Vanderbrew

So, I mentioned last night that I think that the garden is going ok, but I haven’t posted anything about it lately…

Well, I think I’ve got the bugs under control. We seem to have reached a happy equilibrium where they eat some, but not too much and everything is flourishing. I still kill earwigs every time I see them and hold a deep seated loathing/hatred thing for them, but, I’m confident that with constant vigilance I’ll reduce the population in the backyard to such a degree that the sightings will become so rare that the insects will fade from living memory and will exist only in the realm of myth and legend…

A man can dream, can’t he?

Anyway, here’s some shots of the garden so that you all can finally visualize what I’ve been talking about and investing time and effort in.

The cross-garden shot. The two wooden structures in the foreground are tomato “towers” and the one in the background is a cucumber support. Tomatoes, basil, broccoli and beet sprouts are in the close bed - lettuce in the far one.

The black herringbone skeleton in the foreground is my irrigation system. In the far bed you can see the garlic, lettuce and one of our grape plants.

Our nice row of garlic walks up the right side of the bed while the forest of lettuce looks on from behind (my attempt at bio-intensive methods) and the small shoots in front left are turnips. There are carrots between the turnips and lettuce but it’s hard to see them.

The cucumber support with a row of plants at its base. I built the support over the weekend am pretty happy with how it turned out. You can just barely see a dark green smudge beyond the sunlit lettuce - that’s one of our two bell pepper plants. The four bamboo poles behind the cucumbers are for the beans - two poles for the pole beans and two poles for the bush beans (where I didn’t read the package carefully enough to realize that they were bush, not pole beans…). The lattice in the back on the left is for the sweet peas.

Our back wall features sweet peas, then pole and bush beans. The other Flame grape is climbing the trellis and there are a few zucchini plants in front of it.

Basil! It’s hard to tell, but there are four plants here. The two on the outside are from the first batch I put out and they’re actually coming back from what I thought was a terminal case of “bug ravage”. The two in the middle were “extras” (is there such a thing when it comes to basil?) that I’d kept in the garage under lights because I wasn’t sure where to put them.

So, yeah, I’m pretty happy with how it’s all going. I started more seeds over the weekend to try to get the other variety of peppers and egg plants to come up. I also started herbs - oregano and parsley because I don’t think what I direct-seeded is coming up, rosemary because you need to wait until it’s warm enough and the seed starters are free, and basil because there’s no such thing as too much of it. I’m growing more marigolds because my direct seeded ones did pretty abysmally - most likely because I didn’t have irrigation setup at first and the soil got really dry for a few days.

Oh, and the bit that I’m proudest about? Every single vegetable/fruit you see in the pictures (apart from the grapes which we bought last year and the garlic which was grown from cloves) is grown from seed. No six packs, no 4 inch pots, nothing from the local nursery. Everything was ordered online in little seed envelopes and grown from that state.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.