Tag Archives: Broccoli

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April Showers bring HAIL?

The past month hasn’t seen much activity in the garden.  April, true to its history has been wet, wet, wet.  A surprise hail storm lasted long enough to see a rather large pile of hail exit the roof and establish itself in front of our porch.  Its remnants were still there the next morning when I left for work.  Fortunately, the hail was small and didn’t seem to do any damage either to the balcony lettuce or to the spinach seedlings just coming up at the community garden spot.  I’m sure the lettuce was wondering what was going on.

This Just In

Today saw the planting of two varieties of potato, Makah Ozette and Nicola. The latter is a European variety of a lower glycemic potato. I’ve only found ONCE source in the US so far, the Main Potato Lady.  Once again I opted for planting in half buried large nursery pots, 6 in all. I learned about this method from a community gardener in the UK.  Also into the ground went some beet (Cylindrical) and radish (French Breakfast) seed.  Yeah its wet but there wasn’t a lot of disturbing the soil except where the potato pots were ‘planted’.  I think they are happy.

Whats Growing

Broccoli and Chard:

4 starts of each went in the ground near the end of last month.  I wasn’t planning on planting chard but they are so pretty and I was so needing to plant SOMETHING.

Garlic:

Last years two garlic plantings are coming along nicely.  Looks like I have near 100% of what I planted up and ready to start the season.  I gave them a bit of fertilizer last month and with all this rain they should be getting the full benefit.  Bring on the sun.

Kale:

Another overwintered crop.  I planted these from starts late last summer.  We’ve been eating on them for about a month now.  They have started to go to seed but the dog will eat the unopened flower tops so life is good.

Leeks:

The last of the overwintering trio.  A fellow gardener offered up some tiny leek starts last spring.  They ended up getting overshadowed last summer and stayed pretty small.  They come back with a vengeance this year and are almost ready to harvest.

Lettuce:

The old lettuce seed I planted last month did nothing.  Not surprising.  I think the seed was circa 2014.  I picked up some starts from a local garden center and tucked a few starts of the old Amish variety in next to the onions and a few other from a mixed lot into the balcony planter.   I decided to bite the bullet and buy some fresh seed and start those in a plastic container inside.  They are about half ana inch tall now and will be tucked out here and there once things get more settled.

Peas:

My nearly vegetarian dog LOVES snow peas.  We do too but she ends up eating most of them.  I planted half as much as I did last year, a single cardboard trough worth.  The idea was to get them up indoors, grow them out on the balcony to about six inches then plant out.  The scheduled roof redo meant they went into the garden early.  So far so good.

Spinach:

The two varieties of spinach are coming along nicely.  Spinach bolts when the days get to be a certain length so the season tends to be short here as we get long pretty early.  Its a pity, the climate could make for some awesome spinach almost year round.

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Downtime

September came and went without much going on garden wise. The temps cooled and the rains made a regular showing. Fred kept creeping along to the point of needing his own zip code. Helda kept putting out beans like crazy, more clubroot was found in the broccoli planted this spring and the zucchini kept getting larger and larger as the number of visits per week declined. One a positive note, large zucchini can be treated like eggplant (bake the slices instead of frying them) and made into a wonderful zucchini parmesan.

The milder temps were not soon enough for the spinach tho. It all bolted and ended up being dug into the garden to help enrich the soil. That is new for me. Typically garden refuse would go into the compost pile. This year I made trenches and dug it back into the garden. Everything went in except the brassicas (clubroot) and anything with seeds like the few large cucumbers I ended up missing over the summer. The lettuce I planted at about the same time also bolted. I cut it off at the ground level to see if there would be any chance of getting anything decent once the temps cooled. Doubtful but worth a try.

figlets2015-09-13 All of the three fig cuttings I started last Spring have figlets and are about a foot tall. I started with a bag of dormant 6″ long cuttings from the Brown Turkey and Petite Nigra container plants a dear friend adopted. Looking at these I’m thinking they are all BT. This is fine as I do prefer their flavor over PN.

The second round of carrots I planted ended up with little holes through most of them. A root maggot of some kind. Need to research that one. I’m thinking a floating row cover would be a good idea next time.

The Iditarod tomatoes took forever to start producing but once they did were pretty consistant and had a good flavor. The Celebrities were gone at about the time they started so we have had a good run of tomatoes from the two plants on the balcony.

The horseradish I planted in a clay pot and buried is HUGE. While I did have a horseradish plant I had never harvested any of it so that will be new for me. I know it is one whose ability to regrow from the smallest piece of root left behind. For this reason it was planted in a clay pot and buried. It remains to be seen whether or not that will work. There is, after all, a drainage hole at the bottom.

Lessons learned: 1. Wait to plant spinach and lettuce for fall. Mid July was much too early.