Lawn seed

We pulled up sod, roto-tilled, and raked-in Eco-Lawn seed on a 10x20ft strip behind our house around November 28. Here's a picture of our first watering.

We hope that this lawn will be weed resistant and require less water. If it looks good this Spring, maybe we'll use it in more places of our yard, along with native and drought resistant plants.

Guavas

We have a pineapple guava bush growing next to our fence. Thought it was just a hedge until these things started to fall off into the lawn around mid November.

This year, the individual guavas are pretty large and sweet. One was about the size of a lemon, but sweeter, of course.

Garden Wrap Up

Still growing some Arugula in the Earth Box. I expect I can continue through November, until we have frost at night. But the patio is warm in the mornings, and may be protected from frost, so I'll give it a try as far into the winter as possible.




Here is my last tomato plant. We ate all those red tomatoes in arugula salads during all last week (October 25-30). Some animal (raccoon?) helped finish off some of the tomatoes we didn't get to.





Today, I pulled up the tomato plant and chopped it up for the compost bin. I was so happy and excited to see actual compost in the bin! This is the first time I "turned" the compost. It is not a "hot" compost pile, but it is still compost never the less!

Fall Clean-Up

The small garden boxes did well this year. There is still asparagus growing in the back planter, but the front two are cleared out for next year.

I raked into the front two planter boxes some compost crop mix seed from Bountiful Gardens. It is a mix of wheat, vetch, rye and fava beans. It is supposed to fix nitrogen into the soil.

The large planter box did poorly. This is the second year in a row. I pulled up the plants and, again, there is a grub infestation. It seems the Japanese beetles will reproduce here every year. However, I cannot blame the grubs for the poor spring, because they were not there until August this year, because I manually picked them all out before doing the spring transplant.


I suspect the soil is diseased (blight?), because of the black spots on my tomato leaves. But just to make sure it is not lack of nutrition, I tested the soil today. The pH test reports the soil is still 6.5 (slightly acid). That is the same pH I measured in 2005, which was one of my best years.

My plan is to bring in new dirt and rebuild the planter box this spring. No sense in putting compost seed into this dirt.

Canning

Cooked down the last two to three weeks of ripe tomatoes to make 6 pints of marinara sauce. My own recipe simply adds onion, olive oil, garlic, red wine and spices to the tomato sauce. I like to reheat it with sliced mushrooms and use it over pasta with Parmesan cheese.

Old Garden Pictures

Here is a link to my garden pictures from 2005 to 2008:
http://www.pbase.com/ercarlso/garden

Ripe Fruits

Harvest has been a bit late this year. First batch of melons came during the end of July, and continued for a month. Second batch seems to be coming.






Have had cherry tomatoes for several weeks, but this is the first big batch of normal tomatoes. Cooked these down into sauce.

Interesting Harvest

Picked this funny radish for salad today. I saw the top of the radish poking out of the dirt, but when I pulled it up, two more radishes were chained along with it! All of them tasted very good.

New Growth

Two weeks ago (June 27), I pulled up the snow peas and directly sowed these "Blue Lake" green beans from Bountiful Gardens. They are already looking pretty vigorous!

Also harvested some radish (not shown). Also started harvesting nectarines this week (July 10).

Transplanted 4 "Purple Passion" Asparagus seedlings purchased from Yamagami's today (July 11). They are USDA Organic, grown at Sweetwater Nursery in Sebastopol, CA. Supposed to be "more tender" than green types of asparagus.




Earth (Box) Day: July 11.

Decided to give my new EarthBox a try. It was a gift from Horace. The left picture is after filling with dirt. The right picture is after everything was planted. Here are "Mixed Greens Lettuce" seedlings I purchased from Yamagami's today. Also some "Rocket Arugula" I grew from Burpee seed.

Some Progress

Plants have not been growing very well this summer, although there is some progress. Right now, I think the issue is not very deep soil in the main bed, and also a failure to rotate crops from the previous years. This zucchini plant has only yielded one so far. This is highly unusual for zucchini.



This flowering squash on the lower left should be vining out across the rocks by now, but seems content to stay small. The Radish on the lower right looks just fine, but it is in a newer bed that does not seem to lack nutrients (or depth).













Tomato plant on the left is a hybrid I grew from Burpee seed, and put into the planter box on the North side of the house. Seems to be growing well despite a late start. The Cherry Tomato (below) is a weak looking plant, but still gave some fruit, yay!










Again, we have some nice looking melons (two kinds shown here) coming from the newer planter box with newer dirt. These seem to be doing fine.













Cute little corn growing in the main bed looks good, but is a bit stunted. It isn't any taller than me.

These pictures were taken around July 1, 2009.

Early Harvest

Picked a second batch of snow peas for dinner tonight. These are Oregon Sugar Pod II Snow Peas from Bountiful Gardens Seeds in Willits, CA.

Late Spring

State of the garden by end of May, 2009 is good.


Melon plants seem to be thriving. These include Crenshaw, Honeydew and Cantaloupe.

Watermelon plant isn't keeping up. In the past, I grew it with the other melons, but it got crowded out. Now I grow it in a separate planter. It's a late-bloomer, but usually reliable to produce something by September.


Zucchini plant has a flower, but no squash yet!



Tomato plants also have flowers, but are still small plants. Not using the cage supports much yet.

New artichoke plant is growing in it's own little planter box too. Still small, but this one is already looking better than the one I attempted to grow last year.


Last but not least, I harvested a bok choi for stir fry dinners all last week.

Transplants

Garden Plan

I used xfig to draw up a plan of what I would grow before I purchased seeds in February. Basically everything except the strawberries were transplanted on April 25th. Hard to tell from the photograph this is the plan. Everything has room to grow!

The watermelon, butternut and pumpkins are vines that will spread out over the gravel on the west side of the raised bed.

Grubs

Preparing the raised beds

I've been using these raised beds for a while, but two years ago, I had a Japanese beetle grub infestation. I didn't know how destructive they could be so I ignored them (the "organic" thing to do, right?). Well, I ended up with very low yields last year and sickly plants.

This year, I decided to solve the problem. I dug all of the dirt out of my smaller planter and replaced it with new dirt. But the larger planter box was going to be more difficult, so my husband built me a frame for a 1/4 inch steel mesh. I dug out all the dirt and sifted it through the mesh. This helped me to pick out all of the grubs and put them into the trash. I hope to finish the job this weekend.

Seedlings (and weeds) thriving

The seedlings were thriving on April 10th. I started all of them from seed back in mid to late March.

The center container has three types of tomatoes, using Burpee seed: Sugar Snack Cherry Tomato, Roma VF, Bush Big-Boy.

Center back container has Country Gentleman Shoe-peg Corn, from Bountiful Gardens.

Far left container has Spearmint Herb and far right container (front) is Imperial Star Artichoke, both from Burpee. Right back container is Black Beauty Zucchini, from Bountiful Gardens.



Some other seedlings were ready to transplant outside. Those include mostly Melon plants: Burpee Early Crenshaw, Orange Sorbet Honeydew, and Honey Bunch Cantaloupe. Also one Bok (Joi) Choi plant.