Justin Wilson!

I'm envious of you urban gardeners. Small, neat, easy. We have some 9800 square feet in cultivation, vegetables and fruit trees. It's beginning to feel like a bloody farm. Work, work, work.

Will try to post some "produce porn" on Flickr tonight.

:-)

I threw some plants in the ground last spring. The okra did great, and the tomatoes grew but did not produce any fruit. Something keeps eating the bell and poblano peppers, but the jalapenos were left alone (and quite hot). At one point, some rats were eating the leaves of the pepper plants, until I set some traps.

It's been a hot and dry summer, and I really didn't put much effort into it. I just wanted to try a few things to get a little experience. Next year I'll get an earlier start to stay ahead of the heat. I'm also going to try some automatic watering, and companion planting.

In case anybody was thinking it's easy, I've learned that it isn't.

If you cook it any other way than frying it can be slimy. Of course if your X was a bad cook having your food slide down without a chance to taste it might have been a good thing.

So far we've been having a great year in the garden. Our garden is about 90' by 90' excluding the wheat.

I successfully grew a patch of spring red wheat - sowed 10 lbs and harvested about 50 lbs - and my harvesting skills are lacking as I am sure that I was also seeding the next crop at the same time.

We planted 6 different varieties of potatos to see what would grow well here, and have had a great harvest still ongoing.

we had a great run of peas and beans, zuccinni and summer squash.

I'm pretty sure our corn cross polinated and the sweet corn went straight to starchy, but the dent corn still is looking good. The sweet corn will be going to the pigs.

We have melons galore too - you'ld have to ask the DW which are which, cause I can't keep up with the varieties she planted.

Grapes, asparagus, and artichokes we started this year for future years all did well too.

Our tomatos have been off from last year's volume, but our neighbors all seem to be in the same predicament - a late frost really stunted them this season. The frost also trashed several of our fruit trees.

We've been dehydrating, pickling and preserving as much as we can.

I tried growing red brandywine tomatoes this year. Not a single tomato. The flowers bloomed and mysteriously fell off without setting any fruit.

- Tomatoes have done very well (heirloom, very yummy, had to freeze a bunch since I didn't feel like canning until I could do it once)
- Cucumbers died, probably due to lack of water while I was on travel
- Carrots were actually decent this year (raised beds have nice deep, soft soil)
- Green beans were very nice. I grow a combination of bush beans in the garden and pole beans in a teepee. Bush gives one or two harvests

Early crops (broccoli, cauliflower) didn't do so well, mostly from neglect. The peas did pretty well, but the kids usually eat them off the vine before they can be brought inside.

About ready to plan for another round of cool weather crops for the fall.

I use the square foot gardening (http://www.squarefootgardening.com/) approach and can grow quite a bit in 2 4x4 blocks.

Holy cow, lots of scrambling in the garden last night. Sudden change of forecast -- frost warning!!

This comes after sunset, so DW and I are outside with headlamps, harvesting what we can and covering things we care about most with old sheets, towels and tarps.

The greenhouse with tomatoes and peppers had already been closed in. Root veggies were hilled up and will be fine.

I was up at 5:30 a.m. with a water hose and sprinkler head, trying to wet everything down and keep the frost from forming. Last ditch effort. In the low spots the water would start to freeze as soon as I turned my back. We'll see if it did any good.

Not as dramatic as hurricane season, I guess. We often get a few frosts and then weeks of nice Indian summer. Different sort of "disaster" -- starry sky and dead calm, frozen grass crunching under your feet, and a summer's work on the line.

I enlarged my garden this year from the five 4x10' and 4x10' beds to one about 30x80'. Too much at once. And it wasn't helped by my brother, who decided that he needed to rototill the neighbor's garden before mine. It wouldn't have been so bad if the tiller hadn't broken down, and then got a flat tire before he could get to my garden.

I've also been having trouble with the neighbor's Mastiff getting into my yard. Once here, she panics and knocks down the gate or the fence and lets the chickens in. They've scratched away much of the mulch without me knowing it. They did a real number on the young watermelon plants.

I'm still having trouble with my soil. I put the lime on too late to do much good. I had intended to bring in several loads of composted dairy manure, then lost the tranny in the pickup. So I was reduced to dragging home some horse manure in my decrepit old cart (wheels but no tires) from the end of the street. The street is longer than I thought.

One batch of potatoes is ready to harvest, the other is still green. The tomatoes and peppers are way behind, due to an unusually cool summer. Some cucumbers so far, but not overwhelming. A few zucchini -- unusual...

I planted some melons, but what is growing doesn't look like what I planted. Funny-looking for melons.

Beware harvesting your own seeds. LABEL THEM immediately. The English shelling pea bed somehow turned into sugar snap peas, 6' LONG and sprawling all over instead of 18" tall and tidy. The chickies didn't help that little situation, either.

Planted all the beds and realized too late that I had forgotten the leeks. The poor things are strugging in a 1x3' nursery bed, planted too close for comfort. Maybe I'll get one pot of potato/leek soup out of them, as they're only the size of green onions.

The butternut squash that did so great last year aren't doing so well this year. Again, the lack of warmth, maybe. Or the soil.

One good thing this year: no bugs. Fewer bugs of all kinds since I got the chickies. Some of the weeds they avoid like poison, but they do a good job on the bugs.

I had decided on doing a fall garden, then suddenly got a P/T job AND my regular job picked up, so maybe I can start something on my next days off.

More manure. Plant cover crops. Let the 4-hen demolition crew in after harvest to clean up. Start some fall greens and sweet peas.

"In case anybody was thinking it's easy, I've learned that it isn't."

That's the truth!

Sue

I will say the radishes did not do too well...

My youngest came inside and was all proud to tell me that she had weeded the garden for me.

Hard to get angry at a 4 year old who wants to help, and yet she had carefully pulled every radish seedling out of the ground...