It is now exactly two months out from my original garden post which you can view here. And one month from my last update (view here)!

Front yard – my ‘orchard’ -After walking my local pea patch several times and hearing about local gardeners’ tomatoes doing poorly, I wasn’t completely discouraged that I had zero tomatoes on my plants at the beginning of the month. Then, lo and behold, an explosion of growth! I now have green baby tomatoes growing on every single tomato plant! How exciting! One of the large potted tomatoes started getting brown/yellow leafs so I moved it to quarantine away from the others ‘just in case.’ I later found out that potentially this particular plant might have been sunburned – eek! I have also been watering all my plants at least every other day if not every day with our full days of sunshine these past few weeks.

The side yard – my ‘berries’ – My blueberry looks like it is slowly dying 😦 but my salmonberry is very much thriving and threatens to take over this raised box! None of my cilantro seeds panned out but I have many parsely plants… and I tried a leaf and discovered that I don’t like parsley. Sigh. In order to use this plant I’ll have to trade it for something I like or simply dry it for integrating into future dishes.

The backyard – ‘greenhouse’ – We’ve been leaving the cover half off this box to let in more sun and rain (not that we’ve had rain in the past few weeks). The zucchini are taking over and, along with the slugs, have killed off my three squash starts. We harvested most of the lettuce and are eagerly awaiting actual zucchinis. We still only have the flowers and I’m thinking I have to research pollinating. I’ve heard some mentions about self-pollinating and male/female flowers?

8/2/2020

You’ll notice our mint is slowly dying… And that’s because I haven’t been watering due to the invasion of another type of ‘pest’ — a cute little nest of three eggs, two of which have hatched so far!

The backyard raised bed garden – the big ‘project’ – three raised garden beds with potato planted in front and thimbleberry bush start and a raspberry bush start off to the side. These beds continue to forest out. The only success so far are the green beans! They are almost ready to harvest and from the sample I picked they are 6/10 on flavor and 10/10 on texture.

The beds have the following planted in them:

Bush Beans
Carrots Nantes
Bush Beans
Carrots Nantes
Bush Beans
Carrots Short ‘n Sweet
Bush Beans
Carrots Short ‘n Sweet

Spinach
Spinach
Chard
Chard
6 cucumber mounds

4 rows of corn
6 zucchini starter mounds
1 row of mounds of cauliflower seeds

 

My housemate and I finished up our last wood project – building a railing bed that sits on top of the porch railing. I immediately planted more of our lettuce mix and am very pleased with how the rough project turned out. My calendula and mystery flower continue to thrive and grow very tall. The basil is somehow still alive.

The rhubarb I planted out front looks meh. I know they have a long growing cycle – but the only changes I’ve observed so far are the slight yellowing of some of the leaves.

Not pictured – I’ve been trying to grow avocado trees from seed and I have two that are growing stems and roots! I’m getting ready to move the first viable plant out of its water cup and into a bucket of dirt. I also have a mango seed that I’ve planted.

My future projects include the following:

1. Build a trellis and grow loofah!
2. Build a seed library and place it near my Pea Patch if I get permission (source an outside viable medicine cabinet and DIY it into a seed library)
3. Plan for a winter crop and next year (less variety and more spacing between plants)
4. Finish using the free pallet wood and build a long planter box and small square raised garden boxes
5. Giveaway the rest of the project wood pieces