WARMING AGAIN

garden overview after the weekend

What a great weekend! It was warm and sunny and we were able to move forward (again) on bringing the garden into spring/summer mode.  We started by removing most of the frost cloth and walls of water and moved on to providing structural support for our tomatoes. 

volunteer tomato plants to share

As usual, we continue to find hardy volunteer tomato plants and seem to have a number of folks willing to adopt them.

 

homemade tomato cages (towers) with additional string supports

 

setting up the string trellis made by our friend Chuck....

includes attaching each string to a tomato branch

The finished product

We are still experimenting with stringing up our plants.  This is only the second year we have tried this technique and we continue to learn and modify it.  Chuck told us about this and said he found this technique produced a greater yield.  I think that while it is a lot of work to set it up, it is easier to maintain than continually tying up the branches to the cages.  We'll see.

 

hornworm damage?

Several of our plants already have what appears to be hornworm damage.  We went hunting for hornworms at night with the black lights and found neither hornworms nor the usual markings that they had been there.  We will definitely have to keep an eye out.  Fortunately, the chickens LOVE hornworms!

 

Jim transplanting rogue strawberries

Our strawberries keep escaping their pots and running amok.  They do very well in the poor quality unwatered dirt surrounding their pots!  I am thinking we might do better just building them a bed of their own but they would likely escape that as well.  We keep relocating them as it is hard to work and get through this space when they expand.  This weekend the dogs learned how to harvest strawberries... we'll have to work on that one!

one of three chili pepper beds

We peeked under the frost cloth at our newly planted pepper plants.  They are doing so well, we figured we'd keep them under wraps for a few more days as they get settled into their new home.  Some have already set fruit!

 

Mexican sunset and sweet banana peppers with fruit set

We had a couple of surprise discoveries this weekend.  First, we found fava beans and sugar snap peas had set fruit.  We'll be enjoying those for dinner soon! The other surprise was the Swiss chard starts I bought on impulse in Orange County last month were actually "undercover beets."  I kept wondering why they were not growing like my chard usually does.  Jim was poking around in them and discovered that this is because they are actually beets!

 

fava beans (left) and sugar snap peas (right)

eggplant nestled in the snap pea and lettuce bed protected from the freeze in a wall of water

Bed with kale and "Swiss chard"

NOT Swiss chard (despite the label)

Our short day onions are forming bulbs and looking really good.  The surrounding lettuce is mostly done so we will be uncovering this bed this coming week.

onions and lettuces

The blackberries are growing really well. It is time to weed them and tie them up before they takeover this end of the garden.  Hope to be enjoying fresh berries soon too. 

 

blackberries are growing so quickly

Even the chickens are producing well!

As the weather begins to warm up again we are thinking about how to provide shade for some of our crops which tend to get scalded in the heat of the summer.  We are working on a few different ideas and we'll track our progress on that front soon.

For now the garden is keeping us busy and happy.