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.