Worked on Fence and Garden

Today we fenced in the back side of the garden. This was the most difficult part because of the slope. I am so happy that it is done. We have also begun killing off the grass in the pathways. We are using a tarp and kiddie pool in two areas of the garden to kill off the grass. Here's a picture of the whole garden with the new section of the fence in the center back:

Now for a quick update. The asparagus have sent up some new spears which is great. We have filled in the container with the last portion of soil, so our asparagus are fully planted!

Our strawberries have been turning red. We now have chicken wire up to prevent the birds from getting the strawberries before we do.

We have had a couple of sunny warm days and so most of the plants in our garden have thrived.

We clipped back the bottom leaves from our tomato vines so they do not touch the ground. We are hoping to minimize the diseases and know this helps.

We have harvested our radishes. We have had rather peculiar radishes. The seem to not have fully developed or something is in the soil eating them. We had quite a few duds too.

We noticed last week that our pepper plants were kinda yellow in the leaves. We decided to conduct a little experiment. We watered the pepper on the left with what we are calling Mittleider water because we have dissolved a tablespoon of Mittleider weekly feed fertilizer into a gallon of water. We did this because the weekly feed was not dissolving when we watered the garden and so we thought about using it like a liquid fertilizer.

We watered the pepper of the left with Mittleider water and the one on the right with regular water. Since doing it the plant on the left has greened up and looks happier than the one on the right.

Here's a closeup. Notice the difference in the greenness of the leaves. The one in the foreground did not get the Mittleider water.

Happy with these results we expanded the experiment and watered half of the bean plants with Mittleider water. We will post the results as we continue this experiment.

Ten Picture Garden Update

Just a quick update on the garden. I figured the pictures tell a better story. Suffice it to say that things are growing well. We have added trellises to our new containers and more soil in our asparagus bed.

Here's a picture of said asparagus bed:

Here are our strawberries. They are doing really well. I'm happy that the leaf disease is no longer a problem. We fixed it by removing the infected leaves and any leaved that were lying on the soil.

More fruit on our plants:

Our beans have come up. Our tomatoes are growing higher in their cages. The peppers are doing well. They seem to be a little yellow though. The broccoli is doing well too!

Here's a close-up of the tomatoes:

This next picture is the top half of the box because our sweet peas are climbing higher and I can't fit it all in one photo. We had to help the sweet peas find the trellis.

Here's the bottom half of the same container. The beans are coming up and the radishes are ready for picking.

Here we have our transplanted watermelon and cucumbers. We have some spinach, zucchini, and peppers in this container.

This is our vine tomatoes which are doing well. There are flowers on most of our plants.

Here's the same box but from a different vantage. Our herbs are doing great!

End of May 2011

Today I thinned our raspberries. I noticed some strange substance on the canes. It looked like spit bubbles (I can't think of a better way to describe it). I am not sure what is causing it. Here's a blurry close-up of one cane with.

We have strawberries forming on our plants! I can't wait for fresh strawberries.

Here's our asparagus box. The asparagus ferns are getting tall and appear to be going to seed.

Our sweet peas are climbing the trellis. Our radish plants are doing well too! We transplanted some peppers in the front of this box.

Here's a closeup of the peas.

And a closeup of the radishes.

Here are more pepper plants and our determinate tomatoes. We also planted some beans in this box.

Here's a closeup of the tomatoes.

Here's our cucumbers, peppers, and what's left of our spinach.

Finally here are our indeterminate tomatoes and herbs. We have cilantro, basil, oregano, and thyme. We also have transplanted zucchini and eggplant into this box.

Garden Update

Today we worked some more on the fence. Here's a picture of what it looks like up to this point:

The last section in the back has a difficult slope that needs to be worked on. In the front we need to put up a gate with an arbor.

Today we also transplanted cucumbers and planted spinach. This is our strawberry bed.

Here is our asparagus bed. We have a couple of spears that have turned into ferns.

This bed has our sweet peas in the back, our radishes to the center left, and grass clippings throughout the rest of the bed.

Here are (going left to right) two brocolli plants and our determinate tomatoes: Belstar and Rutgers.

And in this bed we have our indeterminate tomatoes (Cherokee Purple, San Marzano, Isis, & Red Grape), our Italian parsley, and basil. We also have our carrots and thyme and oregano in this bed.

Our tomato plants didn't like the cold weather.

Our blueberry bushes have yellow leaves. This may be due to an iron deficiency or too much water. It has rained all of last week so I wouldn't be surprised if it is too much water.

Tomatoes, Herbs, and First Harvest

Today we went to the farmers market and purchased tomato starts. We purchased San Marzano, Rutgers, Cherokee Purple, Bellstar, Red Grape, and Isis Candy tomatoes. We have purchased oregano, lemon thyme, and basil.

We applied another helping of Mittleider Weekly Feed to our plants. The asparagus plants have sprouted up from most of our roots. We only had one of the sixteen not take off (which we replaced with some spare roots).

Our strawberries look wonderful. We also harvested some rhubarb. This was our first harvest. A comparable bunch sold for $3.50 at the farmer's market this week.

Another Nice Weekend for Work

Luckily we had another great weekend for weather.  Mike did a lot more digging and got 5 more posts in.  We also got 2 more fence pieces up.  Our spinach, peas, radish are up and growing.  Mike put weekly feed on the broccoli and peas.  I'm glad things are working out even though it's been wetter and colder than than normal.

This is one of the big rocks Mike had to dig out of a post hole

The garden as of Saturday night.  Lots of progress

Busy Saturday

April has been the wettest recorded April in local history. Consequently we have not been able to get out in the yard. Today, however, we finally had good weather.

We began putting up the fence around the garden. We dug four post holes so far and constructed and installed two fence panels. We are using this fence design, however we have added a skirt of chicken wire at the bottom to foil the rabbits and ground hogs attempts to burrow under the fence.

The first of many fence posts

Getting out the new saw

What we got down the 1st Saturday

We planted our asparagus crowns today and sowed carrots and radishes directly into the soil. We also de-winterized our blueberry bushes.

Asparagus crowns

Strawberry Diagnosis

I read that a lot of gardening is observing your plants. They will let you know when they are hungry, thirst or sick. I have put this into practice and I am starting to learn what our plants are telling me.

Take our strawberries. I noticed our strawberries had spots on the leafs. At first I wasn't sure what was going on but the other day I thought it might be a plant disease. It turns out that it is. Our strawberries have a Mycosphaerella fragariae infection, or the common leaf spot. According to Cornell The disease is found in almost every New York strawberry planting.

It looks like we need to do a better job cleaning out the strawberries in the fall time, and not let them grow so thick.

Starting Lettuce from Seed

Today's weather was horrible and so we didn't plant any sweet peas. We did start our lettuce seeds today. They are in our seed sprouter in our dinning room in the sunshine.

We also have our peppers which are doing well. They were a little slow to come up. We are not sure what the issue was but we are happy they all came up. We started just enough peppers and were nervous when a few seeds seemed to have failed to germinate.

We have also purchased our asparagus crowns this weekend. We went with the Jersey Supreme variety because Cornell Cooperative Extension's website recommended that the Jersey Knight and Jersey King varieties. Jersey Supreme is the next iteration in the Jersey asparagus series.

Preparing the Garden

Knowing that the weather was going to be poor this weekend, I took a 1/2 day of vacation and did some work in the garden. I prepared two containers for planting. I had to remove the grass and level the ground.

Once the ground was level I added some pre-plant mineral mixture.

I then mixed up some soil and added it to the container.

I added another application of pre-plant minerals and our weekly fertilizer mix.

At the end of the day we have 5 containers in their places, and one planted with our strawberries. We should be planting sweet peas this weekend if it is not too horrible.