Little Vermont Family Garden

Battered corn (though this specimen is thus far unharmed)

Thinned carrots

Blurry little cucumber

Little Jalapenos

Oddly shaped bell pepper

Tomatoes

Onions

Potato flowers

Sweet potato vines

Pumpkins taking over the whole yard (and the neighbor’s yard)

Loads of green beans

Not so Little Perennials

Beautiful blueberries

About a third of the garlic

That’s all I have for now.  Hungry children calling…

The first:

They are so sweet and tasty!  My funny husband thinks this is an argument against gardening.  He says now he feels obligated to eat peas “at every meal”!  Apparently he’s forgotten about the freezer.  I remind him the point of gardening is to eat a good quantity of fresh, delicious food.  I also told him that I intended to put away some of it so that we can enjoy it later, when peas won’t grow.   This is the part he disagrees with the most.  He says “it’s not the same”.  I agree, but frozen snap peas from our garden are still tastier than the stuff you can buy at the grocery store, they’re far less expensive, and they have traveled only about 50 feet, in a bucket.  They have much to recommend them.  So, I’ll be freezing whatever is left of this bowlful.

The other type of bounty is the one which I will place upon the head of whatever creature has, for a second time, attacked my corn.  We’ve had two episodes.  The first occurred on Wednesday - I went out and saw that one of the stalks had been torn or bitten off, and was resting about 4 feet away in a planter containing lettuce.  I was perplexed, since we’d been outside playing that day and didn’t see anything amiss.  Then yesterday, it was finally time to water again.  I watered in the morning and checked out all the plants and progress.  Then we spent the morning at a playgroup and I didn’t get out to the garden until mid-afternoon again.  In the space of a few hours, someone attacked four more plants.  I just don’t get it!  They don’t eat anything, don’t dig in the dirt, they just rip off a few plants and leave them lying on the ground.  WHY?!  I could almost forgive a creature if they were just feeding themselves.  This just seems malicious!   I just don’t know what to do about it.  S. says “don’t grow corn anymore” which seems extreme, unless you know him.  All gardening involves a little loss to the local wildlife. 

 That’s all for now.  I’m being accosted by the other variety of wildlife here.  Little Boy Blue, to be specific.

It’s another two-post day!  Snapped some photos this morning.  Many are not great, because of the way the sun was hitting everything.  Oh well, I did the best I could.

Scallions, Shallots, Chick Peas 

Lettuce

Corn (carrots in front)

Cucumbers

Peppers (cabbage covered up, tomatoes in back bed)

View of the north gardens

Black raspberries

Spiderwort, mallow, sunflowers

Bee balm hidden in overgrown sunflowers

Beans

Potatoes

Chard, onions, sweet potatoes

Ten foot tall peas

Close up of peas

Onions

Unholy mess of a side perennial garden

Clematis

View of the south gardens

Overflowing with perennials in the back

I bet you thought I meant my garden, or my lifestyle.  Nope!  I have green boys.  See yesterday’s post for an explanation.

This Organic Life by Joan Dye Gussow has been added to my list of favorite books, and one I’d recommend to anyone who loves gardening and who also has a deep concern for our earth and the state of farming and how food is brought to our tables.  Go to your local library and get it!  Today!  I bought it, for two reasons.  First, my library doesn’t have it and second, I wanted it on my bookshelf so I can reread it at will.  It’s wonderful.

As far as how my own garden is growing, I have no complaints.  I spent some time out there this morning, weeding and fertilizing.  I use dehydrated cow manure for fertilizer.  Moo-Doo, to be specific.  Lately I’ve been putting handfuls of it around my peppers (because they are beginning to flower) and corn (because it’s about knee-high) and I top-dressed the chard and kale once I trimmed all the plants down to one inch high or so.  The chard is already growing again!  I mowed the lawn yesterday, so things look very nice out there.  I hilled the potatoes, which was overdue and not very easy.  I don’t really have enough dirt to hill them.  Somehow, they produced more plants than I was expecting.  I’m not too concerned about hilling because the potatoes were planted fairly deeply, and should have enough room.  Let’s hope.

The beans are all about to flower and they look healthy, aside from a few slug-battered leaves.  I have not uncovered the cabbage to peek at it this week, but I don’t have any doubt about its health.  Tomatoes are flowering and looking good.  I only made ten cages, and then I ran out of material, so I ordered a set of tomato ladders from Gardeners Supply, with birthday funds!  Thanks mom!  They are red and will look very, very nice on the remaining two plants.

The sugar snap peas are getting plump and we’ve eaten a few, but looking forward to a big bucket full one of these days!  The shell peas are done, sadly.  I may try a fall crop, they were so tasty!  I need to get out there and take some more pictures, once my batteries are done charging.  It seems they need charging every time I go out to take garden progress pictures!

That’s all for today.  The Big Boy just informed me he’d gotten out the finger paint, and that requires a little supervision, unwilling as I am to have the floors and walls painted. 

Victory is mine!  Take that, leaf miners!  This 11 gallon bucket is nearly full of kale and swiss chard.  And that beautiful child next to the bucket is the former vegephobe!

 Bright Lights (I know what’s for dinner tonight)

 

The scape monster!

 

It’s that part of the season when I don’t have much gardening to do.  Just a little weeding here and there.  Things have grown enough that there isn’t even that much weeding to do, either, especially among the beans.  Because it has rained every day for something like 2.5 weeks, there hasn’t been any watering to do, either.  Enough with the rain, already!  I had standing water in my raised beds yesterday morning!  I worry things will start to drown out there!

We’ve eaten just about all of the coral shell peas and now the snaps are coming in.  There are flowers on the tomatoes, and all the potato plants are getting huge.  The beans are really growing and even the limas are starting to look healthier.  I’ve had a few slugs on the green and yellow beans, but not too many.  I’ve just picked them off and tossed them into the lawn.  I’m sure they slither right back up in no time, but truthfully they really aren’t doing enough damage to warrant more permanent tactics.  The Big Boy delights in pointing them out to me.

As far as abject failures go, I can list only spinach.  I had hopes that it would do well in large planters, which I could move to shady spots as needed.  It bolted anyway.  I don’t think greens love planters, at least in my yard.  I did much better last year with it in the raised beds.  I just ran out of room and figured that of everything I planned to grow, the greens would do best in planters.  The lettuce is growing really slowly in them, too.  As soon as the peas are done, I’m going to plant lettuce in its place.  The chard has bounced back and most of it looks quite healthy, and is ready to be picked and eaten.

I’m not sure what to make of the garlic.  About half of it looks terrific.  Another bit looks ok, but still has no scapes.  One corner of the bed is about to die, and I have no idea why.  It looks awful - and now has fallen over from all the rain we’ve had.  I probably should dig it out in case it’s diseased, which is likely, based on the little I’ve read about it.  I bought “Growing Great Garlic” recently, and I expect that if I ever had time to sit down and read it, I’d know what has happened.  Hopefully I can do that before next year’s crop goes in!

So far, the corn and cucumbers look terrific.  Peppers are doing similarly well, and they are flowering, which reminds me I need to get out there and do some side-dressing!  Maybe I have more garden chores than I previously mentioned, after all.

That’s all for this morning.  I hope we have a little more sun this week!

I really wish I had kept better records last year.  This year, I have a spreadsheet that documents all the important dates for each plant, including (when I remember) the date the greenery appears above the soil, for things that are sowed directly.  I noticed a whole bunch of blobs of dirt on the top of the potato bed the other day, and my first thought was that our newest marauders (oppossum and woodchucks) had been digging around in there again.  Nevermind that this didn’t make a lot of sense.  Yesterday I had time to go checking out the progress of all the veggies, and was beyond thrilled to discover that the potatoes are already coming up.  Last year, it seemed to take forever before they came up.  To be fair, they are buried pretty deeply - about 8″ down - but I am not known for my patience in matters related to gardening.  I planted them during the heatwave last week, which was followed by really soaking thunderstorms.  I think that really did it - we had enough rain over several days to really get down to the roots.  Hurrah!

In other news, I did take the boys to the Community Garden last weekend.  What a nice place!  The plots are large - 20′x20′ is the smallest.  There are marshes to the north, with walking paths that are about a mile and a half long - we walked along and saw a beaver lodge and a number of whistling ducks.  They were hosting an event there that day, with composting workshops and a childrens’ planting area.  An eight year old girl came running up to us when we arrived to tell us about it.  Apparently she’d been waiting for kids to come and mine were the first.  They each planted seeds, with Emily to guide them, and got to take their pots home with them.  Big boy wanted sunflowers, Little Boy Blue wanted “a big pumpkin”.  Unfortunately the pots have been dumped about three times since then, but I think the sunflower seed is still there, at least.  I believe the pumpkin seed was lost.  It’s fortunate that I planted those already.

I love the concept of a community garden.  I plan to call the organizer and get more information, and I may just rent a plot.  I had in mind to get some of the playgroup moms together, have it be a garden for all the kids that we can meet up in or go to on our own, and then donate the produce to the Community Cupboard.  I don’t know yet if they accept fresh food, but one has to hope!  What I don’t know about this garden is whether there are shared tools or other resources.  I didn’t see any sheds around.  I saw many compost bins, which was neat.  A few people had really interesting looking plots which gave away hints about their personalities!  Perhaps because the event was going on, almost no-one was actually gardening while we were there.  They had set up a story walk with laminated watercolor pages on posts surrounding the gardens, so we would walk from post to post and read and get to see each plot.  Great idea.  Big boy impressed me by identifying a good number of plants by looking at their leaves (”look mom, they are growing beans like we are!”). 

I am so tempted to get a plot there.  I can plant all the transplants that have no home so far, since I cannot bring myself to toss them in the compost bin!  Right now there are about 15 tomatoes all crowded in a pot, waiting for a home.  And then I thought well, I’d have room for melons, and strawberries!  I think I have an addiction brewing.

We shall see what develops!

I think everything is back to normal with the pictures in the old posts.  Let’s hope.

Guess what I’ll be eating this summer?  Lots of blueberries!!!

I did some reorganizing and of course the links to all the pictures changed.  I guess I should feel lucky that that is all that went wrong.  I fixed the links on the most recent post, but I’ll have to go and change them in all the previous posts for the last two years.  That shouldn’t take me more than a few months.  I apologize for the confusion.

Here’s a couple more from today though - showing Big Boy and Little Boy Blue and their PEAS!