Spring Garden Retrospective - Part One

It's been quite a while since my last garden tour, a late March tour at the beginning of April.  There has been a lot going on in the garden since then and I've been taking photos all along but somehow I just haven't found the time to do a post about it all. So I've decided to do a series of retrospective posts. I've found these types of posts to be fun and informative and this may be the garden tour format from now on. It's always amazing how quickly things change in the garden and I love to see how it happened. 

Lets start with what I call Bed #1. At the end of March this bed was half full of favas that I was just starting to harvest and the other half was nearly cleared of the over wintered veggies. So let's leap forward to April 28. The favas are still there and at the height of their production. The other half of the bed is now home to newly planted out zucchini seedlings and a tunnel filled with recently set out pea shoot and bean seedlings.

Bed #1 on April 28, 2014

April 28

Here's one of the baby zucchini plants. It's a sibling of the amazing Romanesco zucchini that I grew last year.

Romanesco zucchini April 28

May 11

May 14

Whoa baby, it's really starting to take off... 

May 18

May 18

June 3

Z-Day has arrived, the first zucchini to blossom.

June 3

Off in another corner of the bed and back to April 28, the newly planted out San Pasquale zucchini. It's under a protective water bottle cloche to keep the birds from pecking it to death.

April 28

May 14

The birds still love the San Pasquale zucchini. I'm experimenting with suspending strings of milk bottle caps over the plant. The caps are colorful and swing around in the breeze so I'm hoping the color and motion will scare the feathered feasters away once in a while.

June 3

Look off to the left, there's something new in my garden. Corn, my first attempt at growing it in at least a dozen years. I was surprised to find that the soil was staying at a consistent 70ºF in early May so I knew it was time to plant some corn.

May 7

I had already cleared out this section of the bed, the favas in this corner had been sown early and were already finished producing so I had prepared this section of the bed for summer vegetables. I dug in my usual amendments of sifted compost, crab meal, sulfate of potash, and a trace mineral amendment called Azomite.

May 7

The corn is set out in a block, 3 plants by 5 plants, each plant 12 inches apart.

May 7

The granules in the planting hole are a mycorrhizal innoculant called Mykos (OMRI approved). Mycorrhizae have a symbiotic relationship with plant roots that helps plants to access more nutrients and water and the mycorrhizae get access to the carbohydrates that the plants produce. I used this amendment with my eggplant and some of my pepper plants last year and found the results to be worth the investment. The innoculant isn't cheap, but it takes far less than what the package recommends to get good results and it will provide lasting benefits in healthy soil.

May 7

A week later and the corn is already poking it's leaves up and out of the soil. This is not a sweet corn, it's a flint corn called Cascade Ruby Gold that was bred to be harvested dry and then used for cornmeal or polenta. I probably could have sown it even earlier because the kernels don't have the high sugar levels that inhibit germination so it doesn't mind cooler soils. (The sweeter the corn the more difficult it is to get it to germinate). This variety was developed to do well in cooler climates.

May 14

Only 4 days later... Almost all the seeds germinated, I think only 2 out of the 30 seeds did not grow.

May 18

Ten days later... I've thinned to one plant per planting hole - no gaps! And there's another look at the San Pasquale zucchini.

May 28

Yet one week later and each stalk is producing tillers (aka suckers but not actually, true suckers form higher on the stalk). Tiller production is generally considered to be a sign of favorable growing conditions, it means the plants have ample water and nutrients. From what I've read it's not necessary to remove the tillers, they do not suck nutrients from the main stalk because they develop their own roots. Tillers are generally regarded as benign.

June 3

Cascade Ruby Gold is supposed to produce in about 85 days, so on May 21 I felt quite comfortable about planting the other flint corn that I'm experimenting with this year. Floriani Red has an estimated production time of 100 days so it shouldn't start tasseling until well after the Cascade Ruby Gold. Red Floriani was even quicker to germinate, I spied the first leaf blade on May 27 and a day later at least one seed per planting hole had emerged.

May 28

Six days later. Corn is such a satisfying plant to watch grow! Floriani Red is an Italian heirloom that makes really tasty polenta. I've tried a locally grown Floriani Red polenta and loved it so I hope that mine tastes as good or better. Polenta isn't something that I eat very often any more so when I do I want it to be the BEST.

June 3

Next, let's check out the tunnel. I had the tunnel covered with remay to begin with because my pea and bean starts needed to be planted out and my order of micromesh hadn't arrived yet. The photo below shows the Usui pea shoot seedlings in the foreground and bush beans beyond.

April 20

One thing I like about the micromesh is that unlike the remay I can see through it.

April 28

April 28

April 28

The micromesh does not provide protection from the hot sun. Early in May we had an unseasonal heat wave and with temperatures hitting the low 90ºF's the peas needed some shade. A triple layer of remay came to the rescue.

May 11

The beans looked like they were heat stressed also but rather than cover them up I gave them extra water and a compost mulch.

May 11

The peas responded well to the shade, water and mulch and produced a nice bunch of shoots. This is after one initial harvest to cut the main shoot. The plants produce new shoots from the bases of the plants and the remaining leaf nodes on the main stem. When I harvest the shoots I cut them back to one leaf node where I can see a nascent bud.

May 18

I lost a few of the bush snap beans (Royal Burgundy and Classic Slenderette) but the remaining plants started to recover.

May 18, Royal Burgundy and Classic Slenderette

The bush dry beans fared better for the most part.

May 18, Rosso di Lucca and Black Coco

 Although you can see some yellowing in some of the Black Coco beans.

May 18.

The pea shoots take a while to generate new shoots, this is one week after a harvest.

May 28

 The snap beans are slow to get going this year but I think they will produce a modest crop.

May 28

 The dry beans are much more vigorous.

May 28

It always seem like the next round of pea shoots appears overnight, one day there's almost nothing and then there's a thicket of growth.

June 3

 The radishes behave the same way, one day there's a few dainty leaves and then suddenly the roots are pushing themselves out of the ground.

June 3, White Icicle radish

The Black Coco beans have gone through a growth spurt recently and they seem to want to push out of their end of the tunnel.

June 3

Seen from this angle the Rosso di Lucca beans don't look so bad either.

June 3

The snap beans. Oh well, perhaps I'll get a handful or two.

June 3

The two remay enclosed trellises that are visible behind the tunnel (a few photos back) are where I've got more beans started. The remay discourages the birds from feasting. I've learned from hard experience that I MUST protect my bean seedlings from the birds. The birds don't seem to like the remay enclosure even though it is open, perhaps it's because the walls tend to billow around with the breeze or it feels dangerous. I'm not sure why, but they don't bother the seedlings in there. The first trellis is planted with Tarbais beans, the seeds for which came from a packet of cooking beans from Rancho Gordo.

May 28, Tarbais beans

June 3

I hope the second trellis of beans makes up for the poorly performing bush beans. These are two large romano type beans, Spanish Musica and Golden Gate.

May 28, Golden Gate and Spanish Musica beans

June 3

Finally, the last stop on the tour - Cucumbers. Here's another method I use for seedling protection, gallon water bottles with the bottoms cut off and the caps removed make great mini green houses. The cucumbers appreciate the extra warmth on cold spring days and it also keeps the feathered or furry critters from munching.

April 28

April 28

I'm growing two varieties of cukes this year. Tasty Treat Japanese cucumbers and Garden Oasis cucumbers. I sowed the seeds into 4-inch pots and started them indoors on a heat mat. The tasty treat cucumbers came from a new packet of seeds so I sowed only two seeds into that pot. The Garden Oasis seeds were rather old so I sowed the all of the remaining 4 seeds into the pot in hopes of getting one plant - of course they all germinated. I'll have to thin those out soon.

June 3

That's the catch-up tour for Bed #1. Stay tuned, or not if I bored you, for posts about the rest of the garden.