Week 13 - Garden Tour #2

For episode/article 13 for This Week in the Garden, we'll go on a quick tour of my garden. I’m on vacation this week, and it’s been a while since we’ve had a garden update, so for this week’s article/vlog we’ll take a look at my garden and see what’s gone well and what hasn’t!

Starting from the first vegetables planted, we’ve got the onions. They’re just starting to fill out and should be ready to harvest within the next few weeks. You can tell your onions are ready once the tops fall over.

Beside the onions, we’ve got cucumbers. This is the first year I’ve grown cucumbers, and I’ve been delightfully surprised. These are a muncher variety and I’ve been harvesting about 4-6 cucumbers a day from 5 plants. I’ve trellised them on a fence to help support the weight and so I don’t have to worry about training them every few days to a wire. In total, I think I’ve picked about two dozen jars from these plants over the past month!

The next veggies are my tomatoes. I’ve mostly got Early Girl and Better Boy varieties, but I’ve got some Romas and Cherry tomatoes. I decided not to trellis or stake them this year to see if I could grow them in a low-maintenance setting. They fell over once they put on tomatoes when we got some strong wind. I was a little discouraged because some of the plants split, but I left them to see what would happen. I thought that they might send out roots from the stem and I hoped that would make the plants sturdier. Sure enough, that’s what happened! I haven’t had any issues with the tomatoes growing close to the ground, probably because of the mulch, and I’ve harvested about 5 dozen tomatoes over the past 2-3 weeks. I can’t tell if I’m getting the most out of my tomatoes with this method, but with 30 plants I don’t put in much work maintaining them and I’ve got more tomatoes than I can handle!

The next rows are of bush beans. The early beans planted in April aren’t tall, probably because of the cool temperatures. I’ve got two good harvests on these and the later beans planted in May have done well. I harvested those before I left for vacation and had enough for a few meals for 12 people!

I’ve also got bush black beans next to the snap beans. I’ve never grown these before, so I’ve got no standard to know how they’re doing. They look a little yellow, I’m not sure if they need water, nutrients, or they’re just almost done. I’m going to wait for the beans to dry down and then I’ll pick them and store them in a jar.

Next to the beans are my zucchini and yellow squash. These did really well in May, but growth has slowed down and they got Squash Vine Borers a few weeks ago. I left the plants in the rows and gave them some nitrogen. It seems like the plants have turned around and are starting to green up and produce squash again. I’m not sure if this is a last-ditch attempt to produce seeds before they die, or if they’re going to continue to produce. The zucchini I planted later wasn’t affected by the borers and is just starting to produce squash.

I’ve got a few jalapenos in the next row. These were slow-growing, probably due to the cool weather when they were transplanted. They’ve taken off in the past few weeks and I was able to harvest a few peppers to make pepper jelly. I’m waiting on the rest of the jalapenos to add them to a hot salsa after vacation.

Past the peppers are watermelons. They’re just starting to fill in, making the weeding easier. There aren’t any flowers yet, but this variety is a 70 day variety, so hopefully we’ll see flowering in the next few weeks. If everything goes as planned they should be ready before Labor Day.

At the end, I’ve got 20 rows of sweet corn. I have 4 varieties ranging from 60 days to 90 days. The first group should be ready to harvest next week. I’ve had some issues along the way with the corn (see last week’s video) but I think the 70 and 80-day varieties should produce a good number of ears. Hopefully, the corn earworms don’t eat them all!

The last thing in the garden are the potato towers. I made a video on these toward the beginning of the summer. This is another experiment in the garden. The plants flowered about a month ago and now I’m waiting for the stems to die so the potatoes can fill out and the skins can thicken. This should happen in the next few weeks, so expect a video soon!

That’s a not-so-quick tour of my garden. If you’ve got any suggestions, questions, or comments, send me an email or fill out our form. That’s all for this article from This Week in the Garden, stay tuned until next time.

-Adam