Veggie Garden Roundup

Just wanted to give a quick run down of what we have growing in our home vegetable garden (and other vegetable "areas") along with some pics.

Main Garden Bed

Potatoes (2 varieties)
Yukon Gold
Russian Banana Fingerling

Summer Squash (1 variety)
Cocozelle Zucchini (x4)


Tomatoes (16 varieties!)
Brandywine (x2)
Super Sweet 100 (x1)
Caruso (x2)
Prince Borghese (x1)
Yellow Perfection (x1)
Pole Perfect Purple (x1)
Red Grape (x2)
Sun Gold (x2)
Sweet Chelsea (x1)
Mountain Princess (x1)
Caspian Pink (x2)
Mountain Delight (x1)
Margherita (x1)
Cherokee Purple (x2)
Garden Peach (x2)
Green Zebra (x2)



Onions (2 varieties)
Copra
Cippolini


Broccoli (x4) - FAILED (bunny food and already flowering)


Peas and Beans (3 varieties) - limited success
Oregan Giant (edible pod pea)
Blauhilde (pole bean)
Royal Burgandy (bush bean)


Container Garden


Peppers (4 varieties)
Thai Dragon (x2)
Red Beauty (x2)
Sweet Banana (x1)
Carmen Sweet Italian (x1)


Carmen Peppers - don't they look incredible? (more on these in a later post)
Tomatoes (4 more varieties)
Matt's Wild Cherry
Sweet Pea Currant
Small Fry
Mr. Ugly

Misc
Eggplant (x1)
Garden Huckleberry (x1)
Ground Cherry - Cossack Pineapple (x1)


Cold Frame #1
Swiss Chard (Charlotte)
Carrots (Danvers 126)


Cold Frames #2
replanted with leaf lettuce and arugula after recent tragedy
(not looking particularly promising)

Cold Frame #3 and #4 - new this year
Being re-evaluated after limited success with leaf lettuce, beets, and swiss chard and complete failure with purple dragon carrots (100% failed germination)

Other areas
Asparagus bed
Rhubarb bed
Herb containers (basil, parsley, oregano, cilantro)

Wow. I knew we had a lot, but I've never tried listing everything all at once. And this doesn't even include our small community garden patch! We must be nuts. Seriously, I'm quite happy with what we've accomplished so far - our successes seem to outnumber (or at least outweigh) our failures. Can't really complain about that.

Tragedy

Honestly, officer, it was an accident. I didn't mean it. In fact, I'm not really sure what happened. I'm pretty sure they got water, either via watering can or rain. Though I must be wrong. Still, I've never seen things go so fast from this good:

May 27.
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to this bad
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June 1

First Harvest!

We had our first salad from our garden the other day. A nice mix of leafy lettuce, arugula, and baby Swiss chard. Sixty-three days from seed to table.

Cold frames and beets

For the past few of years, we've used a couple of cold frames for some of our veggies - mostly leafy greens (e.g. Swiss chard, leaf lettuce, arugula, escarole, etc.) They work really great as they let us sow seeds directly outside much sooner in the spring, and the small, confined areas are easy to keep weed- and herbivore-free and well-watered. This year, I added two more frames to the backyard to increase our yield by staggering our plantings across a couple of months - this way, hopefully, we'll have a continuous supply of lettuce, chard, and carrots throughout the summer and into the fall (I plan on resowing at the end of the summer for fall, and perhaps even winter harvesting). The first cold frames I made out of plywood, some poplar 1x2s, and sheets of thin plexiglass cut to size - all bought from Home Depot. This year, I asked my grandfather, who owns a millworking business if he could cut me some plywood to size since I really don't have the right tools. Well, as I should have expected, given the way my grandfather operates, instead of plywood, I got a top-of-the-line exterior-grade composite, called Extira. It was completely unnecessary and definitely overkill, but I happily used the pieces and put the new cold frames to work this afternoon.


Into the new frames went another sowing of spring leaf lettuce mix and Swiss chard, some purple dragon carrots, and some beets. If the beet seeds look remarkably like Swiss chard seeds, it's because they're just different cultivars of the the same species - Beta vulgaris.

Beets:

March seedlings

I planted some lettuce and arugula seeds just under two weeks ago and they seem to have taken. The cold frame is doing its job - even with sub-freezing night temperatures all week. YAY!

(that's my flash drive in the photos for scale)

Lettuce:


Arugula:
(I think I'll need to thin the arugula at some point)

No signs of carrot or Swiss chard though, even with the temporary plastic cover I put on the other cold frame :( (though I don't really expect to see carrot seedlings for a while - they're notorious for taking a long time to germinate)

Planting lettuce

I decided to sow a crop of lettuce outside today. I know it's only the middle of March, but lettuce is a cool weather plant and I sowed the seeds in a cold frame. All in all, I'm hoping this will give us a jump on the growing season. I've sowed lettuce seeds in the cold frame the past few years, but never this early, so this is an experiment of sorts. The soil temperature inside the cold frame is above 50°F and even with the air temp in the low 50s, the cold frame was maintaining 70°F - ideal conditions for the Spring Mix we ordered from The Cook's Garden. If all goes well, we'll be eating fresh salad by early May.