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Friday, May 12, 2017

Summer Planting Starting At Last


That's one end of Bed #4 this morning. It's newly planted out with one zucchini plant, basil plants, and cucumber seeds, and there's a new trellis to support the Tromba D'Albenga squash which isn't quite large enough to plant out yet.

This is what it looked like just the other day...


The celery that I sowed over a year ago is gone, just a memory now because there wasn't anything to salvage, it had all turned quite bitter. The chard that was sowed last summer is almost a memory, I harvested a few pounds to blanch and freeze. Every other lingering vegetable and weed was eliminated, except for some Buck's Horn plantain that I transplanted.

The cloches that you see in the first photo are protecting the newly sown cucumber seeds.

Pre-germinated Cucumber Seeds
This year I'm experimenting with pre-germinating the cucumber seeds. I placed these seeds onto damp paper towels enclosed in a plastic bag and placed the bag on my heat mat. Would you believe I did that yesterday morning? It only took 24 hours for the roots to emerge! I started 4 seeds each of 3 varieties. 2 seeds of each went into the garden and the other 2 into pots as backups.

Three of the 5 basil varieties that I'm growing this year were ready to set out.

Corsican Basil
Corsican basil is returning for the 4th year, it has become one of my favorites. I wrote a variety spotlight post about it last year.

Persian Basil
Persian basil is new this year.

Italian Mountain Basil
Italian Mountain Basil is returning again. I don't think I grew it last year, but I did the year before and I remember that it produce some very large leaves. It's also supposed to be more cold tolerant than most basil varieties.

Romanesco Zucchini
I've been growing Romanesco zucchini, a hybrid variety from Renee's, for a number of years. It has always been extremely vigorous and productive. It produces really tasty, firm, and large zucchinis. That little tiny plant looks rather lost in all the space (do you see it in the first photo?), but I've learned to give it a lot of room.

Look how big it got back in 2014...



And it ended up even bigger! That's just one plant!

One lesson that has taken me years to learn is to give those little seedlings plenty of space to grow. It's hard to resist the urge to fill up a space when the plants are so small. I know from experience that the tendency is to crowd too many plants into a space. One strategy that I use now is to do a bit of interplanting, like I did recently with lettuce planted between broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. I'll cut the lettuces as babies before they start to compete with the brassicas. So I'm doing something like that around the baby zucchini plant, I sowed the space with a cover crop of buckwheat and mustard that I can cut down as the zucchini grows. I also sowed a bunch of pea seeds amongst the cover crop, a variety for which I had saved a lot of seeds and which was bred for harvesting as shoots. So I hope to get a cutting or 2 of pea shoots before the zucchini takes over.

So now that I've finally got some summer veggies into the garden the weather is going to turn colder than usual and there's even a chance of rain next week.


12 comments:

  1. Yegads! More cold for you! Nights in the 40s. Yowwee. Squash'll need a blankie.

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    1. The squash will need a blankie! What about me... Highs of 61, 58, 58, 59 predicted for the next few days. Brrr. Shiver.

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  2. I'm with you on the Corsican basil. I grew it for the first time last year and we loved it. I'm growing Persian again too, though I wound up letting it flower for the bees last year.

    Your first photo reminded me I want to experiment with trellising some of my squash this year. I forget if you use remesh or hog panels, but do you just clip them on to the t-posts or are they tied to them somehow? Left to my own I might lash them together with some wire, but I'm thinking that could be hard to undo at the end of the season.

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    1. I use 6-inch square remesh and lash it to the posts (a combination of t-posts and flimsier garden poles to extend the height) with UV resistant cable zip ties. The zip ties are easy to attach and then at the end of the season they are easy to snip off.

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  3. WE are still in danger of night time frosts - one found our potatoes this week. WE hope they will recover.

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    1. I guess I shouldn't be complaining about our cool weather. Frost still for you, I stopped worrying about that a couple of months ago.

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  4. May try the cuke seed trick with our straight yellow squash. Sowed in the ground a week ago and no sign of it yet. Rain due on Tuesday and then heating up again.

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    1. I pre-germinated the squash seeds also and it seems to have worked great. I'll be trying it with melons too.

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  5. That's still some really cool weather. We're supposed to get a couple days in the 90's this week, all I can think is that it's better than the 100's.

    Your basil plants look nice and healthy, and they're pretty interesting looking varieties. I've actually​ finished planting out the entire summer garden, the only thing left is seeding some beans and squash. That's really great that you're able to keep up with gardening year round.

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    1. Aack! 100's! That's so unusual here in my microclimate. 90's are unusual too, but certainly more bearable than the 100's.

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  6. I've been away for a while and I missed CV. Just going somewhere else makes us more appreciative of how close we live to paradise. Frost in May, 100 degrees in May, you can have it.

    What do you have growing under(Agribon?)cover in the first couple of pictures.
    Thanks.

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    1. We do live in a special place. That's actually not Agribon, it's 1/4-inch hardware cloth covered frames that I use to make cages for critter protection - birds, rabbits, rats, and such. It doesn't keep bugs out though...

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