Quick Update

I stopped by my garden on my way home from work and was astounded at the growth over there! No pictures today as it was raining and I didn't want to risk my camera, but I will put some up tomorrow.

In the course of 3 days my peas have gone from 1 flower to dozens with tons of side shoots starting to grow. I'm pleased, but surprised - I've never had pea plants get this big in the past! The sugar snap are about 4 feet tall and still growing up. They've long-since dwarfed their supports. I'm going to need something else to stick in them for support this weekend or they may topple!

All of my recent transplants (peppers, eggplant and tomatoes) are all settling in very nicely. I only seem to be in danger of losing 1 plant (a Wild Cherry tomato plant that is 50/50 on survival at the moment) and I already have a few bell peppers setting fruit.

The bush beans are starting to get some buds on them which is also great news! In addition, I filled in the few empty spots in the bean patch with my second set of seeds so hopefully I'll be able to have a nice staggered harvest this summer.

And finally, most of my squash family seeds are sprouting! I have almost 100% germination on my zucchini and cucumbers. The winter squash is also starting to poke their heads out of the ground (pumpkins and spaghetti squash). I'm very hopeful on these guys this year. I've never had amazing success with winter squash because of squash vine borers, but I'm convinced this is my year!

Harvest Mondays

Green Oregon Spring and Oxheart Tomatoes with Tam Jalapeños

Ripe Oregon Spring Tomatoes

Pink Oxheart Tomatoes, Cherokee Purple Tomatoes and Tam Jalapeños

All Lined Up!

Harvest Pics (Finally!)

I've been harvesting from my garden for a couple weeks now, but none of it ever seems to make it into pictures! Part of the issue is that I'm mostly harvesting from the rural garden and then I make dinner for everyone over there, so a lot of the time nothing makes it back to the apartment.

First Harvest of String Beans: Blue Lake (Green), Pencil Pod (Yellow) and Dragon Langerie (Purple)

First Ripe Tomatoes! 5 oz of Oxheart Pink tomatoes picked July 16th.

1 1/2 pounds of beans. About half of these were sent home with friends.


On a side note, I'm looking to buy a pressure canner and would love some input from others about their favorite brands/sizes before I invest. My price limit is $200, but I'm hoping to spend more like $100-$150.

Rural Garden: Tomato Explosion!

I'm just back from a trip to the rural garden and all I have to say is WOW. The growth over there is astounding, especially when I compare it to the community garden with its horrible soil.

Tomato Plants, 2 weeks ago

Tomato Plants, Yesterday

Lots of buds, flowers and about 20 green tomatoes!

I'm now even more excited about how many delicious tomatoes I'll be harvesting this year. These plants are just massive! Those stakes have about 5 1/2' above ground. I think they'll soon be towering above their supports if they keep this up.

Mystery Disease

I went to the community garden for the first time in about a week and was pleased to see that it's mostly thriving. However, a quick examination of my tomato plants showed that a quarter of them are infected with something. At first I thought it was just dirt splashed on the leaves, but unfortunately it's definitely not dirt. I'm thinking it's either septoria leaf spot or early blight, but I've not seen this before and would love some help figuring out what it is. The affected leaves are mostly on the bottom half of the plants.

Other than the diseased plants everything is looking pretty good, although I had a ridiculous amount of weeding to do in the right bed. I'm particularly happy with the bean patch and the kale, which have both shown awesome growth and are looking very healthy.

Before Weeding....

And After!

Donated Kale

The Bean Patch

*Update!* After some help from the people over at gardenwebs and a return visit to the garden I have decided that my mystery disease is indeed early blight. I yanked the 2 plants that were most heavily affected and removed all the infected leaves/branches from the other plants. Now I'm just waiting it out to see how it goes.

Rural Garden Update

The rural garden plot is doing great! Unfortunately there have been no updates because whenever I make the trek to my mother's house I seem to always be forgetting my camera. But no more! I was there the other day and finally managed to snap a couple of pics.

My tomato babies are looking good!
The tomatoes were planted about a week and a half ago and seem to be really settling in. However they are looking a little close together. I spaced them at 1.5 feet apart in all directions in a stab at square foot gardening, so we'll see how it goes. I can always pull a few plants if it seems like they're strangling each other. As you can also see, the tree my father refused to move is shading the plants from the morning to early afternoon. Hopefully I'll soon be allowed to move it (depending on my mother's powers of persuasion, because mine failed) and my plants will have fewer shade issues.

From left to right, eggplant, tam peppers and a block with cauliflower and lettuce.
I had just transplanted the peppers and eggplant the day of this picture and hear they're still looking good. The tam plant that you can barely see is one that got a bit stunted so I'm not sure it will make it, but I figured I'd try anyways! I put my 17 year old brother on watering duty for the new transplants and the pumpkin, squash and zucchini seeds I just planted. I got a little overwhelmed with the seed starting and apparently forgot these guys so we'll see how they do direct seeded. *Hopefully* he remembers to water and that I told him not to water so much that there are puddles everywhere...

Potting Up

Most of the seedlings have their first true leaves so I decided that new homes were in order. I wanted to hopefully separate them out early enough that their root systems weren't completely entangled and wrapping around the bottom of the plant cells.

Prior to transplanting:

I think I timed it pretty well. Most of the seedlings had good root systems that were just starting to show at the bottom of the soil mix when I took them out of the cells. Most got put into deep plastic cups with holes drilled in the bottom, but some simply got moved into single cells in the interest of space. Between everything, I've got two flats filled with seedlings that are being rotated between the lights and a south-facing window.

A few days after potting up everything seems to be doing quite well:

These are the early Oregon Spring tomatoes. I hardened them off a bit and then put them on the windowsill in my enclosed porch to test their hardiness. So far they're doing completely fine.

In other news, I went out to check on the rural garden on Friday and did some transplanting, although I unfortunately forgot my camera. I thinned out the cells of broccoli, lettuce, chard and cauliflower, taking the most established plant from the cell and moving it to the garden. I moved 3 cauliflower, 12 lettuce, 4 chard, 4 broccoli deccicio and 4 broccoli waltham into the garden and covered all of the cauliflower and half of the broccoli with plastic bottles. I decided to only cover half the broccoli as an experiment to see which do better. If I lose some of the plants it's no big deal because I still have 6 of each variety growing on my porch.

I planted some spinach seeds last Tuesday and a few were beginning to sprout. Yay! I also planted 4 sq ft of carrots this morning (1 ft each of the Lunar White, Cosmic Purple, Amarillo and Nantes). I sowed them very shallowly, watered and then covered with a layer of hay to hopefully keep the moisture in and encourage germination. I covered the left side of the garden with a tarp and the back half of the right side with a thick layer of hay to help keep the weeds at bay until I plant next month.

Seedling Update

I'm sure everyone's getting sick of seedling pictures, but I'm proud of my babies and I need to show them off! This is really the first time I'm doing any major seed starting. Last year I started a hybrid tomato and broccoli, but that's it. I direct seeded beans and squash successfully, but all of my other plants were freebies that were donated by the local YouthGrow program to all of the community gardens. It's a great organization that gets teens involved with growing their own food. They start plants for the community gardens and plants to go into the large YouthGrow gardens that they help to maintain all summer. While I love free plants, this year my goal was to start all of my plants from seed.

Kellogg's Breakfast shared by EG and Oregon Spring

Black Cherry also from EG

Brandywine and Cherokee Purple from EG

Oxheart Pink and Polish Linguisa

Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper that was a freebie with the Tam Jalapenos I got from eBay

Tam Jalapenos and Organic Black Beauty Eggplant (With some cauliflower mixed in... I accidentally seeded the cauliflower in the wrong 6-pack)

Early Snowball Cauliflower from EG

Broccoli Waltham 29 and Organic Broccoli Deccicio

As you can easily see, EG (from Our Engineered Garden) was extremely generous and gave me lots of seeds to help me out this year. I'm a broke college student and I just can't afford tons and tons of seed unfortunately. However, I'll be saving as much seed as I can this year to start building up my own little seed library. Hopefully I'll have a bunch of fun stuff to trade this winter!

Some of these guys are starting to get their first set of true leaves, which means I'll soon be potting up! The cauliflower and broccoli will be first, as well as trying to rescue the cauliflower from the eggplant. We'll see how the extraction goes...

New Seedling Set Up

I finally got my lights all set up for my seedlings and I think they'll enjoy the extra light.

Girlfriend bought me the shelves from Target and the shelf heights are awesomely adjustable. The lights are 24" and one is cool white and the other is warm white as that's what I had in my apartment at the time.

The babies in their new home under the lights! It's pretty much all tomatoes, peppers and eggplant under here.

My Orange Sun bell pepper plant is once again producing peppers. After these two grow a bit I'll pick them and pinch back any other blossoms so I can *hopefully* transplant it outside. I hadn't even noticed these two until yesterday when I saw fruit.

The leeks are doing solidly and seem to be slowly getting thicker at the base.

The green onions got a little haircut and ended up as an excellent garnish for my salad the other day.

My chives are doing well once again! I've had this plant for about 2 years now and the fact that I didn't kill it was one of the things that made me want to start gardening in the first place.

Harvest Mondays

It's been a relatively quiet week here....

Hybrid tomatoes, an heirloom from a plant that was gifted to me from REC and some Blue Lake green beans

Hybrid tomato, sweet Italian pepper and more green beans

More tomatoes and green beans with squash blossoms

The lunch made from the harvest shown above.

A lovely black beauty eggplant (that will probably end up as dinner tonight) and a small Italian pepper

The garden totals thusfar:
Summer Squash - 4 lbs
Tomatoes - 8 lbs
Green Beans - 1 lb
Eggplant - 1 lb
Italian Peppers - 1/2 lb

Looking good!

The garden is looking excellent! I had a mini harvest today and it's my biggest of the season thus far.



3 tomatoes (2 hybrids, 1 heirloom), 1 crookneck summer squash and a handful of green beans. All said and done it was about a pound and a half of veggies.

I have a bunch more crooknecks forming, as well as some nice gold zucchini. Over 5 eggplants have set fruit as well! I'll probably harvest the first of them mid-week for some eggplant parm. The butternut squash I've trained up the chicken wire fence are also setting fruit. One is the size of my fist and the others are the size of a kiwi. Pictures of everything mid week hopefully!