June 25, 2007

Skippy’s vegetable garden

A couple of shots of my garden. Everything is growing like crazy. The pink rose on the fence, Dorothy Perkins, is at its peak. All of my spring veggies are producing well: The peas are ripe. Lettuce is delicious. I’m also adding cilantro, arugula, parsley, dill and garlic shoots to out salads. I see from this photo that its getting a little yellowish so I’ll fertilize today. I want to make sure the summer veggies ripen soon. aerial views of my home vegetable garden

June 24, 2007

local community garden

Skippy and I visited the Belmont Community Gardens yesterday. What a beautiful place to walk through! All of the plots are so interesting. One of the first times I’ve been to a community garden and seen gardeners working. I learned several things: 1- My fava beans are WAY behind where they could be. There was one plot with tons of nearly ripe favas. Awesome! Two plots had favas; both were planted much closer together than mine. One had two foot tall flowering plants like mine, but the other’s were 3-4…

June 23, 2007

chili pepper blossom

Capsicum

June 23, 2007

no scapes 🙁

I keep checking my garlic for scapes, since I read about them on many gardening blogs and I see them now at the Farmer’s Market. This is the first year I have grown garlic. Last fall I planted some of my commercial bulbs from the local supermarket. Sadly, no scapes. I quess I have “softneck garlic”. As Farmer MaryJane explains: Commercial garlic growers from warmer climates (for example, in Gilroy, California) use “softneck” garlic varieties that are readily machine harvested and do not produce scapes. Garlics that are well adapted…

June 22, 2007

summer squashes

This year I have planted several types of summer squash. In early May, I planted seeds for Casserta, Sunburst and zucchini. The Casserta never sprouted and neither did a second seeding in potting soil several weeks later. The zucchini (Cashflow) came up fast and the Sunburst (a green and yellow colored patty-pan shaped squash) was slow but eventually sprouted. I purchased some plants of Gold Bar, a cylindrical yellow squash, to fill in for the absent Casserta. In all, I have three hills with about five plants each. I planted…

June 22, 2007

Dorothy Perkins

Dorothy Perkins is the big old rose by my vegetable garden. It shades a lot of my vegetables, but rewards me with beautiful pink blossoms, which are just beginning to open on this first day of summer. Dorothy is a classic rambler rose developed in 1901 and said by some to be one of the most famous of all roses. It was in my yard before I came here in 1991 and dug up my vegetable garden. Its flowers are a slightly different color every year. Depending on how much…

June 20, 2007

spring vegetable flowers

From top left: green pea, arugula, broccoli, radish, another radish, snap pea, tomato, fava bean, Capucijner field pea.

June 20, 2007

a baby tomato!

Its a very exciting week. School’s out, summer starts soon, the town pool is open, AND I have purple peas and baby tomatoes in my garden! It can’t get much better than this. I can almost taste a fresh garden tomato ….. This tomato is a Rutgers. There are also baby fruit on my Chadwick’s cherry. Last year I found my first baby tomato on June 22. So this year’s is almost exactly the same date. Even though I bought bigger plants that bloomed much earlier this year, the plants…

June 19, 2007

a purple pea!

The purple podded Capucijner peas are starting to make pods. Pisum sativum, spp. arvense

June 19, 2007

thinning carrots

I tried to seed the carrots more thinly this year, but still they have ended up very dense. I am starting now to thin them. They are still too small to eat. I thin them gradually – soon the baby roots will be large enough to munch on as I continue to thin the rows. Daucus carota

weeks and counting until my last spring frost

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