The last couple of weeks has brought very encouraging times for our garden and has been keeping us very busy. Almost everything we planted has done well so far. We did have complete failures for black beans, kidney beans and oregano. We are going to plant some additional cucumbers where the beans were. As for the oregano, we tried replanting additional seeds – still nothing grew – so I bought a plant. Hopefully that will solve the problem. For the success record so far, ahem… onions, potatoes, corn, brussel sprouts, broccoli, peas, spinach, 3 varieties of tomatoes, sweet peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, watermelon, halloween pumpkins, sweet pumpkins for pie, cilantro, basil and catnip! We are hoping to have an enjoyable summer harvesting all of this.
That is not to say we haven’t had some issues in addition to the bunny issue. We had a very late frost and we believe that might have killed the beans and oregano. Our little oak tree has some frost damage on two leaves (3 other leaves look ok). Sadly, the tiny walnut tree did not make it.
The biggest problem right now is what I think is flea beetles. They have primarily attacked the potatoes, but there is some evidence of them on the peppers. We are using Neem oil and it appears that is helping a lot.
We are astounded at how well the brussel sprouts and broccoli are doing. They have grown into very solid plants especially when considering how extremely tiny their seeds are. Each seed is about the size of a pinhead. One of the broccoli plants tried to bolt with like two florets. The instructions I read were to pinch those off and hope for the best. None of the other plants had started growing florets yet. Here is a picture of one of the brussel sprouts.
Our pea plants are almost ready to begin harvesting. We have many pods but they have not plumped up yet. Check ’em out. A few things I have noticed is this variety can actually stand up by itself, they love being in the raised beds and they don’t mind being close to each other. Once the peas are done we will be planting green beans in the three raised beds. Next year we will plant a lot more in the raised beds. (One can never plant enough peas!)
Our spinach was delicious, but it is solidly bolting now so we pulled it all out of its raised bed and planted carrots in its place. We learned to plant earlier, pick leaves sooner and more often – but still for the first year – total spinach success.