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.