Time for the annual gardening thread

[Jack]

Picked 3 tomatoes today 

There must be something in my garden that doesn't like marigolds.  We plant a few around the corners because they're supposed to keep critters away or something.  The first 4 died - dried up completely.  So they had a sale on them at Walmart yesterday and the wife bought another dozen.  Twenty-four hours after planting them in the garden they're all dried up and dead looking already. 

[Mr. DS]

Picked about 4 decent sized heads of broccoli today.  I thought they were a cold weather crop. 

[Jack]

Picked all our peas a couple days ago.  Yummy!  Now the plants have pretty much died already.  I'll have to rip them out this weekend.  Beans are coming along nicely - bush beans will probably be ready to start picking in a few days.  Pole beans are just sending out their vines in every direction, no beans on them yet.  Really need to get up there and do some weeding this weekend too. 

[Mr. DS]

Weeded this hell out of the garden this morning (I'm going for surgery after lunch today, now thats dedication  )  over the past week the squash have started popping.  We've picked about two dozen so far.  We actually harvested our first couple cukes today although they were a bit undersized.   We snagged a nice head of broccoli, at least 5 inches across. 

The tomato plants are doing phenomenal and I'm glad I've opted not staking them, well at least for now. They seem to be growing across instead of up which is what I was hoping for.  We have several baby tomatoes on the vine and I'm sure we'll have hundreds more by summer's end.  I honestly couldn't have asked for a better growing season.

I've also been picking blueberries off the bushes in front of my house and invading my mother in law's raspberry patch. 

[ChaosTheory]

I'm so envious of you guys!  I live in an apartment so everything I've got is in pots on my deck; and we had a surprisingly cold, wet spring so I had to plant late, and very little of it came up at all.  I've got - still alive -  lettuce and spinach (which is doing pretty well, actually) a couple green beans, chamomile, strawberries, two dahlias, marigolds, and oatgrass (for the cat).  If and when I get a house and my own land I'm gonna go crazy 

[Mr. DS]

Well my stuff is officially going insane.  We picked about a dozen squash and cukes over the weekend.  The tomatoes are now a jungle and pretty much every flower has produced fruit.  The plants, although unstaked are at least 3 feet tall.  The peppers have yet to give off anything but are extremely robust.  We had some potato beetles on the eggplant but a little platinum took care of that. 

[Andrew]

I think that our zucchini and squash have already just about worn themselves out.  I'm thinking about ripping out the last of them and replanting that section.  We have been drowning in squash and zucchini for about 2 or 3 weeks.  We've eaten them daily, I cut them up for lunch, and we have been giving them away like crazy.  Katie has also made a ton of zucchini bread, which we've eaten a lot of and given away a lot of loaves.

Now the cucumber's and tomatoes are coming in strong. We picked 4 big lemon boys today, and about 2 quarts of the smaller (cherry, tomatoberry, and isis candy) tomatoes.  Picked 5 cucumbers in the last few days, and we picked about 3 quarts of beets to pickle up for eating sometime soon.

The pepper plants are full of peppers, but I'm seeing some blossom end rot.  I'm guessing that they mix of heavy rain (we got some lately) or complete dry is not doing well for them.  Something is also eating the tops off of the pepper plants, and I mean denuding the leaves.  I'm guessing it must be a bird, but haven't a clue what kind or why it would do that.  No insects are apparent, and I've even checked at night to see if it could be a nocturnal insect.

[Bmeansgood]

Is there anything I could still plant this late in the game that could come out by late september?  We experimented with some large container gardening this year and two pots got flooded out so I am either going to put them away till next year or try something new.  Any suggestions?  We are up for anything.

[Andrew]

Is there anything I could still plant this late in the game that could come out by late september?  We experimented with some large container gardening this year and two pots got flooded out so I am either going to put them away till next year or try something new.  Any suggestions?  We are up for anything.

Romaine lettuce is usually a very good crop for colder weather.  I've had it growing in December, and it's been snowed on and was still fine.  We usually get a second crop of lettuce and spinach in.  Beets and carrots also tend to be good candidates.  I'm planning on another planting of beets - which I've also found to be cold resistant.

[Jack]

Our bush beans are in full swing now - really need to get out and pick some today.  Pole beans are still wrapping themselves around everything and not producing anything yet.  Everyplace you look in the garden there's a bush bean tendril wrapped around it.  Our tomato plants are pretty big and have lots of fruit, but nothing ripe.  I've got one cayenne pepper about 6" long, as soon as we make some chili I'll be dropping that in there    So far our jalapeños just have a couple of tiny peppers on them.  But they're looking pretty healthy, so I'm hoping for some good yields and lots of jalapeño poppers.  Those leeks that my wife bought instead of onions are growing up really tall.  Haven't picked any yet though. 

[Mr. DS]

Is there anything I could still plant this late in the game that could come out by late september?  We experimented with some large container gardening this year and two pots got flooded out so I am either going to put them away till next year or try something new.  Any suggestions?  We are up for anything.

Romaine lettuce is usually a very good crop for colder weather.  I've had it growing in December, and it's been snowed on and was still fine.  We usually get a second crop of lettuce and spinach in.  Beets and carrots also tend to be good candidates.  I'm planning on another planting of beets - which I've also found to be cold resistant.

Pumpkins and certain varieties of squash (butternut, acorn, spaghetti) should produce by early fall if planted now.

[Mr. DS]

New pics!!!

Tomatoes with some beans in the front

Peppers and Eggplant

My wonderfully happy Habeneros

Squash and broccoli to the left.  You can kind of make out the remaining cukes to the far left.

Not bad for a day's harvest

[Jack]

That's not a garden - that's a farm!   

We've been getting some tomatoes, mostly the Romas are getting ripe first, though the other varieties have had a few ripe as well.  I think we've picked a dozen so far.  My Jalapeños are coming along well, they're about an inch long at this point.  The Cayanne plant is doing really good, with plenty of nice peppers.  Now I've just got to remind the wife a few more times that we really need to make some chili!  Still waiting for the pole beans to start producing - the bush beans already gave us a good bunch and they're probably ready to be picked again.

[Andrew]

That's not a garden - that's a farm!   

I agree, that's a huge garden you have there!

Our zucchini and yellow squash plants wore themselves out with everything they produced.  The cucumbers are coming in strong right now, and I've been picking 1 or 2 per day.  We picked 1/2 the remaining beets yesterday as a gift to the grandparents, and should pick the rest this week (which will let me replant them).  We also have picked over two dozen lemon boy tomatoes, and the plants got so laden that they broke the tomato cages.  The cages didn't fall over, I mean they structurally failed in a vertical fashion.  The tomatoberry and isis candy tomato plants are producing like crazy.  We picked over a gallon of those little tomatoes on Friday and that barely dented what is still ripening.

Pepper plants are full of peppers, and the carrots are getting close to having some ready.  Jenna's sunflowers are huge, over 8 ft, and blooming.

[Jack]

I bet if I took our pole beans and stretched them out end-to-end, they'd reach halfway to the moon.  They've completely engulfed a bench that sits next to the garden.  I had to put a chicken wire fence between them and my peppers because they were wound all around them.

But do you suppose there's a single bean on there anywhere?  Nope.