donation

Today I donated a big box full of fresh vegetables to a local food pantry. Squash, cucumbers, broccoli, broccolini, bulb fennel, green onions, beets, radish, kale, peas, and parsley. It's a great feeling to grow enough food to give it away.

today's harvest

indoor gardening on a rainy summer day

A dreary, rainy day here. Cool for us (upper 50's). I missed getting outside to work and having sunshine. But I know my gardens loved the rain. We got just under an inch of rain - a steady all-day rain.

Instead of outdoor gardening, I "gardened" inside.

- I've been meaning to clean out and organize my little room off the garage that I use for indoor gardening, honey, canning, and root cellar. It's all organized now.

- I also planted a tray of fall greens. They are listed on my 2017 planting list (the link is on my on side bar). Lots of lettuce, arugula, broccoli, napa, and escarole.

garden work: weeds, weeds, weeds

Today I spent a couple hours working in my community garden plot. Where do all these weeds come from? I think I pull them and then I turn around and they have grown up again.

Weeding takes most of my garden time now, but I do other fun stuff too.

 (Someday I'll do a post on all the different ways to weed, and maybe even one on all the different types of weeds I grow in my gardens.)

Today's garden work (besides weeding):
- Remove salt marsh hay mulch from my garlic bed (I harvested the garlic last week) and put it on my recently planted seedlings (cabbage, Brussels spouts, and broccoli)
- Remove lower leaves from tomato plants and weed well around them to maximize air flow - in our damp and humid summer, the plants have a very large amount of early blight and leaf spot
- Harvest summer squash, cucumbers, dill, and cut flowers (tall blue ageratum and nigella)
- Plant a few winter radish seeds, watermelon and black radish - it may be too warm for these now but I'll find out
- Train butternut squash and cucumber vines up their trellises
- Begin to cut off and compost potato plants that are all mostly done (brown and dry) now
- Water
- Spray brassica plants (broccoli, cabbage, kale, and Brussels sprouts) with spinosad (for cabbage worms).

backyard garden

I used my cell phone for panorama photos of my backyard garden. It would be really cool to have curved raised beds like these photos.

buying fall seeds

I'd like to plant some carrot seeds soon for late fall harvest. I'm out, so I checked a couple local nurseries. One is sold out of all carrot seed, the other has sold out of all of their seed for the season. Few gardeners plant crops for fall. So I placed a nice big order from Johnny's Seeds. Five varieties of orange carrots and a purple carrot, a black radish, a small Chinese cabbage, purple stock flowers, red salanova lettuce, pickling cukes and teddy bear sunflower seed for next year, and dubuisson endive.

Fall crops I've already planted are Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and of course lettuce that I am planting about every 3 weeks. I've also planted Belgian endive (wiltloof) that I am looking forward to trying for the first time this year.

my first summer squash

This is a great, early, and very and prolific yellow summer squash variety. Yellow Multipik. I harvested my first one today.

boating

When we're not gardening, we're out boating! Suzie (4 yrs old) is in yellow and Charley, my BIG puppy (10 mo) is in red. We're on out way out onto the pond.

today's harvest

OMG!! What am I going to do with all this lettuce? I have a a bumper crop this year.

spring in my backyard garden

I haven't posted many of my photos recently, so I'm putting together some collections. This is my backyard garden from early April until yesterday. Spring.



By the end of summer, there won't be any dirt showing.

summer!

My backyard garden on the first day of summer.


(The summer solstice 2017 in Northern Hemisphere was at 12:24 AM EST on Wednesday, June 21.)

today's harvest

Please go to Apple Store for the current update on Skippy's Calendar app. It corrects the bug on the fall date changer. Yes, it's time to start thinking about fall planting. I planted my Brussels sprouts a couple days ago. I'm hoping to have some for Thanksgiving this year. It seems pretty far ahead to plan for that!

tomato seedlings are in

My tomato seedlings are all transplanted out into my garden now. Yeah!! Finally. It's turning point for me.

For many things, gardens included, preparation is most of the effort. By the time my tomato seedlings go in, my soil has been amended, the seedlings raised and hardened off, and my tomato supports are up.

But more than that, tomatoes are my big summer crop, and once they go in, all my spring beds have been prepared and planted, and my garden design changes have been done. This year I laid down new wood chips on garden paths and reseeded grass on the main path. I emptied and turned compost bins and rebuilt the one at my community plot. I've harvested greens so far, like lettuce, spinach, and arugula, but planting tomatoes makes me hungry for summer vegetables.

I outdid myself by planting 28 tomato seedlings between my home and community garden plots this year. Plus another eight for my mom in her garden. They are about 60% slicers and the rest sauce varieties. Mostly heirlooms, a few hybrids. I over planted and have 32 seedlings left over. My neighbors and fellow community gardeners always seem happy to take the extras.

So it's a time to celebrate. A toast to the coming summer vegetables. A hope for a productive season. And a rest with feet up (briefly) after the spring's work and before that of summer.

App update, bugs fixed. Please go to the Apple Store and download the update.