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.

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:

Swiss chard on its way!

Looks like I may not need to resow my first Swiss chard batch after all. They're up and looking good. (Also exciting - I think I may see some carrot sprouts, but I'll give them a few more days to be sure)

More sowing

After getting my lettuce seeds in the ground yesterday, I felt emboldened to sow a few more veggies today - carrots, swiss chard, and arugula. I may be pushing things a bit, especially with the carrots, but from what I've read, I think this might work (I am trusting the University of Rhode Island Master Gardening planting calendar - we're not in RI, but we're close and in the same USDA Hardiness Zone). The arugula went into the other side of the lettuce cold frame and the carrots and swiss chard went into the cover-less cold frame, which makes it just a "frame" I guess (BTW the cover got blown off last summer during a particularly blustery storm). UPDATE: Nighttime temperatures in the teens got me worried so I rigged a temporary cover out of a clear plastic landscaping sheet and some logs/rocks to keep it from blowing away. I expect I'll need to replant when it gets warmer.

Arugula:


Swiss chard:


Carrot: