As of today...

happygirl, that is a SWEET harvest! Congratulations and happy eating!

Wunnerful, Wunnerful, Wunnerful!

I can't believe it's been several days since I was here last! Afternoons have been spent watering the garden, picking, and cooking produce. So much to do, so little time.

It tied a record high of 100F here yesterday. Between us, hubby and I spent 2 1/2 hours late yesterday watering the vegetable garden!

nini your photos are beautiful. What's that growing to the right of your corn? Looks like Caster Beans.

happygirl What a great looking harvest. I never seem to have time to photograph mine.

Honeybee... actually those are my okra plants that are just starting to bloom. I use raise beds, so things are planted as close together as I dare and still be able to get a good harvest. The best success are the two rows of bush beans that are between the three rows of corn. Hopefully I will have good pollination because the rows are close together. Glad to have you back. Am on the way out to water my garden now. Keeping my fingers crossed that I will get some rain tonight or tomorrow with any luck... Things are just so very dry around here at the moment.

I've got morning glory? Vines growing Next to my mater vineS. They've put a stranglehold em and have tethered the 7 foot mater vines to the fence.

How's that for companion planting?

Gymgirl - I'll have to borrow that morning glory trick of tethering maters - mine have flopped over, hit the ground, and some are starting to grow back up again!

My former pea fence is now a fence of morning glories, and maybe it wasn't the smartest idea to let them go, but they're pretty:)

I once had the brilliant (or not) idea of planting morning glories under a fairly young mountain ash tree and letting them grow up into it -- turned out to be a really tall variety of MG and just about brought the poor tree down, but the next year it really took off growing!

:-)

My brilliant idea was to let them go in the corm patch. Looked gorgeous, but now they are everywhere. I pick 'em, and pull 'em, and on and on the grow. Pesky little fellas.

Well, no one ever said you had to be a genius to be a gardener! LOL

I think we tend more towards "creative."

Ironically, I'd planted the MG's far away on the other side of my property, where I do flowers. However, I do believe the birdies tried to help me and dropped the seeds everywhere. Within 2 years, I had MG's growing everywhere. I pulled hundreds of seedlings and grew them in pots the first year I discovered them, and they were beautiful, but guess what! Evene MORE seeds to be scattered across 3/4 of an acre. (Of course, NONE of them took in the jungle area where I wanted them to grow!)

But back to veggies. I am delighted that I will be picking my very first One Ball Squash and Cool Breeze Cucumbers today!. The peas are still going steady - though they look a mess! Beans are flowering, and the tomatoes are popping forth like crazy, though far from ripe. As usual, my cole crops didn't do squat, except the kale which is still going gang-busters. The cabbage and radishes are long done, I'm just waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the seed pods to dry so I can pull the plants and plant something new. The escarole and lettuce are about to call it quits, tto. Malabar Spinach and and Pak Choy are doing great, too. I'm eating them young and they are awesome. The winter squash is still primarily male flowers, with the ocasional female that turns up being aborted in short order. Hopefully they will start setting so I will get a few Bon-bons and Pink Bananas!Oddly, aside from the Cool Breeze and the Spacemasters, the rest of the cukes have grown very little since I planted them out. Can figure out what's going on with them.

And that's how MY garden grows!

I dug out my soft-neck garlic today, all the rain we've had apparently caused it to flop over in a mess; I dug a couple out to see how they looked, and since they seemed plenty big I decided it was time to dig even though the tops haven't started dying back yet. The hard-neck varieties are still looking strong so they can stay for a while. Haven't decided yet what to do with the new-found space; right next to it is my potatoes, which I am eagerly awaiting some flowers on so I could maybe get some new potatoes! Yesterday I picked 6 (yes, count 'em, 6) beans off the bush beans in my hoop house, which, meager a harvest though it is, I find exciting -- last year I didn't get any beans (from the outside pole beans) until mid August! I also harvested a cabbage from one of the plants that grew back up this spring after managing to live through the winter. And my asparagus is still going, even though I'm generally done harvesting it around the 4th of July. Life is good!

That's a lovely tidy garden, Weedwhacker. What are you using for mulch there? Our asparagus went longer than usual too, but we still stopped picking around mid-June - although I snuck a few extra stalks a week or so after that for sautéing with scrambled eggs. My beans are starting to come but not very heavily. Maybe it won't be a good year for them. Potato stalks are dying back and I pulled my garlic last week. Onions are looking like they're almost ready, too. Only currant tomatoes are ripe; the rest aren't even pink yet. But we've eaten some summer squash. Yup, life is good!

I liked you photo, Weedwhacker. Your maters look as though you have built one heck of a sturdy corral for them - they'll never escape! ^_^

greenhouse_gal -- we use the grass clippings from the lawn for mulch, we have a pretty big yard, bought a grass catcher for the riding mower, and what I can't use on the garden goes on the compost pile. I will say, though, that our grass has suffered somewhat from this plan; I had DH just use the "mulching attachment" a couple of times at the beginning of the mowing season to try to put a little organic stuff back on the lawn. Oh well, I can always make it into more garden if the grass peters out on us...

Honeybee -- yes, it was a long process of trying to figure out the ideal tomato cage, but these are working great for us! By the end of the season most of the plants will be up over the top and sticking out every which way, but at least they won't be blowing over when a stiff breeze comes up! We were previously using cages made from "rabbit fence" wire -- smaller holes at the bottom, larger at the top -- that I came to absolutely hate! For one thing, there were sharp ends on the wire and I would end up with gashes on my arms from picking, and if a tomato fell down inside the cage there was he** to pay to get ahold of it! These look so crazy big when I first plant the tomatoes, but every year the plants grow to fill them up!

edited to say -- too many exclamation marks!! sorry!! LOL

This message was edited Jul 10, 2010 10:51 PM

WW, we let the grass fall back onto our lawn rather than collecting it; we don't really have a lawn, it's more like a collection of green weeds, and it needs all the help we can get. Sometimes our son brings down clippings from his lawn, but not if he's added any weedkillers or pesticides. So we use salt hay for mulch, which works well.

Your tomato cages look great, but aren't they a pain to move around when you rotate crops, or don't you do that? We use bamboo poles, which we saw them do in France, and that works well for us but I do remove suckers and try to keep the plants tamed to some extent. Here's a view from last year's garden. We set up tripods with the poles 18" apart and plant a tomato at the base of each pole.

This message was edited Jul 11, 2010 7:34 AM

WW, your garden looks great!!!! I'm traveling to MI on Tuesday to bring back a great friend (like a mother to us) who broke her arm. She will recuperate with us, since I'm home 24/7 with my own mom. A fresh face in the house will be good for all of us.

GG, where do you get the salt hay? I have some green romas that I see. Seeds from you. Thank you. My beans are sparse also. I did just plant some more though after some BAD bunnies ate two plantings. They can't get to them now.

Jan, the romas are Cornue des Andes, one of my favorites. We get salt hay from a couple of places, one in Goshen and the other in Fairfield Twp. I'll send you a Dmail when Tony unearths the info. I am imagining that Fairfield would be closer for you?

Probably . Thank you.

GG -- I like your arrangement with the bamboo poles, very pretty! Is it hard to find the tomatoes on the inside part? With the big cages we have I don't do any pruning unless they get totally out of hand and we can't walk past them; the cages aren't as hard to move as they appear, most are just a single unit, and we have a couple of doubles, the group of 5 closest in the picture is one double and 3 singles. I used to space them out individually but found that it works just as well to group them up and it saves quite a bit of room -- although last year I had 12 of them lined up in one group and it was like a roadblock in the middle of the garden, not one of my better ideas. We use a heavy stake on each side of the group, pounded into the ground and then tied to the cage it's by -- all of the cages are also tied together -- to keep the wind from blowing them over.

WW, I don't have any trouble finding tomatoes, but then I do prune, so that makes a difference. I used to prune when we used old cedar poles, too, but this is a bit more compact. I have a friend who grew some of the same tomatoes I do, from starts I had given him, in big wire cages, with no pruning, and it looked as though he got more fruit but would have had more trouble finding and harvesting it. Here's another photo, also from last year:

GG, that's one beautiful looking garden!

Thanks, Stephanie. Being a painter I like to have it be visually pleasing as well as pleasing to the palate!! We love to sit out there and watch the bluebirds and hummingbirds and orioles feast on the bugs and nectar. When it's not too hot, of course!

I need to take some photos of it this year, too.

You should! Then, you should submit them to the photo contest if there's one this year.

Thanks for your faith in my photography, Stephanie! I do like painting better, though. Yet I don't paint gardens; go figure.

So, then... you must not live in the same cedar swamp that I do, lol. We had a really nice long period of time this year without mosquitoes because our spring was extremely dry, but now we've had Rain with a capital "R" and they are out in force! We added a sunroom onto our house a few years back for just that reason -- we have a nice deck that is basically unusable most of the summer! At least we do have a nice view of the garden and yard from the sunroom. Life in northern Michigan is much better with screens!

I couldn't agree more about how beautiful your garden is -- somehow mine always starts out looking very neat and lovely, then all of a sudden it becomes a veritible jungle; usually (but not always, I'm afraid) a jungle of the plants that I'm growing on purpose, not weeds -- and with our rather short growing season I can't really look on that as a bad thing.

Today I picked a really nice batch of baby beets and the greens are beautiful as well, haven't been attacked by any bugs so far, so that's a couple of meals' worth of veggies right there. And I officially declared asparagus season over -- although it *is* still sporadically coming up, we have too much other stuff to start eating now. (Although I just got back from grocery shopping and they wanted $4.19/lb for scrawny asparagus stalks -- I'm sure the other customers must have wondered why I was laughing hysterically...)

Now I'm off to thin my corn out a bit and maybe work on my very chive-overgrown herb garden -- my plan is pretty much to dig it up and start over!

Jan -- meant to add, have a safe trip to Michigan and back; your friend is very lucky to have *you* for a friend!

{{{hugs}}}

WW, my pictures don't show the parts of the garden that got away from me, like the strawberry patch. Almost no strawberries and now just a crop of weeds, even though I have tried to tend to it. It's hard when it's this hot and that part of the garden isn't productive.

Actually we live on a Pinelands cedar stream, albeit a navigable one, and have plenty of lowlying areas on our property that were swamps this spring. Alas, it has been so dry here for the past month and a half that we are finally in a fire-alert stage, so it sounds as though we're the opposite of you people. We have a screened-in porch at the entrance to our house, and it's where we do a lot of our living in the summer unless it's this hot and we have to retreat to the a/c-ed interior. We even put our Big Green Egg on the porch, because we do have mosquitoes, and earlier on in the season we have awful gnats.

My beets came up very spottily; I'll probably replant in a month to see if I can get some for the fall and early winter. But we had a very productive asparagus patch and I would have been laughing right with you at those outrageous prices!

Thank you, Pam. We feel we are the blessed ones for having her in our lives.

Usually I am a skeeter magnet, but as GG said, it has been very dry and they haven't been as much of a problem for me this year. One silver lining for all this dryness. Maybe after the rain yesterday, it will be a different story.

The vagaries of the weather just make me happy I'm not trying to make a living at this!

Truly! A coupleof yers ago a friend of mine was saying how he wished this was his full-time job - how fun to be doing something you love. I told him he was nuts - it's depressing enough as a hobby when you have the demons to battle. After last year's blight, he sent me a note telling me he takes it back!!!

Here it is another season. This is how my garden looks today:

How do you hold down the barrier cloth? I've tried using it but never have any luck with it!

I use anything that's heavy right now, but as soon as the wider remay gets here I'm going to staple 5' long poles to it on either side and then I can just roll it on and the weight of the poles will hold it down.

Yehudith, that's a good idea.

WoUld ya'll please talk a bit about the differences and uses of these hoop coverings, please?

I still don't know what Remay is or does.

Gymgirl - my covers are called: "Floating Row Covers". Recently I purchased something at WMart called "Garden Blankets" but have not used them as yet. I also have purchased something from Drip Works called: "Agribon," but haven't used that yet, either.

As to holding down row covers -- my neighbor recently gave me a pile of red bricks, so I've used them. Before that, I used what rocks we could find, or dirt. The photo shows row covers protecting peas from birds, being held down with bricks.

To hold the covers to the hoops, I used clothes pins purchased from WMart.

This message was edited Mar 19, 2011 11:16 AM

My new Remay/Agribond/row cover just came from Johnny's Select Seeds. Its lovely. Its very wide and very thin and was less expensive than from the other places. As soon as the weather settles I'm going to trade out the heavier stuff I have for this and will keep it on all season. The only thing I'll have to uncover is the eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, squash and melons.

Gymgirl

Do you know about the nets they have for playpens and strollers to keep the bugs off the babies when they're outside? Well rowcover/remay/agribond are the samething for plants. You can use the heavy weight to keep your plants "warm" in the fall, winter and early spring and the really light stuff in the summer to keep your plants from suffering the ravages of the bugs in the summer. Here, this will give you lots of information. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILPq8Bc2g90

They have lots of videos with lots of info, but this is specific to row covers.

Hey, just started reading the veggie gardening forum (don't know why it took me so long...) and I'm so glad I saw this about row covers. Are you sure they can be used here in Houston in the summer? It gets very hot & humid here. Guess I'll click the link & learn. Thanks for sharing this. Also, great idea with using poles to both hold down the covers & store them when not in use.
HoneybeeNC--Fabulous area to grow your veggies. Happy planting!

Bariolo

You probably want to use the lightest you can find or the shade netting.