50 tomato plants out of 23 varieties were planted in three rows, the Prudens Purple plant perished in a terrible accident. Plants were seeded just 42 days prior.
A row of tomatoes sharing a bed with 15 eggplants. Eggplants take a couple weeks to germinate but they size up quickly once they get their true leaves.
Sweet peppers and the mildly hot Poblano pepper.
Di Cicco, Waltham, and Summer Purple broccoli. Di Cicco are the smallest plants of the three varieties. Leeks will be sharing the broccoli bed.
In the middle are 3 beds seeded with bush green beans, bush limas, Purple Hull Pinkeye summer peas, and summer squash.
The empty bed next to the tomatoes will have a trellis for cucumbers, pole beans, luffa, bitter melon, Delicata squash, and Papaya squash.
The garden is finally tilled on May 4th! Yayyyyy! And now the planting and watching things grow.
A few people raise rabbits around here, so rabbit manure is available for free if you shovel it yourself or $5 per 50 pound bag. And our city provides mulch for $5 a truckload and compost for $15 a truckload. A truckload ranges between 1000-2000 pounds depending on who is working the front end loader, but they're usually a bit more generous with the more expensive compost.
On May 7th the tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers were planted out. And then on May 8th the broccoli was planted out, and the bush beans and Pinkeye Purple Hull peas and summer squash were seeded. It started raining while I was planting the broccoli bed and then proceeded to rain for 3 days. Hopefully the beans don't end up rotting in the ground.
The leeks still need to be planted in the broccoli bed, and the last bed still needs to be trellised and seeded. Then the whole garden can be mulched. The flea beetles are already starting to decimate the eggplant leaves, so I dusted them with food grade diatomaceous earth since it's going to be dry the next few days.
We were going to till and plant the old garden space, but there's just too many other things going on. There won't be a big stand of corn, and no winter squash or melons. And I ended up giving away a few dozen plants to coworkers and friends.
4 comments:
Your seedlings look fantastic for such a short growth time 42 days. Great bargains you get on rabbit manure, compost,mulch! I would love it if we had that deal here!
Pear Squash, I have to look that up and see what type squash that is.
Aphids are what tackled my eggplants almost right away! Little devils are most annoying :O)
What a huge garden, that was a lot of work getting that planted. Your transplants look huge. Hopefully those eggplants are big enough to weather the flea beetle attacks if the DE doesn't work.
Hi Texan,
The seedlings got big fast once I got them outside where it gets full sun 8 hours a day. Most of the mulch and compost the city produces is from tree waste, which is good considering so many people spray their lawns here.
I actually meant papaya squash:
http://www.evergreenseeds.com/orsquaspapsw.html
Hi David,
There's still a lot of planting to be done, but I do wish we had a milder spring so we could grow all those lovely spring greens and peas like you're able to.
The row covers you made look great. I've used agribon before and it works well for excluding insects, but it did get amazingly warm underneath that floating row cover.
Post a Comment