Bed #3 Retrospective For 2014

I was hoping to get all my 2014 evaluations done before the end of January but that doesn't look like it's going to happen. Anyway, here's a look back at another of my 4 huge raised beds. In case you haven't noticed I'm not doing them in order, I've covered #4, #2, and now I'm on to #3.

This bed looked pretty bleak at the beginning of the year. The Greek Gigante beans were looking dead, and anything else that had any signs of life were covered up with Agribon to protect them from the birds.

January 14, 2014

Things were looking better at the beginning of February, I had pulled out the Gigante beans, which weren't actually dead, most of the plants still had big fleshy roots that probably would have sprouted in the spring. But the beans had to go because I had other plans for this bed. That's an experimental patch of Red Fife wheat taking off in the foreground. The long low tunnel is protecting various greens that are just germinating. And the fabric covered trellis is covering some snow peas.

February 5

The snow peas were holdovers from a late autumn planting and survived a few freezing nights with the help of an additional covering of frost cloth, the plants produced 1 1/2 pounds of pods in February.

February 5

Here's a look at the greens getting going, they included two types of Arugula, mizuna, pac choi, three varieties of spinach, and there's still room for some transplants.

February 5

Before the end of the month I had another tunnel up and planted out with different greens and saladings, including beets, rapini, pea shoots, and lettuces.

February 22

A glance at the tunnel in late March shows obvious signs of greenery, some of it overgrown because I had been travelling a few weeks and nothing got harvested.

March 27

If the plants weren't enclosed in the tunnel the good bugs would be feasting on rapini flowers.

March 27

By the end of April the wheat patch is looking a bit sad, there's spots where the plants are looking small and they are yellowing.

April 28

 There's plenty of activity still going on in the tunnels.

April 28

Including some pretty good looking lettuces and beets.

April 28

By mid May the wheat is starting to look decidedly sorry, it's stunted and barely forming any heads. What I didn't realize at this time is that the bed was being invaded by oak roots because I didn't line this bed with a root barrier when I filled it. The oak roots were out competing the wheat for water and nutrients.

May 18

The weather turned unusually hot for May so I topped the tunnels with some Agribon to shade the greens growing inside. Do you see the carrots blooming at the end of the bed? Those are some Spanish Black carrots that I had sown there on March 25 of 2013. Some of them had bloomed at the end of 2013 but frost killed most of the developing seed heads before the seeds matured. I cut the tops down and left the roots in the ground and the plants grew back with a vengeance in the spring.

May 18

 The wheat just kept looking worse...

May 28

and even more worse. Why I didn't give up and pull it out much earlier I'm not sure. It's hard to see, but the far end of the bed is looking like a jungle also, it's full of blooming carrots, arugula, and coriander. The tunnels kept producing...

June 11

I was pretty good at sowing successive rounds of greens and saladings through the year. And what a surprise, I was harvesting strawberries! After the year of the rat (2011, see the tally of kills on my sidebar) I thought I would never be able to grow strawberries again. That year the rats feasted not only on the berries but they ate the plants too, I had to rip out all the plants so as not to feed them.

June 11

Ah, there's a little better look at those burgeoning carrots. Those blossoms were an absolute magnet for bees and beneficial insects, as were the arugula and coriander blossoms.

June 11

I was not so good at keeping on top of the chard harvests, they threatened to burst out of the tunnel much of the time.

June 22

I eventually gave up on the wheat and pulled it out, chopped it up, and into the compost it went.

June 28

It was when I prepared the end of the bed for squash that I found all the oak roots, so this area got a thorough digging. The squash didn't seem to mind the competition as much as the wheat did. The trellis has two Tromba D'Albenga squash planted at the base and in front of that are two Honey Nut butternut squashes. The space could have easily supported 4 Honey Nut plants because they are fairly small plants for winter squashes. This year I'm going to train they up trellises.

July 2

I had harvested Sweetie Baby romaine lettuce through May from this space but didn't get around to replanting anything. There was some escarole in the bed also but it bolted without forming any decent heads.

July 2

There was a bit more lettuce to get me through July.

July 2

The new squash vines were climbing and trailing all over the place by mid August and the January sown fennel was reaching for the sky.

August 12

I planted out a couple of Green Fingers Persian cucumbers at the end of the bed after clearing out the carrots, arugula, and coriander towards the end of August. The carrots dropped seeds all over the place when I harvested the heads (which I've still not cleaned, tsk tsk) and I've been harvesting the volunteers for a while now.

August 30

More lettuce, some gai lan, and beets going at the end of August.

August 30

The other tunnel had more than enough greens going to keep me harvesting about every week to ten days. This is just before I went through and harvested, more often than not it seemed that I took the camera out to the garden after I harvested but shot was too pretty to miss.

August 30

August 30

The butternut squashes were quick to set a crop. This was one of the larger squashes.

August 30

Not the best photo, I didn't seem to take many shots of this bed in September, but you can see how the Tromba squash has covered the trellis and the butternut vines are already dying back and the fennel is sprawling all over the place. I let the fennel stay because I didn't have a lot of flowers left in the garden to attract beneficial insects. The dreaded Bagrada Bug had shown up for the first time and I had pulled out most of the sweet alyssum in the garden because it is extremely attractive to the Bagradas and alyssum is was my mainstay plant for drawing in the good bugs.

September 22 

The summer sown lettuce looks pretty good here, but it succumbed to heat and powdery mildew. The Sweetie Baby bolted before I was ready to harvest it and the butterhead had a lot of soft brown spots inside the heads, although I was able to rescue some of it.

September 22

The cucumbers were thoroughly happy though and quickly covered their tower.

October 3

The same goes for the productive Tromba squash. The butternuts have been harvested and cleared out.

October 3

By the beginning of November I had cleared out this tunnel and direct sown various radishes, baby turnips, rapini, and Cilician parsley.

November 4

These are transplants of spinach that was started in paper pots.

November 4

The cucumbers were still producing. Green Fingers seems to be very resistant to powdery mildew, they were barely fazed by it through the autumn.

November 4

I was still harvesting Tromba squash as well, another PM resistant variety. It also helped that we had a long and warm autumn.

November 4

The squash and cucumbers went into a pretty quick decline in November, although they still produced some small harvests.

November 29

November 29

But the new plants in the tunnel were happy.

November 29

November 29

The other tunnel also had some lettuce and beet transplants off to a good start.

November 29

Here's the bed on the last day of the year. The squash and zucchini have been removed and the fennel has been cut down. The jugs are full of water and warming in the sun. We had had some freezing nights and I used the jugs of water to help protect my celery from freezing. I put the warm(ish) jugs of water in amongst the celery plants after sundown and covered the plants with frost cloth. I don't know if that tactic actually helped but the celery did come through the freezing nights unscathed. You can see that there is also some frost cloth pulled aside and hanging in the path, I used that to give the greens in the tunnels some added freeze protection as well.

December 31

 The lettuces were coming along very nicely at the end of the year.

December 31

 And the greens in the other tunnel were looking quite good too.

December 31

December 31

All those lovely veggies in the tunnels shrugged off those freezing nights and have given me a nice steady supply of goodies for the past month. I'll not be replanting anything in this bed for now because in the next few weeks I need to shift the soil and lay a root barrier on the bottom of the bed. I won't have to remove all the soil at once, I should only have to remove about 25% of it, lay down the barrier and then shift the soil from the next section onto the barrier and so on until the task is done. Then the entire bed will be sown with a cover crop mix and prepared for planting out solanums at the end of May.

Only one bed left to review! And then a review of the 2014 harvests. Then it's on to 2015...