Posted By FarmerJ on August 17, 2009

Boy, have I been remiss in keeping you current on our gardening adventures!  My excuses?  I have two of them, actually.  One, because most nights I’ve been too exhausted to even formulate a coherent sentence.  It’s been a choice between harvesting and preserving the many fruits of our labor, or blogging about it.  There’s really only one right choice there, right?  And, two, because my anal-retentive tenancy has gotten in my own way.  I haven’t figured out a ‘good enough’ way to keep things organized in a manner that is easy to follow, and interesting enough to hopefully keep you coming back.

I realize if I wait too much longer, I’ll be trying to figure out how to tell you about the 2010 gardens.  So, I’m just going to dive in and hopefully make some kind of sense out of it all for you.  If I seem to him-haw and teeter back and forth, bear with me as it’s just the anal-retentive side going into convulsions because the spontaneity side is trying like the dickens to leak out a little.

So!  Here we go!  This is our Square Foot Garden.  It is our original 19′ x 40′ plot and the only plot we had last year.  We did a combination of square foot and traditional row gardening last year.  It was a fabulous learning experience…and just what it took to give us the ‘gardening bug!’

This year, there are fifteen 4′ x 4′ squares and one 4′ x 16′ rectangle.  Six of the 4′ x 4′ beds contain the strawberry plants and the 4′ x 16′ bed contains the asparagus.  One of the six beds of strawberries and one row of asparagus were planted last year, so when this photo was taken (in early June) we’d already been enjoying some delicious treasures ~ the strawberry cage Darling Husbie and I built did a wonderful job at keeping those hungry Robins from nabbing them before we could!

The remaining nine 4′ x 4′ beds contain our celery, onions, lettuce, carrots, spinach, radishes, hot peppers and bell peppers.  Again, when this photo was taken, things were thriving inside that little magical fenced area.

A week prior to this photo, I’d clipped the green onion tops back.  Here, they were already needing trimmed again.  The lettuce had nearly filled in the entire square and was ready for picking.

Everything I’ve read about growing celery has told me how difficult it is to grow, so much that I was leery about even trying it.  I was beginning to believe what I’d read as I witnessed how finicky those little celery plant babies were under the near-perfect growing conditions of the Indoor Growing System (my grow light station Darling Husbie set up for me downstairs).  I put those babies in the ground and two weeks later, they really took hold.

So now that we’re in the middle of August, we’ve had some successes and failures out there ~ failures resulting from lack of care, I’m ashamed to say.  While I’m at it, I’ll confess my disappointment in myself for letting this plot ‘get away’ from me.  The grass has grown up from the mulch in the pathways, and it’s really trying to take over.  At one point, it almost did ~ thankfully the boys put the half-kibosh on that for me.  There is still some weeding to be done out there in order to reclaim it…something I must simply get done.

The failures?  Well, the celery, I think.  While it hasn’t died, it hasn’t really grown any more, either.  The stocks are about 6″ – 7″ tall and they never really filled out.  And, to make another confession [boy, I should sleep like a baby tonight after all my confessions, eh?!], I haven’t taken the time to snap a stock off to taste it.  I need to do that.  My guess is that it’s going to be bitter.  I’ll report back on that.

Another failure was the radish.  Well, to be fair, the radish did really, really well.  It is the gardener who failed to pick the radish before they got too big, too bitter and flowered.  Now, I read somewhere that some gardeners actually plant radish and leave them to flower in order to expel squash borers away from their squash.  That would be a really good excuse for me ~ except that my squash are located at the other end of the yard, on the other side of the house.

The Romaine and Black Seeded Simpson lettuce did really well, also.  It seemed like it went from just large enough to pick (like in the photos above) to 2′ tall and having bolted in about three days.  It’s weird, but it seems like that’s how things grow out there ~ like it’s just hangin’ on, hangin’ on, hangin’ on, and then it will just explode over night.  So anyway, we didn’t get to enjoy the lettuce nearly as much as I’d hoped.

Things that have done superbly well have been the asparagus, strawberries and the onions.  I am so pleased with the onions, I wish I’d planted more than the 100 – 120 I did.  We use a lot of onions.  We love onions!

The verdict is still out on the carrots.  They seem to be doing a lot better than those I planted last year.  The peppers are still questionable.  We’ve only gotten two hot peppers, and we haven’t gotten any bell peppers.  But, last year the pepper plants were some of those that did the hangin’ on then exploding routine.  I’m hoping that is the case this year, as well.  I’ll be sad if we don’t get any peppers!  And, the spinach?  Well, it’s there, like the celery.  Some of it grew, and then it just stopped.  It hasn’t died ~ and I haven’t harvested it.

The weather is supposed to be cooler this week.  I have a few less projects on my plate this week, too.  I’m thinking this is a good opportunity to spend some time in this plot and give it a little love.  Maybe then I won’t be too ashamed to take some current photos to at least show you how much the asparagus and strawberries have grown!

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