Spring / Summer Garden

Clearly Murphy was a gardener and his Law is absolute in the country.  Cold winter, wet spring, broken equipment, rain when you don't want it or need it and no rain when when you do, hard scrabble clay soil and bug plagues.  We have already had them all and we are just getting started!

But the garden is IN!  Late - but in!

It has already been a huge learning experience to try to grow a large garden here in Piedmont Virginia.  The very late spring and wet weather delayed planting for everyone.  Trying to establish a new garden with all the plowing, harrowing, soil amending, and tilling put us further behind.  Last and not least, our new tiller failed just when we needed it most, but in the end resulted in the manufacturer stepping up and providing a brand new unit.  That whole saga is an epic story in itself for another posting.

Watermelons and Cantaloupes on the left with hay mulch - then winter and summer squash, peppers, then tomatoes, eggplant under row cover, green beans, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage toward the back and last are  the onions.  On the right, down in back, are the potatoes, sweet potatoes, basil and sage

 Despite the cold wet spring the warm weather arrived at it's usual time.  The cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower - didn't make it.  The seedlings we started indoors began beautifully, but finally became too root bound in their pots waiting for the wet weather to end so the garden could be prepared for planting.  They just didn't thrive in the garden once planted and clearly were not going to mature before the hot weather did them in.  Fortunately here in this part of the upper South you can plant those crops again in the late summer and grow them out into the cool fall, which they like.

broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower - all pulled and relegated to the compost piles

 The tomatoes suffered the same drama of beautiful seedlings becoming very root bound and nutrient deficient before finally getting into the ground.  We lost several plants immediately from transplant shock and all of them looked poor for a while but have come around and are now doing pretty well.  There arev6 varieties of tomatoes in 4 rows.  We transplanted 76 seedlings - 64 have survived.  New replacement seedlings have been started. 

The tomatoes are supported using the 'Florida Weave' method with a T-post every 3rd plant and plastic twine tightly strung on each side of the post.  Additional strings are added as the plants grow taller

 Our first planting of green beans - two types of bush snap beans and a pole snap bean germinated very well with the seed sown directly in the garden but were immediately annihilated by Bean Leaf Beetles in two days.  We had a plague of them because the garden plot was a soy bean field prior to us coming along.  We have starting replanting the bush beans and the pole beans.  The pole beans are planted all at once because they produce for a long time if you keep picking the beans.  We plant short rows of snap beans every week, alternating the variety to keep a steady supply of beans reasdy to pick.

Bean Laf Beetle buffet

French fillet green beans, Maxibel variety, under row cover to keep off the pests.  A short row of regular snap green beans, Provider variety, was sown one week after the 'Haricot Verte' beans.  Hoops at the ready when they germinate in a few days. 

Shortly after planting the potatoes - very late delivery of the seed potatoes due to freezing weather - we had a 3.6 inch monsoon rainfall which drowned some of the seed potatoes and they rotted in the ground.  I've heard from others that they lost their entire potato crop to rot so I don't feel too bad that we lost about 25% of our planting.

4 varieties of Irish type potatoes - Red Norland, White Superior, Irish Cobbler and Yukon Gold.  It's time to hoe the weeds and almost time hill them up.

The herb garden has been an almost complete failure from that huge rainfall.  First off I bought most of my herb seeds from D. Landreth Seed Company in Philadelphia, PA.  They are a very old seed company that goes way back.  I was totally disappointed in the quality of the seeds.  They seemed old with many broken and empty hulls in many of the seed packets.  With that and the seeds getting literally washed out of the ground by sheet flooding during the rainstorm- it was a complete bust.  Only the Lettuce Leaf Basil and Sage seedlings transplanted are doing well.  Again - because of the long growing season here there is still plenty of time to start seedlings or direct sow in the garden again.

The onions are doing well.  Having never grown opnions before, we have read up a lot on doing it properly.  So far so good.  We bought onion plants from Dixondale Farms in Texas for delivery in mid March, the proper planting time for this area.  Shipment was delayed almost two weeks by cold winter weather so the plants would not freeze during shipment.  Because the tiller was broken we had to had dig compost into the rows and make raised beds.  We planted every seedling we received - even the wimpy runts you get in the generous count in a 'bundle'.  Some are big, some are runty.  They are starting to bulb now and we expect a decent crop for our first try.

Onions - double rows of 4 varieties - Red Candy, Yellow Candy, White Superstar and Italian Cippolini

 

We tilled and mulched a bed at the top of the garden for watermelons, cantaloupes, sugar pie pumpkins and Seminole winter storage pumpkins.  All the hills we prepared have germinated and are starting to put out true leaves.

We have a row of acorn and butternut winter squash, a row of 4 varieties of cucumbers - 2 slicing and 2 pickling, a row of zucchini and a row of yellow crookneck and patty pan yellow summer squash.

Right up against the melon patch mulch is a row of winter squashes.  Next are the cukes where the T-posts are - you can see the first trellis I tied up for the cukes, 3 more to weave.  Then comes the zucchini and summer squashes.  In the foreground are New Mexico Hatch Chilis and tomatillos.  There are 5 other varieties of peppers, bith hot and sweet on the other side of the 4 rows of tomatoes.

I think the first thing picked from the garden will be Basil.  We are both starting to think about making a couple of panini with roasted red peppers, mozzarella and fresh Basil from the garden.  I don't think we are going to be able to hold out much longer............