Starting plants!

It's that time of year to start plants for the garden. I use newspapers to make our own seed pots. They area good size for the roots to grow and get a good start and you can plant them straight into the garden. The roots will grow out through them and they will biodegrade in the garden.

Here's what I planted:

12 peppers including: California Wonder, Crispy Hybrid, and Early thickest

5 peppers that are warm called Pablano

4 Peppers that are colored: Carnival mix and Rainbow blend

30 Heirloom tomatoes including: Mortgage Lifter, Brandywine, and Beefy Boy

3 Swiss Chard, rainbow

5 Squash: Zucchini and Yellow straightneck (I will plant these every four weeks throughout the season to have successive plants. I love summer squash.

Here are a couple of the flats, ready to plant. I planted three flats today and have three more to still do!

Now we just need some sun! I wrap them in plastic wrap to give them more humidity for sprouting.

I have some more to do but this is a start!

New plants we are trying out in the fall garden

I thought I'd show how some of our fall plants are doing. Of course we still have other things but these are the new things we're trying out this fall! Here's how our carrots are coming along. This is the first carrot patch we've ever had so I'm excited. They should be ready in another month.

Another new plant we're growing is Brussel sprouts. I have about five plants and the sprouts are starting to form!

I'm shocked at how many collards are produced by about five plants!

We also planted a couple of Chinese cabbages.

and a purple cabbage.

NEW STRAWBERRY BEDS

When we did our grading for our raised beds and the greenhouse, we had such a change in elevation that we put in a retaining wall. Michael had the wonderful idea of putting in a narrow raised bed and strawberries in it. That way, we can stand up and pick the berries! Since fall is the time to plant the berries, we stopped work on the greenhouse to build our raised beds.

We found a wonderful place to get mushroom compost to use along with some peat moss and vermiculite to make the soil. I love this stuff and plan to compost raised beds when we put them to bed for the winter.

Michael used his geometry to figure out how much from each bag of vermiculite and peat moss we needed to mix the soil. My job was to bring the buckets of mushroom compost from the truck to the wheelbarrow where Michael would mix it all.

I placed newspaper as a barrier to the ground to smother any grass. Here's the mix as we put it into the beds.

We used two wheelbarrow fulls of mixture for each bed and then we mixed up two other batches to make sure they were all full.

After I wet down the beds, I went and got some strawberry runners to transplant.

Now I have to finish cleaning out the rest of the strawberry beds. They are really prolific and it's a lot of work to clean them out.

Thank goodness the soil is very loose so I can pull them up pretty easy. It's hard to take all of these beautiful plants to the compost pile! I have given away some plants to anyone that wanted them.

Fall Garden

We started our fall garden. I started the seeds and kept them up on the deck to keep water to them in the heat.

We had a heat wave and they had such little dirt in their pots that I could hardly keep them damp enough. I did what my dad told me years ago. We made a hole for the plant, filled it with water and then put the plant in and covered it up and then watered again. We did this at night (ended up doing it in the dark).

Even though we had 95 degree weather, we decided to go ahead and get them planted. I had cleaned out the beds from what we planted earlier and the soil was so great I could put my hand down into the bed in the loose soil.

We planted broccoli, Swiss chard, cabbage, collards, lettuce, green beans, squash and brussel sprouts and cucumbers. Everything survived and they are growing.

We do still have tomatoes growing and blooming. Our plants went up to the top of the 5' fence we built and are going down again so they are probably 8 feet long!

Our apples seemed to be attacked by bees (if you look close you can see one eating an apple! I went ahead and picked the apples to get them before the bees do!

The Start of a Greenhouse transformation!

We have talked for a couple of years about having a greenhouse and so we took the plunge. At the lower part of our property, we planned to build a greenhouse and garden shed and then decided to terrace up the hill in four 12' areas so we can put in some more raised beds. These are the pictures of the process. This is Michael in the area where we plan to put the greenhouse.

Unfortunately, it looks pretty daunting when you see this much uncovered dirt. We knew there would be slopes but the amount to make things level was a little more than we anticipated.

This is the finished view from the high end where we will have our raised bed terraces.

This is the area where the greenhouse and shed will be built looking up to the terraces. Unfortunately, it looks pretty daunting when you see this much uncovered dirt. We knew there would be slopes but the amount to make things level was a little more than we anticipated.

Grapes and jelly

I harvested all of our grapes today. Last year, we almost gave up on the grape vine we had but decided to try to really water and fertilize it to get it through last year. We set it up with supports and it really grew. Earlier this year, it was full of clusters of grapes for the first time ever. They were so sweet tasting. After a week of enjoying them, we decided they were about ripe and needed to be harvested.



These are the grapes after I took them off the vines and put them in the steam juicer. I steamed the grapes in a juicer I've had for probably 20 years and hadn't used in 15! I was able to get a half gallon of juice after a couple of hours of steaming the grapes.


The end result was four pints of a pink hued grape jelly. I also have one in the fridge to eat on. It has a very light, mild grape flavor that is YUMMY!

We have a ripe watermelon!

I don't care to eat watermelon but Michael does and so we planted a few plants. I have never been successful growing watermelon before but this year we have some! I planted a small very sweet watermelon and it looked done so we decided to cut it open to see. Here it is, and a very happy Michael doing his best to enjoy it!

WINTER SQUASH HARVEST

I harvested out winter squash bed in preparation for our fall garden. I am pleased with the harvest even with battling those irritating squash bugs that I just could not get rid of this year. But, they have been the only pests I've really had to deal with other than one big tomato worm we found and eliminated!

Garden Harvest

It's been a while since I blogged about our garden. It survived us being gone thanks to Ryan and Mother Earth watering it! I went out to pick this morning and here's the harvest of the day! We have both green beans and yellow wax beans. I have some winter squash that the vines are dying out so I've been bring them inside when the plants can no longer help it grow. I hope they are ripe enough!

It's hard to see, but our grapes are loaded and just about ready to harvest. We are trying to keep the water to them. Unfortunately, we've had enough rain that our peaches rotted on the trees before they ripened. We only got about two big bowl fulls of peaches from our little orchard. We do have some apples and pears that I hope will produce later this fall.

Here's a close up of our grape vine. We have two other smaller ones that Michael has built an arbor for and we hope to put out some more this fall of various varieties.

This is a view of the lower part of the garden. The tomato plants are taller than I am. I've staked them up as high as I can! The yellow wax beans are in a bed beside them.

This is a raised bed view showing our corn that is forming ears and the green beans beside it. Right in front is our eggplant that have little ones on them and the peppers beside them.

Our sweet potatoes have been growing like crazy and going all over the sides of the bed. I hope there are sweet potatoes down in the soil. We should be able to harvest them the first part of September.

Our fig tree is still growing well and the figs are getting bigger and bigger. Hopefully we will have a few to eat on this fall.

Another walk through the garden!

I know this is turning into a garden tour but that has been our life this year in are "spare time" and something we really enjoy (except when it's in the 90s). We're about done with our strawberries but have some peaches about ripe. In fact, I took this picture and then picked them!

It seems like we can see our grapes get bigger every day.

One big job for Michael this week was making a bed for our blueberries. We still need to mulch them but hope they can grow like crazy for a lot more next year.

These beds are our green beans which are just about to bloom and our sweet potatoes. We also got the cane berry posts put in and wires strung. That was a hard job for Michael!

We're excited to have a fig tree that will produce this year.

What a storm can do!

We love watching our birds in the morning by the bird feeder. We have several families of red cardinals that visit.

My flower beds are taking off. Our hydrangeas are just starting to bloom.

We have a triangle area that I've been trying to put in wild flowers and perennials to fill it out.


We had a pretty violent thunderstorm come through Thursday night. Several big trees were blown over. In fact, it may have been a tornado. Anyway, our little maple tree that is about 7 years old and coming along nicely was a casualty.

Harper's Garden of Eden

We've had a week of almost unending rain but the garden for the most part has loved it! It was fun to get out and see how things are growing and work in the garden on Friday. We had a late freeze in April but it looks like we will have several apples and peaches this year! The buckets are used to water the trees and a deep plug filled with holes going into the ground.

This is a picture of our winter squash, zucchini squash and melon bed! We picked our first squash yesterday.

You can see some of our butternut squash starting to form. We have about four different winter squash varieties that I'm trying out this year!

Boy if our grapes continue to make, we will have a ton! We have two new grape vines we started last fall. One of Michael's honey do jobs is to finish a grape arbor.

Michael made a tomato/bean trellis to put in the middle of our raised beds. We can easily take it down and move it to other beds from year to year. He was half-way putting it up and we had a TERRIBLE thunderstorm on Thursday with high winds. It was bad enough to have some trees down in the area and our trellis, not being finished and anchors was a casualty. I fretted that our beautiful tomato plants would be damaged. They were down but not out! We still have to finish the trellis for the other bed. I think next year I'd like to try pole beans and cucumbers on a trellis!

Here's a view of the garden from the bottom up. We now have 20 raised beds, seven which are newly built this spring! We have nine with strawberries and three with blackberries, raspberries and boysenberries. The rest are for vegetables. We still have to plant in two of them. We can see making our almost acre full of lots of beds and hope to have a southern facing greenhouse which is Michael's big summer project.

Here's a view from one side overlooking the pond. Boy, I love where we live. This morning as I write we have the doors open to hear all of the various birds singing!

Here's a peach that looks like it won't be too long until this variety is ready to pick and eat!