Re-seeding and General Update

First true leaves on my daikon seedlings.

A happy garden hastily photographed due to mosquito attack.

My garden is coming along nicely, and the tomatoes and herbs especially seem to be thriving. Some seeds didn't do so well and I got low germination, so yesterday I re-seeded. The problem was worst among my green beans, where I got less than 50% germination and zero germination of the Carson Yellow Wax variety. I suspect that the seeds were predated in whole or in part and then rotted beneath the soil. My reasoning is that when I dug in the rows I found few seeds, and those that I found seemed to have holes in them and were rotted. (Though the rotting itself could have caused the holes, so who knows).

July 29th:
Re-seeded

• Toscano Kale
• Champion Collards
• Hakurei Turnips
• Scarlet Queen Turnip
• Amour Pickling Cucumber
  
• All varieties of green bean
  

Next I need to pop in a couple of more cabbage plants. I had one more red cabbage plant die on me--for whatever reason they didn't take to the transplanting. My sorrel hasn't germinated, or if it has I can't identify it. I will wait a while longer and then decide if I want to re-plant or maybe put in some Thai basil.

A red sorrel seedling from the Ohio State Website. My sorrel isn't red, but the seedlings should look something like that.

Beyond some low germination, things seem to be going well. I'm getting some leaf predation by flea beetles on my turnips and radishes (though fortunately as that's increased the nibbling on my cabbages has decreased). I might look into getting some floating row cover, but I haven't been able to find it at the couple of stores I checked at. I don't know how much aerial holes will prevent root development--I'm most interested in the roots and if nibbled leaves is the cost of keeping my cabbage un-eaten, I'll happily sacrifice my turnip greens.

My peppers are still playing head-games with me, but haven't died or anything, so that's good. Many of my tomatoes plants have unripe fruit now, byt I've learned not to 'count one's chickens before they hatch' when it comes to tomatoes, so I'm cautiously excited.

Amazingly, I have one pickling cuke! It matured so quickly because I bought it as a large greenhouse seedling. What do I do with one pickling cuke?

Weather-wise it's been a pretty typical few weeks of summer. Hot days in the low- to mid-eighties with rain or a thundershower every 3-4 days. I pulled back on watering a bit, but I'll go back to it to keep the new seedbeds moist. We're going to have some extremely hot weather this weekend, so hopefully it won't damage anything.

Weed-wise, the redroot pigweed is finally starting to pop up significantly. The seedlings are still quite small, though, so they're easy to control. It's the dominant weed, joined also by lambsquarters, purslane, and cheese-weed, and a few grass species in the mulched areas. I think the mulch brought in the grass seed--I should make more of an effort to identify it, but I usually pull it out before it's big enough to do so conclusively.

Planting Turnips, Carrots, Radishes, Greens, Green Onions and assorted seedlings

Whoo hoo I did it! I finished planting everything I needed to get into the ground right away. The only things left are finding space for the remaining cole crop seedlings and digging a mound for my fall garlic planting. I finished not a moment too soon, since we're expected to get pounded by storms this evening.

Freshly planted garden, viewed from the SW corner.

And from the NE corner. Yeah, my rows aren't perfectly straight, but I don't think the plants will care.

July 16th Planted:

Roots

• Hakurei Turnip (38 days)
• Purple-Top White Globe Turnip (55 days)
• White Satin Carrot (68 days)
• Sugarsnax Carrot (68 days)
• Miyashige Daikon Radish (50 days)
• Scarlet Queen Green Stem Turnip (43 days)
• Shunkyo Semi-Long Radish (32 days)

Greens

• Garnet Giant Mustard Greens
• Toscano Kale
• Champion Collards
• Redleaf Amaranth
• Goldberg Golden Purslane
• Summerfest Komatsuna Greens
  
• Cooking Sorrel

Onions

• Evergreen Hardy White Bunching Onion
• Nabechan Bunching Onion

Cucurbits

• 8-Ball Summer Squash (2nd planting)
• Sunburst Patty Pan Summer Squash (2nd planting)
• Amour Pickling Cuke (2nd planting)

Misc. Seedlings

• 2 Watermelon Seedlings (var. unknown)
• 4 Cayenne Pepper Seedlings
• 4 Brussels Sprouts Seedlings
• 2 Purple Kohlrabi Seedlings

For most of the plantings I did a box-style layout, giving turnips 6-8" and carrots and radishes 2-3". I planted a lot of the Hakurei turnips, because I liked them so much. I really hope they grow well. The greens should be exciting too, though I don't know if the kale and collards will get beyond the 'micro-greens' stage. I tried to arrange the root crops so that the quick-maturing varieties were in a very sunny spot, which I can sow with a fall crop of greens or peas.

At this point my space is pretty much used up. I'm kicking myself for not having the neighbor till the garden further east, but I was too lazy to move the giant rock pile out of the middle of the paddock. Most of the west side is unusable because of the shade from the maple trees. Oh well...I can always refine it next year.

In other news, my peppers are looking droopy. I'm trying to water them well, but they just won't perk up. Maybe with the coming rainstorm, all the fertilizer will be mobilized and the plants can take it up and be happy. If the peppers bite the dust I'll gladly plant other stuff in their place, since it's prime real estate.

Planting Herbs, Cucurbits, Celery

Yesterday I got the herb seedlings in, seeded some cilantro and basil, planted some of the cucurbits, and threw in the celery I'd picked up. Of all the seedlings, the celery seemed amazingly happy considering it was in a pot for so long--it seems like it will be a good performer. I also prepared the seedbed for my radish/carrot/turnip plot.

July 15th:

Herb Seedlings

• celery
  
• oregano
  
• marjoram
  
• rosemary
  
• thyme
  
• sage
  
• flat-leaf and curly parsley

Herb Seeds

• cilantro
  
• basil
  
• dill

Misc. Seedlings (from Joel's Greenhouse)

• 1 bush-style cucumber seedling
• 1 acorn squash seedling
  

Cucurbit Seeds

• Amour Pickling Cuke
• 8-ball Summer Squash
  
• Sunburst Patty Pan Summer Squash

I will probably plant more cucurbits when I find the space. I also neglected to get the watermelon seedlings in the ground, and I'm not sure where to put them since they get so dang big.

The herbs are almost all in the back (east) side of the garden. Their bed might be a bit small, but I can always move them if need be. With experience my bed preparation has improved, and now all the beds have a water-retaining lip. All the plants in the back row were heavily fertilized with manure, but did not have added fertilizer.

Next up: seeding my root vegetable bed and fertilizing and seeding my leafy green bed. It's expected to storm heavily tonight, so I won't have to water.

More about my Field Layout

Since it was so late in the year and I needed to take quick action with planting, I didn't do much research before I carved up the garden. I just followed my instincts and the lessons I'd learned in the past. I wound up with wide, deep rows and evenly spaced plantings, instead of the more traditional narrow rows with crowded plantings. Of course, there's nothing new under the sun, and it turns out that this called 'wide row gardening' and 'block style layout'. Here are two publications that discuss it in more detail:

Wide Bed Gardening for Easier Gardening and Higher Yields (Cheyenne Botanic Gardens)
Block Style Layout in Raised Bed Vegetable Gardens (Colorado State University Extension)*

*This one has good information about planting distances for block layout, which can be hard to find.

It looks like I made some good choices with this garden layout, though I could have set things up better for water management by adding a lip at the edge of each mound. I think I will continue this approach next year. The landlord even said I could cut off some branches from the trees that are shading my plot, mostly volunteer white ash. I'm getting my compost pile going now, so hopefully I'll have some good stuff to add to the garden next year. Hopefully we won't be moving again (at least not until we're ready to buy a house--then my garden will be off da hook!).

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.