A Real Garden Update

 

Before I start with the garden, you can see some of the starts we have growing in the greenhouse yet to be planted in the garden. Above are some tomatoes, basil, leeks and something else that has flown my mind. Unseen on the other side are some summer squash plants that I just put seeds into pots so they aren't much to look at yet.

We've been getting some nice rains of late which have been nice after two severely dry years. Fortunately, now that the garden is steps behind our house, we can easily go out and plant for an hour in the evening and not have to wait an entire week when our garden was a 2 hour round trip drive away. In the foreground are a number of rows of peas, nearly decimated by rabbits but staging a comeback. In the far left there are some radishes, a row of lettuce that I harvest just after snapping this picture for a nice supper of salad. Next to the lettuce are some failed basil and a very thin stand of carrots and a different type of radishes. I'm not sure why we didn't get a good stand but I suspect the type we planted just wasn't hardy for our conditions. Beyond the peas and the failed radishes are a couple rows of onions that are doing quite nicely.

Above is a swath that we have carved out for a strawberry bed. My wife's father loved to raise strawberries and thus they have a soft spot in my wife's heart. Unfortunately, the row in the center was mowed off by rabbits and thought to be dead. I bought a bunch more, smaller ones to replace them and the eaten ones have stage a comeback. These are all everybearing strawberries, a kind I have never raised. The ones my parents planted when I was a kid were the ones that ripened in June and then were done for the year. 

Above is a section we carved off for potatoes, most of which have now broken the surface and look quite healthy. We have raised decent crops of potatoes the last few years but none that were really big like the ones I remember in my childhood. I tried a different planting method this year. Instead of planting two or three potatoes per hill, I put a single potato in and then another a foot apart and so on to create a row. I'm hoping that with only one potato per spot, that perhaps they will grow better tubers and then planting them a foot apart (used to plant them two feet apart), we will just have a continuous row of potatoes to dig up.

Beyond the potatoes are some beans that I just planted, two rows of French green beans and six rows of dry shell beans of various sorts. Also unseen is a row of okra seeds that we saved from last year that I also just planted in a failed row of parsnips that never came up. The remainder of the garden is growing up in volunteer daikon radishes that the deer destroyed last fall. I just left them until it is time to plant our tomatoes and peppers which won't be too long now.

One of dozens of pictures I have of deer walking the perimeter of our garden looking for week spots in the defenses.