rainbow gardener's 2018 gardens

[applestar]

Did you ever mention what kind of strawberries these are? Are they June bearers or day-neutrals?
It’s good have different kinds — you Want the June bearers so you get them coming in all at once, enough for freezing, preserving and extra culinary experiments — like Ice cream or pie... but it’s nice to have the day neutrals surprise you with more when you start missing the fresh ones.

[rainbowgardener]

As you say, it is a mix.

[Aida]

Aww, I love the look of your beds and fence. The plants look great, too. Will you be planting something pretty to trail along the picket?

[rainbowgardener]

Broccoli, cabbage, kale, which now has also a couple pepper plants, a volunteer tomato, and corn seeds in between all the broccoli and cabbage.

corn and a volunteer squash plant. The bare spot has more corn seeds in it. The fence behind the corn plants is 3.5 feet tall.

purple cabbage, overwintered parsley, onions, garlic, and volunteer squash

tomatoes, kale, chard, pepper plants, basil. The tomatoes are way behind last year, but do have baby tomatoes on them

Some of those purple cabbage heads are at least 6" in diameter. How do you know when to harvest them?

[rainbowgardener]

Today's harvest:





Broccoli, kale , chard, lettuce, strawberries, purple cabbage, and one banana pepper. I have about 350 sq ft of raised beds planted in veggies and there is so much food out there now!

[applestar]

Wow looking great! What will you make with the red cabbage? What variety was it? I’m growing Kalibos this year.

[rainbowgardener]

good question. I have a ton of cabbage coming on and I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. I chopped those two heads into wedges and blanched and froze them, so I can figure out what to do with them later. (The blanch water turns deep purple!)

I grow cabbage because it is so easy and effortless and gives you so much food. But neither of us like sauerkraut and Jamie won't eat coleslaw or anything with vinegar. I do use cabbage in soups and sometimes stir fries.

For dinner we had green salad with broccoli, bean cheesy chard with brown rice, and strawberry shortcake!!

[applestar]

My mom used to make red cabbage and chestnut stuffing for the turkey. Maybe that will be to both of your taste? (sans turkey ). I’ve made German style pasta with sour cream and cabbage using red cabbage to surprise the kids. You can imagine the color!

[Gary350]

NICE harvest. There are lots of German recipes for Red Cabbage. I wish my Swiss Chard looked that good.

[rainbowgardener]

Incidentally, they say to soak your cabbage in salt water, in case there are any little worms or anything in it.

That cabbage did have little green cabbage worms on it, before it had heads and when it was just starting to. I hand picked them off and smushed them, every few days for three times. Total probably smushed a couple dozen. After that I never saw another one. I don't know if I had managed to really eradicate them (seems doubtful) or if they just all turned in to cabbage butterflies (I am still seeing those).

Anyway, when I soaked the cabbage and then when I cut in to it, it was completely clean, no sign of any worms/bugs.

[rainbowgardener]

harvested the first potatoes today, a few baby ones and one full sized one. They are beautiful red-skinned, very white fleshed. I always just plant grocery store potatoes and I wasn't expecting these red-skinned ones. I probably just forgot I did that.

[rainbowgardener]

A lot of the early planted chard has bolted, but some is still going and is huge.



Also, I was clearing a lot of the bolted chard out of the bed this was in and discovered mixed in with it a half dozen or so potato plant volunteers that I hadn't even known were there. Potatoes turn out to be sort of a perennial crop. When digging/ pulling them, you almost always end up leaving behind a few of the marble sized or smaller potatoes. This bed did have potatoes planted in it last year. So some of the baby ones left behind must have over-wintered and sprouted. I love things that come back all on their own. A lot of my garden is volunteers this year, the potatoes, several squash plants, a tomato, and a bunch of cypress vine that I planted to grow up my fence last year and which seems to have re-seeded itself nicely.

[rainbowgardener]

Pulled the first garlic today and it was huge:

All I do is pop cloves of grocery store garlic in the ground. I've no idea why it came out so big...

[rainbowgardener]

today's harvest:

[applestar]

Nice! Underground crops are always fun. It’s like digging for treasure.

[rainbowgardener]

today's harvest:

Peaches from our tree!!

I never did any spraying at all, so most of them have some bad spots, but those can be cut out and we will still have a lot of peach. And there are still more on the trees.

Yay!!

[applestar]

Nice harvest! Mine are still green....

[rainbowgardener]

oh man, why is canning so often a summer thing to do? I want an outdoor summer kitchen like the Victorian ladies used to have.

Made up 3 half pints of blackberry-peach-wine jam with blackberries from a friend's garden. And 3 half pints of peach-wine jam.

It is very yummy, but not fun standing over a hot stove, putting jars in and out of the hot water bath!

[Gary350]

I wish I had a peach tree or a bushel basket of peaches. Fresh peaches, peach jam, peach cobbler, peach wine all sound good.

How old are your trees & how much fruit do you get each season?

[rainbowgardener]

The trees were planted in spring 2016, so still youngish. One of them was loaded with peaches this year, maybe a gallon or more, not all of which were still good. The other one still has relatively few.

Besides all the jams, we still have maybe a quart of cut up peaches just to eat --- they are so good!!

[rainbowgardener]

This isn't gardens exactly, but I thought I'd throw it in...

One of the things I love so much about being here in the South is the blue skies. Cincinnati seemed like it was always grey-- grey and cloudy and rainy in the winter, grey and hazy in the summer.

That was yesterday. That's the neighbor's yellow shed, though we have a yellow shed also. But it is our apple trees and fence line plantings

[rainbowgardener]

last garden pics (on p.2) were a month ago, so here's an update:

corn and squash

(that silver queen gets SO tall!!)

corn ears

acorn squash (volunteer)

garden view with volunteer sunflower

cherry tomatoes

regular tomatoes

Not a great picture, but there's tons of full size tomatoes out there, six plants worth (one is unknown volunteer) besides two cherry tomato plants. Some of the full size tomatoes are blushed.

[SQWIB]

Everything looks great, whatever your doing... keep doing it!

[rainbowgardener]

Actually I have been very busy with Poor People's Campaign (https://www.facebook.com/anewppc/) and have paid very little attention to my garden for the past month or more. It has just been coasting.

Today's harvest:





dill seed, basil, garlic, potatoes, cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes, hot peppers, chard, last of the broccoli. I didn't bring any in, but there is so much kale and cabbage out there. Being weighed is my first big tomato, a pink Berkeley tie dye, just under one pound. It isn't fully ripe, but blushed enough to finish off the vine.

[rainbowgardener]

The garden was looking very mid-summerish, raggedy and suffering. Now it's all been refurbished: weeded out, dead stuff pulled, new stuff planted, stuff trimmed and treated for disease and pests, compost added, and a fresh layer of mulch.

The spring planted kale was all chewed up and full of holes. It turned out to be full of harlequin bugs; I killed dozens of them (cut off the leaf they are on, drop it on the ground, stomp it and grind it -- they have tough exo-skeletons and just stomping doesn't kill them). Then I looked them up and found that they are piercing/sucking types and weren't chewing the holes. There were also a number of small caterpillars and probably slugs. I disposed of the caterpillars and all the eggs I found (the black and white eggs of the harlequin bug and some unknown white eggs), trimmed off all the chewed up stuff, and treated with sluggo, diatomaceous earth AND Neem. So we will see if it comes back or needs to be pulled. Incidentally swiss chard was in the same raised bed with the kale and was untouched! If you can only grow one thing, grow chard!

Several of the tomato plants were suffering from septoria. I trimmed all that off, treated with hydrogen peroxide, fertilized (actual fertilizer, which I rarely do), composted and mulched.

I had started corn and squash in little pots, since for some reason I was having trouble getting it to start in the ground. So planted out 18 baby corn plants and a few squash (seminole and butternut)

The bed that did have corn and squash now has tomatoes and peppers (and a purslane I saved)


the bed that had purple cabbage and parsley now has all the baby corn plants and a bunch of carrot seed in the ground that hasn't sprouted yet and a Thai basil.


the bed that had kale and chard with tomato plants down the middle, now has the same kale and chard (as noted above) with bean seeds down the middle, as those tomato plants were too far gone, plus a couple pepper plants and a Thai basil.


These are some of the tomato plants I saved and treated, with carrots around the edge:


Overview:


Still been harvesting lots of tomatoes, peppers, and a bunch of acorn squash. Here was one day's harvest, with a sunflower seed head from one of the volunteer plants


Still need to refurbish all the beds outside the picket fence!! But the ones that are done should be ready to just coast again, with just some watering for the seeds and baby plants.

I love how the garden constantly changes through the year.

[applestar]

Looks wonderful and ready to go again. I always find it difficult to make that call — to Declare them “finished” and remove to make way for the next succession crop. So right now, some of my garden beds are pretty sorry_looking....

[imafan26]

Your gardens look really great. Compared to what you started with, you have put in a lot of time and work and it is very productive.