Sunday, June 23, 2013

My Veggie Garden in June

I have been very active in the garden and on my Facebook page and I feel very bad that blog slipped my mind for the past few weeks. So here I am, back at my keyboard and how else to begin again than with some garden progress report ;-)

Here is my new experiment: Companion planting all the way in this bed. I have 4 rows of carrots, 3 rows of tomatoes, and 2 basil plants. I heard that all of these go well together so I am hoping for the best results. I bought some organic tomato plants (the bigger ones on the picture) and the smaller you see are from my indoor green house. They looked dead when I was putting them in but I guess they caught their second wind. Next i need to get tomato cages.


Here is the basil beauty, doing well.


Climbing beans got hit by some bugs early in the season... the first leaves got eaten. So I planted some marigolds and that took care of 90% of the problem as you see.


This year is the first time my raspberry bush got huge. We have tons of small berries starting to show but I hope the birds will not eat them before we do. The bush is in a remote spot in the garden so it is easy for them to get to it without being disturbed :-(


I love these visitors!!!


Some snap peas coming up on their trellis. 


and so are the climbing beans... well slowly...



Last year I had great luck with the soy beans (edemame), and it so happens that we love this vegetable so much that I devoted most of my bed to it this year. I am hoping for the same result... you can see cauliflower peeking out right by the fence in the same bed.

Oh, how I love my irrigation system... 


Cucumbers (I already pulled the extra ones out.. with heavy heart)


Squash and some more cucumbers... I will have to come up with a trellis for these cucumbers. I just love this ladder bed...



Say hello to my volunteer tomato from last year... I don't have the heart to pull it out so it will be keeping company to the eggplants. They like each other...


You can see most of the garden here...


My strawberry bed is by the porch for the kids to access it easily... First year for those!


This is the only snail I will let stay in my garden ;-)
How is your place coming along?

Monday, June 03, 2013

How I planted my eggplants

Few weeks ago I finally got to start planting seeds and seedlings in my garden. It took me a long time, I think I did one garden bed at a time, weeding and watering them, and then planting what I wanted to harvest this year. I also had to figure out which garden bed use for what veggie. You are not suppose to plant the same plants in the same spot year after year so I had to create a careful plan for each vegetable. That took forever. But here it is... I have great success with eggplants so I grew a bunch of them from seed this year (usually I have only 1 or 2 plants).


I used organic soil and non-gmo seeds purchased from the seedsnow.com. The eggplants are one that actually grew nicely and were in good shape for transplant. 


As you see my irrigation system is in place and so I first find a hole in the hose and dig right next to it. This is where the eggplant roots will have the best water supply. I make sure the hole is big enough to fit the eggplant and the soil that comes with it straight from the yogurt cup (I gently removed it by squeezing the sides and then turning the cup upside down to spill the contents out). 


I placed it in the hole and covered with soil. Make sure you watered the spot before and after you plant. If you can, space them about 2 feet apart because the more space they have the more crop they will produce. I will keep you posted on their progress.