Garden Update

Did you guys enjoy the anniversary edition of Wedding Wednesday yesterday? If you missed the DIY projects I posted, you can check them out by looking here (as well as some other great Wedding Wednesday posts!). It was so fun to share those DIY projects with you guys! We didn't do much to celebrate our anniversary yesterday. At first I was really sad about it, but then I just told A.P. that we'll do it up right this weekend. Five years ago, I think I would have been sad that we didn't do something on the exact day. I would have blamed A.P. for not planning something. And truth be told, I was a bit bummed he didn't plan a surprise. But neither did I. We're both busy and tired and hot. So I forgave us and remembered that anniversaries are what you make them. And this weekend, we'll make ours great. Five years deserves that much. Heck, we've outlasted most Hollywood couples.

Now, for the garden update! The garden is growing, but not as well as I'd hoped. It's okay. It's my first year. I lost my best squash plant this week. I'm trying like hell to revive it, but it's not looking too good. The stem broke and got strong again, but then couldn't support the large plant and then it just snapped. So sad. It was the original squash plant. The one that made it through all the other traumatic weather events. Seriously, guys. I'm crying a little. I've been gardening for years and I know it sounds nuts, but every time you lose a plant you grew from seeds, it breaks your heart. Also, our corn is weird and stunted. It's still kind of early on, so maybe things will perk up? But right now, it's looking like a cornless summer. (Or maybe I will get like five baby corns and I can eat them like in Big.) Also, we planted a crapton of lettuce and broccoli and other good stuff and none of it grew. We just had too much dry, hot weather for a while, and I made a rookie mistake. It could be like the carrots and something might pop up, but right now, I'm thinking it's a bust. I'm going to replant, but I'm going to wait a little while until it cools down. It's hella hot here and taking care of the sunflower and been seedlings while the heat pounds down on the city has been...challenging. (Also, I'm well aware it's almost the end of July, but you have to remember that it only warmed up about a month ago, and then we had terrible storms, so some of this is replanting for the hell of it. I'm also thinking about installing brackets on all the beds so that I can install hoop houses to extend the growing season for any slow bloomers.)

That being said, not everything is a complete bust. The other squash plants are looking good. Our watermelon plants are taking off. The cucumbers finally boomed and now I'm trying to train them to go up the damn trellis. They took a long while to boom (we put them in in June!), so I'm not sure how that's going to shake down. Our tomatoes, onions, and peppers are wonderful, as are our herbs in the greenhouse. I see a good pasta dish in my future. We also have planted sweet potatoes and finally got the broccoli in the ground. And just for shits and giggles, we threw some sunflower seeds in the ground. We also got a new round of pumpkins in the ground. At first I thought they would give me problems, too, but they're looking good now. If we have an Indian summer like last year, we should be able to get a reasonable harvest barring any difficulties.

Yesterday, I went thrifting/antiquing and I picked up an old copy of Square Foot Gardening for Cash. It's not the original square foot gardening book, but it does explain the technique. It also explains how to grow so that you can have multiple harvests and therefore sell your crop. My job is thinking about expanding the garden and I am talking to them about doing a small-scale Farmer's Market, so this book was like a perfect little find. I think that next year we will give Square Foot Gardening a try in the expansion and continue to keep the beds set up the way we had them this year. Or maybe we'll do all square foot gardening! Who knows?

In the mean time, we pulled all of the root vegetables except three smaller beet plants and a couple of stray carrot plants that finally made an appearance. I'm going to till the rest of the bed and prepare it for the next go round. This was a decent crop, but because of the bunnies, I didn't get to thin the plants as much as I wanted to. So, I'm aware that we had a lot of sad little roots and big leaves. Here was our crop of radishes, beets, and turnips:


And because my favorite are always the weird ones. Here are my favorite radishes:

The Mermaid Tail
The Monster

(Photos by me!)