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.