit. I'll try to keep it more around the recommended 1" per week, with the exception of the seedlings, which I've been watering every 1-2 days to keep the soil moist.

Phenology

The corn in our 'neighborhood' is finally tasseling. It's so tall we can't see the road anymore, which is nice. Hopefully the harvest will be good after such a crazy spring.

Garden Update

So far nothing's germinated yet, but that's not surprising. I think I see some cracking in the soil over the beans, so hopefully they're doing their sprouting thing.

Half of my peppers are quite wilted now. I'm not sure what the problem is, since we got drenched in rain yesterday and it seems unlikely they'd be thirsty. From what I've read and heard, pepper plants often wilt, especially in hot weather. However, today was pleasant and in the low 80s, so I would think they'd be fine. Five out of five look happier than they did before the rain and the other five look wretched. I guess I will have to keep monitoring them. Like I said, they're in prime real estate so I can always replant. What I'm afraid of is phytophthora stem rot due to too MUCH water. Maybe I should back off with the hose.

My cabbages are looking happier now than before the rain, but I've seen some insect holes on the leaves. I was hoping not to have to get floating row cover this late in the game, but it might be necessary if they're going to make it to sauerkraut stage.

Water Management

This year I finally got the galvanized aluminum watering can I've always dreamed of. It's great for small amounts of watering, but time consuming if I want to water an entire mound. Now I have a series of hoses and a nozzle with 7 handy settings. I could try setting up the sprinkler, but I'm not sure that moving it around every hour or so is any less work than just standing out there with the hose for 20-30 minutes.

I shored up the edge of the mound with the peppers so that I wouldn't lose as much water to the walkways, and it seems to have helped quite a bit. The soil here is quite sticky so it maintains its shape well, even when battered by watering and heavy rain. Next year I definitely need to integrate this micro-irrigation technique into my mounds better. It's low tech, but I can already tell that the water stays in the depressions I've made a lot longer.

Next I need to measure all my watering approaches to see how long it takes to yield an inch of water.

Planting the Seedlings: Tomatoes, Peppers, and Cabbages

This weekend I began planting the starts. I planted:

July 11th : tomatoes
July 13th: cabbages and peppers

I also threw the dill plants into the ground because they were looking so wretched. I have little faith that they'll survive, but it's worth a shot. I still have more cole crops to plant, it's just a matter of finding sunny space for them.

Variety-wise, I basically went with what was available at the garden stand. The tomatoes are a random assortment including Better Boy, Brandywine, Rutgers, and some yellow full-size and cherry toms. The cabbages included Savoy, Stonehead, Discover, and Red Acre. The peppers weren't well-labeled, but I think they were all sweet peppers.

For all the seedlings, I tried to mix the varieties around so that I wouldn't have all of one type in a single location, in case that spot's bad for growing.

I also took a few approaches to the planting itself. The tomatoes were really leggy, so I removed their bottom leaves and buried them quite deep. Since they were already so tall, I had to mound soil up around them to keep the stems buried. This might have been a bad approach from a water management perspective. I mulched heavily around the mounds using oat straw. I placed the tomatoes in the second row from the north. They will get excellent sun there, but won't be shaded by taller plants. I may have spaced them a bit close--I used a checkerboard pattern with ~24" between plants, giving 3 offset rows in the mound. If I get a single tomato out of this I will be amazed.

When I watered the tomatoes I noticed that a lot of the water was running into the walkways, so I took a slightly different approach with the peppers. These I placed on the furthest north mound, where they will be next to the green beans, but not in their shadow. Between the peppers and the beans I made a trench, where most of the water flows. I hope this will make a little reservoir of moist soil whenever it rains or I water. I have not mulched these yet and I'm not sure if I will.

For planting the cabbages I got cleverer still. I placed each cabbage plant in a small depression, so that they will be surrounded by moist soil after I water and the water won't run into the walkways. I mulched heavily between the plants to discourage weeds, hold more water, and keep the soil cool. I've heard that cabbage roots are delicate and they often don't survive transplanting. I tried to be gentle with them, but they were terribly root-bound in the pots. I teased the seedlings apart while holding the rootmass in a pail of water--a technique I perfected on swallow-wort, of course. So hopefully these little guys will survive. I would really like to put up a bunch of sauerkraut from my own garden.

Next I need to plant the herbs and I'm trying to monitor the garden to find a sunny spot that's not in high demand from vegetables. I will be receiving my seeds early next week and then I will plant those.