How Does Your Vegetable / Fruit Garden Grow? 2018

I just got 6 more parsley plants today. Hope that’s enough for everyone. And I hope I get to see the actual butterfly’s that I’ve been feeding !

Last week I harvested the first tomatoes I’ve been able to grow in 8 years! Just a handful of cherry tomatoes but it feels great to get then before the squirrels!

2 Likes

My tomatoes have almost all been eaten by critters…so sad. The day they start to turn from green someone spends the night pigging out.

The new artichoke plant grew one artichoke this year.

1 Like

Wow, nice! I want one too! What is the diameter of your pot?

Naf, the pot is probably 20 inches wide. I stuck the artichoke in there last year because the other veggie pots were full. The plan is to put it into one of the wine barrel pots at the end of summer so it can spread its roots.

Our garden has been doing really well. In particular the lettuce crop has been plentiful so far-- butter lettuce and a mesclun mix. Our herbs are all going wild and the sugar snaps, though we got the seeds in late, look like they’ll be producing any day now. Our two tomato plants have done something I’ve never seen before, which is produce offshoots in neighboring squares. We haven’t had a lot of hot sun here in NY yet but the forecast for the upcoming days looks promising for them. Cukes and pole beans are all plugging along. We have a ton of wildlife and seem to have kept most of the critters at bay with various methods of fortification but we had one casualty- my husband wanted sunflowers and the little marauders (birds I think) dug up the seeds I planted. Just those, nothing else! I may try again with some netting over them. We also have a weed problem in the sugar snap squares that has to be dealt with.

3 Likes

What a pretty set up.

Thank you!!!

Oh! Maybe that is what happened to the sunflower seeds my son and his friends planted for me. We couldn’t figure out why they never came up. The onions and potatoes came up fine.

The seeds were very neatly dug (pecked?) up. I planted them in the center of 4 squares with 4 pole bean seeds around each sunflower seed. Literally nothing was touched except the sunflower seeds! The chicken wire we have around each bed keeps out bunnies and chipmunks (I think…) and the squirrels dont seem interested in our garden, just the bird feeder nearby. So I’m blaming the birds…

1 Like

Here’s a few of my first plants to set fruit.







![IMG_20180628_182147|525x700]

Hopefully the BER on the Poblano is just temporary.

1 Like

Harvested my garlic today. Quite an aroma at first, moved it to the basement in consideration of those that don’t love the smell:)

5 Likes

A good friend of mine tried the fish heads, egg shells, etc. thing for tomatoes a few years ago & I don’t recall her thinking it made much difference & she grows over a dozen different heirlooms in Glen Ellen & San Mateo.

Good to know your friend’s experience, thanks!

The one thing I noticed a big difference with the vegetable garden was horse manure. It took awhile to fully break down (like, over a year) but it’s all gung ho right now.

Poblanos still going!

3 Likes

Lucky you, shrinkrap! The peppers here did terrible with the dark rainy season. The Peruvian Aji Amarillo plants fell apart, despite staking, because of the low light. So, they were a bust. Sweet Cheese-type and Corno di Toros had poor yield, though the plants were five feet tall. The one pepper that did great was Carolina Reaper! I pickled 1 1/2 gallons and gave the rest away. Hottest pepper on the planet, so of limited usefulness.

I hope Virginia’s hot and sunny normal summers are not replaced with the freaky dark, rainy, flash-flood filled weather we got last season. That would be a devastating climate shift, which has never been recorded here.

1 Like

8 posts were merged into an existing topic: Let’s talk about smoking

Better luck next year! I have SO many hot chinense peppers in my freezer I only grow one plant a year now, at least intentionally. Some of those rocatillo where hotter than planned, and those chinesnse plants are still going as well .

Here they are in my makeshift hoop house.


11 posts were merged into an existing topic: 2019 veggie gardens