PNW July 2014

  its July   

familygardens is having a break today from a very HOT heat wave we have had the last few days this week.....not complaining   

harvested our second zuk last night, along with 2 med size heads of our first broccoli of the season   steamed with butter and a harvest of of cabbage last night...it  was delicious!...so happy the rats didn't get to them all....we still have about 6 broccoli, 4 cauliflowers and 1 cabbage left still growing.....

took down the sugar snap peas and will replant a bush type next week for a fall harvest....

no ripe tomatoes just yet....lots of flowering and each plant has fruit and some are starting to blush....

harvested taters again last night for dinner and we will harvest the rest next week or so ......we need to get fall harvest plants planted in those beds....so funny to say that when the last couple of days have been in the high 80's & 90's   

the last of our spinach is bolting.....will pull those too and replant next week.....

corn, squash and beans are doing great.....beans are starting to flower

we have baby cucumbers and boy oh boy if all our plants do well this year we will have lots of cucumbers.....sure hope chickens like them as I don't see how we will eat them all LOL....think we over planted this year....but...we really haven't had a good harvest for several years now....so not complaining   

garlics are getting scapes, sunflowers are growing taller, pumpkin plant is HUGE and blueberries are turning blue   still harvesting strawberries and raspberries .....they keep giving and giving....chickens love them too.....we have been freezing them and so far we have 6 gals of strawberries and 2 gals of raspberries....we put some frozen in water for the chickens along will some frozen corn and peas when we got that heat wave....they loved it!

How is everyone else doing?

Happy gardening
rose

FG, Sounds like you are having a successful harvest this year.   

FamilyGardening wrote:a harvest of of cabbage last night...it  was delicious!...so happy the rats didn't get to them all....

Rats? How horrible. I hate those things in the wild, though I like them as pets. Too destructive of almost anything and everything, and too disease-ridden.

took down the sugar snap peas and will replant a bush type next week for a fall harvest....

I guess I should do that too. This is my first season (successfully) growing peas, and I'm reluctant to plant fall crops in our hot weather. Do you ever have problems germinating them in the summer heat?

the last of our spinach is bolting.....will pull those too and replant next week.....

Same deal. I'm worried it'll just bolt, but no?

we have baby cucumbers and boy oh boy if all our plants do well this year we will have lots of cucumbers.....sure hope chickens like them as I don't see how we will eat them all LOL....think we over planted this year....but...we really haven't had a good harvest for several years now....so not complaining   

Good luck to both of us! I planted about a dozen each of Armenian and Lemon cucumbers, and also have two whose name I forget from a local nursery.

I give my neighbor some of my veggie scraps for her chickens sometimes, and they love the peels of almost everything, including cukes. I'll bet they'd like the rest of the cuke too!

As to my gardening stuff today ...

I made a direct-sow planting of a third type of bush bean today, "Speedy" from Territorial Seeds. Supposedly they germinate in 8-16 and are mature at 50 days. I guess I sowed something like three dozen. The other bush beans I'm growing are Dragon Tongue and Royal Burgundy. The RB have such dark green leaves! Really cool looking already. DT's are starting to move beyond the three or four inches they seemed stuck at for a while.

Also replanted some patty pans, direct-sow. Maybe a dozen. I killed off most of my transplants in the same bed because I didn't harden them off long enough and the temps were near and sometimes over 100. The green and white ones didn't do so well last year, but the yellow ones grew like crazy. Hoping they all do well.

My two malabar spinach in frosting buckets are doing fine in this heat -- that's what they're good at, I guess, as a tropical plant. I've got another one that successfully germinated. My puppy bit off half of one of the first seed leaves on my biggest one, and I picked it up and ate it. Tasted really good, but a little like puppy. I'm very excited about this plant and hope it does great.

Tomatoes planted out in the wild hills behind the house are doing fine. I have a few more to put there.

Tomatoes and peppers at one neighbor's garden (two different ones let me plant in their boxes) are doing average at best. I'm leaving my bed of bolted onions alone, as bee food. Everything there is doing average at best for me except for the beans and last year's oregano, which turned into a monster plant, but another friend who also uses some of our neighbor's boxes there is doing great. He brought in a lot of good compost, more than I could afford, and is using red plastic mulch on his tomatoes. He's doing way better than last year. I'm so curious to try one of his blue tomatoes.

I'm doing fantastic at the other neighbor's place. What a difference good soil makes. At that one, I've got three tomatillos in MM buckets that are doing very well, two of them with lots of lanterns and one younger one looking very nice but just starting to flower. Also I have I think four tomatoes in MM buckets there, younger plants with few or no flowers yet, as well as four in a bed with excellent regular compost that look incredibly healthy, with good thick stems, and are starting to flower and get a tomato or two on them. Banana peppers in that bed are doing nicely, really starting to stack up on the plants even though the plants don't look full-grown yet. I also have two Red Ruffles basil in there -- really nice and beautiful and disease-resistant basil plants. Last year we had late blight, plenty other diseases and bugs too, and they were the only plants unaffected. In fact they did great. So I had to get more this year.

Back home I have some more tomato plants that are long overdue for transplanting, a few more basil plants, a lot of small lettuce seedlings and some bolting full-grown ones, some nice healthy snap peas that have slowed down a lot and should be pulled, some chard that barely survived leaf miners and isn't doing too well, a Better Bush tomato in a great big pot that looks healthy but isn't setting any fruit on its many flowers, a couple of elephant garlic starting to dry up, various herbs and flowers doing great, a few squash growing out of the compost pile that I'm just going to leave there, lots of lovely mint, and two Brussels sprouts plants from last fall that still haven't done jack squat and are just taking up room.

I got a great haul of free buckets the other day, and should start planting and transplanting seedlings and smaller plants into them over the weekend if not tomorrow.

Marc, Where did you get the free buckets? That's great.

I did a tour of the local supermarkets. One or two buckets here and there, one place only lets the bakery manager give them out and she's rarely around, and another one gave six or seven at once, including a couple of 5-gallon ones.

Mostly they just have smaller buckets, but those are fine for shallow-rooted plants like many greens. I think they'd still be big enough for some smallish root crops too -- radishes or beets? I'm really trying to master growing greens, so I'll probably plant some of my lettuce seedlings and a type of big red mustard seed I just bought ... oh, and I finally found some New Zealand Lettuce seeds! I put some in the ground today and will also try some in buckets.

Carried water way up the hill behind the house to water my "in the wild" tomatoes and found three out of four had their entire tops eaten off. Drat, I had thought their being poisonous would keep that from happening. Of course, I suppose it could have been a hornworm. Who knows. That's been a lot of work to all come to nothing! But worse, it suggests that maybe I shouldn't try that again, and I had been hoping to plant more and more stuff up there.

Watered at the two neighbor's places who let me use some of their beds. Still the clear division between where most of my stuff is, where most things besides beans are doing poorly, and the other place where I have a concrete raised bed to myself along with a bucket brigade I brought in, where everything is doing fantastic. One of the tomatillos in buckets, though, was really droopy. I've got to be sure to water every single day now; too many days in the high 90's and above, and the bigger the plants get, the more water they'll need. Gave everything a darn good soaking. High of 96 today, it's 96 and above through Thursday, and starting Friday and going through Wednesday, it's 100 degrees and up.

Good news is that now I've got FOUR malabar spinach seedlings in buckets there. Wow did I go through a lot of seeds before I got germination. Interesting plants. Their seedling leaves get very big, a couple of inches long at least.

Bees are everywhere. Back home in the backyard, where I have some trailing lobelias and marigolds and a veronica and the sage is in bloom, is alive and noisy with them when I get up close to water. As tiny as those lobelia flowers are, the bees of every size really love them. I'll definitely plant more next year. And the bees are always visiting the bowl full of rocks and water that I left out for them, too.

It's hard to decide whether to pull the peas or not. They stopped for a few days, and some are still doing nothing, but some seem to have started up with a lot of production all over again, even though our days have been in the 90's and up for a while now.

I've got tiny lettuce seedlings group-planted in a small tray of vermiculite, and need to transplant those soon. They're still small, but their leaves have turned from green to red.

The Johnny Jump-ups, for whatever reason, are absolutely frozen at tiny seedling stage and refuse to grow any further.

All that work! I'm sorry about the hill tomatoes.

Thanks. Oh well. Luckily those would have just been bonus tomatoes, and I have more elsewhere.

Picked a couple dozen peas today. Most have slowed down or stopped, but some are doing really well even in this 90 to 100+ heat! I should save some seeds from them instead of eating them all, every time.

One of my tomatillos seems to be in permanent wilt. Tomatillos, I've read and heard, are notorious for slurping up water, and they're growing very fast right now, so I think I may need to water them more than once a day until we get past this heat, which could easily last through late August without any breaks. I've been giving them a good daily soaking, but apparently for at least one of the three I have, that's not enough.

I have very few tomatoes on my plants. I think it's just too hot. Day time temps in the high 90's, evening temps in the low 80's for a while past dark, and of course no rain.

More beans and patty pan squash have germinated. Yay!

I have the tomatillos under sheer curtains right now. The branches not protected are dying, so my guess is the pure hot sun is doing them in. Lots of water seems to help recover from mid-day wilting. A few fruit turned yellow, even some of the smaller ones. ??

Do you figure the hot sun killed those fruits, or just ripened them prematurely? I could imagine plants under great stress trying to ripen their fruit immediately, if that could be one of nature's strategies ... I dunno though ...

I think I'll go water mine a second time tonight.

I think I have about a dozen squash plants now, almost all of them quite small. But they're patty pans, so they can grow and produce very quickly once they're in the swing of things. Hope I get lucky productivity wise! We still have at least two months of summer to go before the cool-down begins in earnest.

Ripening prematurely is an interesting idea. The flavor was off, also. I'll get them under shade earlier next year.

wow what beautiful weather we are having in our familygardens this week!!

our main SFG area



SFG bed #1 three sisters, with Painted mountain corn, Butternut squash, Scarlet runner beans



SFG bed #2 three tomatoes plants (Amish paste, Indigo Rose, San Marzano) celery, green onions & New York onions.....the trellis area is empty right now waiting for a replanting for a fall bush sugar snap pea and we have a few empty squares.... 



close up of the Indigo Rose tomatoes.....they are so pretty cant wait to taste them



The new SFG herb area to the left are the herbs and to the right is where we put the extra three sisters corn with some bush wax beans and a cantaloupe in the middle.....we also planted some sunflowers up front in the cinder blocks & leeks on the sides....



we have been harvesting lots of potatoes and still have lots to go



come home to a nice surprise harvest of broccoli & cauliflower





came home to a nice size banana pepper



our tomato cuttings are doing VERY good too   

Early Girl




Better Boy




Stupice




Indigo Rose next to our salad bowel



containers on the back patio doing great!.....carrots, corn & beans, cucumbers, onions, cucumber, onions



happy gardening
rose

Everything looks green and healthy.  Congrats on your excellent harvest so far.

Everything looks so healthy. That banana pepper really is a nice size. Mine are doing very well, but they're not that long.

One of your cukes is in a fairly small pot. They produce okay for you like that?

Marc Iverson wrote:Everything looks so healthy.  That banana pepper really is a nice size.  Mine are doing very well, but they're not that long.

One of your cukes is in a fairly small pot.  They produce okay for you like that?

so far the cukes seem to be doing good, we had extra seedlings and extra empty pots....I think as long as we keep them fed they should do well.....

out front we have 3 cukes in one pot as we sown them by seed and I didn't want to pull any of them in fear something would happen to the one I left, not realizing all three would do so well......






happy gardening
rose

The weather here is all over the place. Every few days the predictions can change by nearly ten degrees. One thing I don't think anyone expected is a sudden onset of rain. It certainly wasn't on The Weather Channel. It's nice, though; saves me a couple hours of watering today, and the air smells so good! And it's so much cooler than just yesterday, by 20 degrees. What a relief!

Marc, Remind what rain is like!   

  Harvested 32 pounds of Potatoes today   

I believe that's about 50 pounds so far this year......still have to harvest a 3x5 bed of red potatoes, a 2x2 area of some kind of baking potato....cant think of it off the top of my head.....and a garbage can with fingerlings......

our gardens are going crazy with this weather!...now to keep away the powder mildew and blight....my heart will be broken if blight comes again this year....

happy gardening
rose.....

Yeah, we had blight last year and it truly was horrible -- ruined much of the soil for this year too. It killed or stunted almost all my first plantings of tomatoes and peppers.

It's back to being very hot again, and around 80 degrees even past 11 p.m.! That's extremely unusual around here; usually nights are 30 to 35 degrees cooler than days.

I helped man the master gardener's booth today at the farmers market. Man was it hot! I brought along a huge mug full of iced coffee and two sodas and still I was very thirsty. Fun helping out and being with the people, though. Went to visit a local nursery afterwards and couldn't make myself leave because the part I was in was air-conditioned.

Got another great haul of free buckets. Woo hoo!

Some new bush beans are sprouting, but germination was a little spotty, to my surprise. I've had excellent germination so far with beans. But maybe all this heat was just too much. It's pushing some good growth in my tomatoes and better-established bean plants, though.

I'm back to hauling huge tubs of horse poop to make another giant compost pile. A different location this year (on a neighbor's property instead of ours) makes for a much shorter and more even walk, though, so getting it every day won't be near as physically demanding. The same source (a different neighbor) has chicken poop I can have, so I'll dump some of that in there too.

It was supposedly 108 today; highs tomorrow at 103 and Wednesday 106. Sheesh. Even watering my tomatillos twice a day, they're wilting and look as if they've somehow dropped half a foot or more in height.

Some of my peas are still producing! Holy cow.

Whatever I can keep watered enough looks like it's adoring the non-stop high heat. It seems to have given at least a small kick-start to some real duds and slow movers.

Ouch, that's hot.

 wowzers   Marc that is HOT.....I hope you are able to keep up with the watering and your plants do ok.....that is some kind of heat for your peas to be producing.....  

this weekend we were able to get some starts going for fall.....cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Swiss chard, collard greens, Purple kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, bok choi, sugar snap peas and giant mustard......

we still need to add our home made compost to some of the beds where we harvested our potatoes so we can direst sow.....carrots, onions, leeks, beets, Parsnips, turnips, mache, spinach, lettuce, cilantro, parsley.......

cant believe we are already starting fall crops as our summer veggies are in full force.....we ate our first cucumber with some of our last carrots today and they were delicious!.......we had our first ripe tomato over the weekend a sweet million cherry....very tasty!!

our back porch Painted mountain corn is getting ears   the others in our SFG three sisters are starting to get their tassels so they will be next getting ears....so excited to try this corn   been tapping on the back porch corn as it only has 4 in a rubber maid tub planted with some wax beans....I can see the pollen as I tap, so Im hoping those beautiful ears get pollinated!

our next door neighbor gave us 2 gifts today   .....a cutting from a currant (cant remember if its black or red) and an elder berry start .....so excited to get these and add them to our gardens!  we have some extra raspberry canes that we are going to give her.....I love that we can share and trade with our neighbors!!

happy gardening
rose

Rose, Your fall garden sounds so nice. When will your carrots and parsnips b ready to harvest?

sanderson wrote:Rose,  Your fall garden sounds so nice.  When will your carrots and parsnips b ready to harvest?

hoping to harvest after first frost....sometime in October....  

happy gardening
rose

You have really gotten a move on when it comes to getting ready for fall, Rose. I'm impressed! I've just completed what will probably be my last warm-season planting, a last round of Speedy snap beans (50 days). Filling in gaps in the one bed I planted them in, in which germination wasn't as good as with my Royal Burgundy and Dragon Tongue beans planted elsewhere, and some of those that sprouted look in questionable health. Not sure if it's the soil or the heat or the seeds or what ... anyway, nothing planted for fall yet, though I've resolved NOT to use the one free bed I have for anything and instead wait till the heat's down to plant something for fall.

I still do have some transplanting to do.

The RB and DT beans look quite nice and are starting to fill in their area. The dragon tongues are so full that I'm having trouble watering them, as I have to sneak my hose in there somehow without breaking off branches. Flowering has just barely started, but the leaves look happy enough.

In the other garden I have at the neighbors, the tomatoes in the bed they gave me to use are growing so fast that I have to rearrange their branches in the cages daily. It's 100% compost, very good quality. There are only a few tomatoes there so far, but the plants haven't been out of their seedling four-pack for all that long. The nitrogen may be quite high, but it's too early to tell is there is any phosphorous problem. We'll see how the blossoming and fruiting goes. Very few of either so far, tons of green growth.

Today I couldn't resist buying the third hanging "basket" of three I found on a steep discount at the local grange -- from $35 to $9 each. They're quite sturdy, and I think about 30 inches long and fairly deep. No mounting hardware, but wire should do the trick if I use enough of it. I have lots of lettuce seedlings, so I'll put a bunch of them in there. Also got some weed barrier to put in the bottom to help retain the soil. My other hanging basket, with nylon cloths on the bottom, is losing soil too quickly.