DIY Garden 2020 – Partial Shade PNW Zone 8b/9a – 3 Months Progress Report – Summer’s Ending…

It is now exactly three months out from my original garden post which you can view here!

Front yard – my ‘orchard’ – We have ripe tomatoes! Not a lot but they’re slowly coming to fruition…

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

9/2/2020

8/2/2020

9/2/2020

8/2/2020 – My lemon tree is growing baby green lemons!

9/2/2020 Bigger babies ~10

The side yard – my ‘berries’ – I’m ready to give away my blueberry and huckleberry bushes and let the salmon berry take over the box. Anybody want some fresh Parsley?

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

9/2/2020

The backyard – ‘greenhouse’ – The cover is off! No zucchinis… I’m ready to bulldoze this bed and winterize or plant fall seeds…

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

9/2/2020 The mint has somewhat recovered

*Baby bird update* One morning my roommate walked outside to discover that the pot had been knocked over and the nest was empty 😦

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 delicious but slowing down on producing

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

9/2/2020 Potatoes are wilting 😦

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

9/2/2020

Our backyard harvest! I have picked a few more green beans but didn’t take pictures. The zucchini was fabulous!

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

8/2/2020

9/2/2020

Our second planting of Mesclun lettuce is thriving and tastes delicious! Also – much less dirt all over than when it was planted in the raised bed. I really like this setup for the lettuce. Our third basil plant has completely died but our second plant has ginormous leaves (not that tasty but they look gargantuan!)

8/2/2020

9/2/2020

The rhubarb I planted out front looks even more meh. I know they have a long growing cycle – but now there are only two leaves :’)

Not pictured – 2 avocado seedlings now! Mango seed seems like a dud.

My future projects include the following:

Build a trellis and grow loofah!
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)
Plan for a winter crop and next year (less variety and more spacing between plants)
Finish using the free pallet wood and build a long planter box and small square raised garden boxes
Giveaway the rest of the project wood pieces

DIY Garden 2020 – Partial Shade PNW Zone 8b/9a – 2 Months Progress Report

August 3, 2020 by rachelauthorbarnard in Garden, Rachel Barnard and tagged DIY, DIY Pallet garden, garden, Greenhouse, PNW, raised beds, shade tolerant, Zone 8b

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.

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

8/2/2020 – My lemon tree is growing baby green lemons!

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.

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

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?

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

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!

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

6/2/2020

7/2/2020

8/2/2020

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

8/2/2020

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.

8/2/2020

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:

Build a trellis and grow loofah!
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)
Plan for a winter crop and next year (less variety and more spacing between plants)
Finish using the free pallet wood and build a long planter box and small square raised garden boxes
Giveaway the rest of the project wood pieces

DIY Garden 2020 – Partial Shade PNW Zone 8b/9a – 1 Month Progress Report

July 2, 2020 by rachelauthorbarnard in Garden, Rachel Barnard and tagged DIY, DIY Pallet garden, Greenhouse, PNW, raised beds, shade tolerant, Zone 8b | 1 Comment

It is now exactly one month out from my original garden post which you can view here.

Front yard – my ‘orchard’ – I keep reorganizing the front orchard to better utilize the sun, plant potatoes, keep the landscaping company from destroying anything, and to create tomato supports. This is my final design for the season. I lined up the six buckets each with one tomato plant and rigged my own support out of the plastic international shipping box twine that holds your box together. I also received some t-posts from my BuyNothing group and utilized them here. By clicking on the image you can see in the larger zoom that I have 0 tomatoes fruiting… Did I not prune enough or correctly? Did I not plant soon enough? Am I not getting enough sun or water? Is there too much water and not enough drainage? The stalks are also more spindly than others I’ve seen at my local Pea Patch.

6/2/2020

The side yard – my ‘berries’ – None of my berry bushes (huckleberry, salmonberry, blueberry) have changed since I planted them. The blueberry was full of unripe blueberries and none of them have ripened. I also planted some cilantro and parsley in this box and they’ve sprouted nicely above ground.

6/2/2020

The backyard – ‘greenhouse’ – I’ve already harvested some of the spicy Mesclun lettuce mix and will attempt to eat my way through these two rows this month so that the three squash starts I planted between the rows will have room to grow. The zucchini in the back are doing nicely but I don’t see any zucchinis yet. These plants seem to be larger than the ones I planted in the other planter box without the greenhouse tarp. The best crop by far is the mint you can see in the large pot behind the stump. I wish I liked mint more and am not sure what to do with such a large crop… The chocolate mint is delicious to eat plain though and I highly recommend planting this variety!

6/2/2020

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 are growing nicely but haven’t produced anything yet… The corn in the back appears to be leaning towards the neighbor’s fence and I’m not sure they’re getting enough sun in the back there.

6/2/2020

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 future projects include the following:

Build a trellis and grow loofah!
Build a seed library and place it near my Pea Patch if I get permission
Plan for a winter crop
Finish using the free pallet wood and build a long planter box and small square raised garden boxes
Giveaway the rest of the project wood pieces

Low Cost DIY Garden 2020 – Partial Shade PNW Zone 8b/9a – Pallet DIY Raised Garden Beds

June 2, 2020 by rachelauthorbarnard in Garden, Rachel Barnard and tagged DIY, DIY Pallet garden, Greenhouse, PNW, raised beds, shade tolerant, Zone 8b | 7 Comments

How does your garden grow?

With slugs aplenty and….

Continue reading →

Wildlife Wednesdays: How Does Your Garden Grow?

July 22, 2015 by rachelauthorbarnard in Garden, Wildlife Wednesdays

Remember the garden I planted this year?

Well… it’s growing up!

This was weeks ago… and now we harvested quite a bit of beans and a large zucchini.

If you have a garden, have you been harvesting yet? What did you plant?

Foodie Fridays: Rhubarb time of year again!

May 2, 2014 by rachelauthorbarnard in Foodie Fridays, Garden and tagged bread cake, cupcakes, frosting, muffins

Remember last year how wonderful our rhubarb was growing?

This year the rhubarb is coming in strong and delicious. We’ve even made a $16 profit selling it to the local fruit/veggie stand (I love those guys).

Rhubarb is a resilient plant that grows without any help therefore it’s a gardener’s dream, unless you don’t want it then I guess it would be a nightmare plant.

This year I’ve gotten into making cake breads with the rhubarb and even muffins!

I’ve got the fancy muffins. The recipe I used was based loosely on the recipe for bread cake (upper left corner) from my Zojirushi bread maker. The mash in the tupperware is my attempt at ‘frosting’ where I combined the leftover mashed strawberries/rhubarb with powdered sugar and some coconut flour for thickening.

Loose rhubarb muffin recipe:

– 1 stick of butter (1/2 cup)

– 2 large eggs

– 1.5 cups of rhubarb (mashed in my Vitamix)

– 3 tsp of baking powder

– 1 tsp of vanilla

– 2 cups of flour (I used wheat flower)

– 1 cup of sweetener such as sugar/honey (I didn’t put any in these cupcakes this time)

Wildlife Wednesdays: A Labor of Love

September 11, 2013 by rachelauthorbarnard in Garden, Maple Valley, Wildlife Wednesdays and tagged Veggies

The cost of a garden: seeds + equipment + soil/compost + labor + water = $$$$
The fruits of your labor: Priceless

Foodie Fridays: Herbs to Own

August 30, 2013 by rachelauthorbarnard in Foodie Fridays, Garden | 2 Comments

The basil plant takes sun and continuous water to grow and prosper. It yields plenty of leaves for use. It can be used in salads, a stir-fry, sandwiches, and more.