I'm going to try to hold back on minute-by-minute updates on the gardening front, but, having no kids, I feel like a new parent - I want to document every first shoot, bud, weed and caterpillar that I find in the garden. But this big news this weekend is that everything is in the ground! Hooray! The first year we planted, I think we put the tomatoes in in April - and they did fine. But with frost warnings this year well into May, we held off on the tenderest stuff: our eggplant, cantaloupe, tomatoes and peppers. I want those plants to produce stuff all summer long, so I'm willing to wait an extra week if it means they'll be healthier in the long run. Plus, I've noticed that even if you plant most things early, they'll stay pretty sluggish until they get the weather they want - then they take off like a rocket!
So here's the update: The earliest stuff is doing pretty good - peas are about a foot and a half off the ground, the potatoes are going gangbusters and popping out the tops of all the buckets, the carrots have their first true leaves (after almost a month of trying to water them every day, the little divas!), the Romaine lettuce is at edible size, and I just harvested and ate our first radish. Year 2 of our strawberry patch is amazing - we've harvested about 50 huge, juicy strawberries - Dawn says we owe it all to the inches and inches of compost we've dumped on top. The garlic and onions are up, and the broccoli and "pak choi" look perky and growing. The eggplant already has a bloom on it!
Our raised bed out front is now fully planted, and so far the peas that we put out front, on the south side of our house, are now fully twice as tall as the ones in the cooler, shadier back yard. Nothing really beats full sun, I guess. But I've been trying to work with our microclimate: the sun-loving squashes, tomatoes and peppers are in the sun-baked raised bed out front. The shade-tolerant lettuce and cucumbers are in the partially-shaded areas of the back, and the cool-loving broccoli an pak choi are in an area that receives a little bit of shade. After three years, I now know when to give up - the back corners of our garden, where I have tried to plant beans, sunflowers, tomatoes and potatoes - all to no avail. Now that area is allowed to have just weeds and flowers - a good place for beneficial insects to hang out and feels safe.
I've also tried to tone down my "companion planting" - after three years, I have a better idea of, timing-wise, which plants go together. (Usually I just plant too much stuff on top of each other, and nothing has enough space!) I planted my lettuce close to the base of my eggplant - by the time the eggplant reaches it's full two-foot spread, the lettuce will already be in our salad bowl. I planted cucumbers at the bottom of the pea plants - hopefully by the time the cukes are ready to run up the vertical-support strings, the peas will be done....but every year I miscalculate how late in the season we can harvest peas, so we'll have to see how it goes. And I planted some of my favorite "dragon bean" seeds in between the pak choi - hopefully by the time the beans need more space, we can start stir-frying the Asian greens.
But yesterday I set up my bean tepee for the pole beans to grow up, and Dawn and I hooked up our front-yard soaker hose (expensive, and a small feat of engineering, but simplifies our lives) - we're pretty much ready to go for the summer! yeah, bring on the hot days! (Now all I need is some mulch to keep all that good water with my plants!)
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