The Modern "Victory Garden"

It's been a productive Sunday so far.    I have been working my way through several tasks, but at a slow enough pace that there has been time to savor the truly gorgeous summer day at hand.   Yesterday evening, my daughter and I picked the entire bush bean patch for a second time getting over 6 lbs of produce for our efforts.  This morning after breakfast I set to work to prep and process them for freezing.   While working on freezing the green beans, I also baked a loaf of no knead bread.   By noon, I was wrapped up with the kitchen tasks and was able to move outside for some garden time.           

The garden in early August is a bit of a jungle.   It's hard to do the weed whacking of walkways because the potatoes are starting to lay down and the squash plants are taking over all parts of the garden.   I hope you will overlook the overgrown walkways in the following pictures.       

 Here's a view of the side garden as seen from our deck.                  

The first bed has the early and mid season potatoes which are beginning to lie down.   In a few weeks they will begin really dieing back and by early September will be ready for digging and storage.   The next bed over has two different crops of carrots, parsnips, recently planted kale, and the brussel sprouts. 

Looking at this same area but from the backmost portion of the garden.   

I mentioned before that I have had to give in to using sprinklers for watering chores because the heat has made it impossible to keep up with the watering duties otherwise.   I like this particular sprinkler because it uses a low amount of water, sits up high so it can be used in beds with tall crops, and creates a gentle rain effect that seems to be most effective for soaking the beds.   The plants in the front portion of the center bed are Steins Late Flat cabbages and behind them are the Butte potatoes.  To the right are the fall plantings of broccoli and cabbages, and to the left is the corn patch.               

Also in this portion of the garden is the longest of the vertical grow beds.   It has cucumbers (both slicers and picklers), runner beans, and sugar snap peas growing on the vertical support structures.  The Sunset runner beans are flowering and are creating a nice wall of blooms and foliage.       

The cucumbers are next to them on the left. There are lots of tiny cucumbers on the plants, but so far there is only one slicing cucumber that appears to have been pollinated and is suddenly putting on some decent size.       

Moving around to the back of the house (and the other side of the greenhouse) is the newest section of the garden.                    

This is truly a productive jungle in this back area!   The front bed is the bush bean patch which is producing abundantly at the moment.   In the middle is the squash patch with winter squash, pumpkins, and zucchini.  The pumpkins and winter squash plants have sent their vines into each others areas and consequently the patch is now a mixture with Small Sugar pumpkins growing right along side the Buttercup squash.                      

My cat Sid found a cool retreat in the shade of the tomato patch.   He was hamming it up for the camera!                   

One of the chores I attended to today was the planting up of the swiss chard and kale seedlings.   They were started on the fourth of July but could not wait any longer to be transplanted - as they were getting root bound already.   The swiss chard was planted in containers on the deck that will later this fall go into the greenhouse to over winter.         

I used my new (old) compost sifter for the first time today and sifted up some nice compost to add to the containers to rejuvenate the potting soil in them.                      

Here are the swiss chard plants after being potted up in one of the three containers.                               

The other task I attended to was the pulling of the storage onions.   They have been laid over for a while now and were ready for the harvest.   I laid them out on the sidewalk area next to the shop.   This area is fairly shady so they will be warm and dry but not baked by the hot sun while they dry and cure.                                 

There are 62 bulbs in this pile.   I have half as many sweet onions still in the ground that we will use up first before moving to these better keeping onions.   These were not quite as productive as I would have liked, but it is a decent harvest none the less.                      

The rest of the day will be largely devoted to continuing the watering process.   Plan to harvest some basil and green beans in a little while.   Tonight's dinner menu will be pasta tossed with fresh made pesto (basil, garlic, pine nuts, seasonings, and olive oil), slices of zucchini dredged in fine seasoned bread crumbs and fried up crisp, steamed green beans with a little butter and salt, and roasted chicken thighs.                    

I think I will sit outside for awhile first though, and enjoy the fine summer day with my cat Sid.                          

It's been a hectic week at work.   Very productive but I feel like I have been running non-stop for days - which I guess I have been!   So it feels really good to start the weekend off with an early Saturday morning stroll through the garden, sipping coffee as I go.   How about joining me for a brief morning garden walk?     

It's been warm and going to get much hotter, so the early morning cool feels very pleasant.   No specific garden chores to attend to this morning other than to keep moving the water around.   I have some errands to attend to today, and by the time I wrap those up it will likely be too hot to do much of anything serious in the garden.  Maybe plant out the January King cabbage starts.   However, this is weather more suited for a rest in the chair on the deck (which gets afternoon shade).   It looks inviting even in the cool of the morning.                                       

Do you remember those little broccoli, kohlrabi, and cabbage plant starts I set out just two weeks ago (July 11)?   They looked like this when I planted them up.            

Not much to look at then.  Well here are those same plants two weeks later to the day (July 25).                                        

Despite (or maybe because of?) the warm weather, these brassica family plants are all really going strong.   I added a lot of compost to this bed and the big pea patch preceded these plants - so I think this section of the garden is quite fertile as a result.             

The Sunset Runner Beans are flowering.   I think the flowers are quite beautiful.                 

 I have not grown this variety before and I am looking forward to seeing how well it produces.                                   

The runner beans are not the only beans in the garden though.   I have a huge patch of bush green beans (Jade) that are ready to have their first harvest.    Take a look at these lovely beans!       

I am going to wait until Sunday to do the first picking - so I can get to them in the morning before the high heat of afternoon.                    

Well, it's time to get to those errands.  Thanks for keeping me company on my morning garden walk!

The forecast is calling for hot and dry weather for the next week or more.   This follows many weeks of warm and dry conditions and watering is turning into an every day chore as a result.   It has been my custom not to use sprinklers on the raised garden beds - preferring instead to use either soaker hoses or to hand water with a hose and wand attachment.  I prefer those methods because it avoids watering the garden walkways, putting water only where it is most needed at the plants roots.   However, this past week I have come to the conclusion that unless I quit my job to stay home and water several hours a day, that this is just not going to cut it with the dry/hot summer we are experiencing.   The fact that we expanded the garden considerably this year has a lot to do with the extra time too.   So, for the third day in a row, I have the sprinkler running on a section of the garden tonight.   I still need to hand water the containers and odd sections, but the sprinkler is helping me cover a much larger area with less of my time consumed to do it.   I will just have to deal with the fact that my walkways are going to sprout an overabundance of grass and weeds as a result.   Perhaps next year's big garden project will have to be laying down an impenetrable cover in the walkways for weed suppression as well as aesthetics.    Would love to hear what your recommendations would be (if you care to share them) so I can consider various options before planning that project.                                                     

The sunny warm weather is definitely a positive thing for the garden overall.   Although it is making me work hard to keep everything hydrated, the resulting accelerated growth of the warm weather crops is something to behold.   The corn patch now has many ears of corn formed and many more just forming.             

I skipped growing corn last year due to space constraints and I must say I did not realize how much I missed it until just recently.   My husband adores fresh corn, so he really missed it!                                      

A couple of the Legend tomatoes have just broken color (finally).   It's hard to see the color change (lowest hanging fruit in the photo) because it was getting twilight out when I took the picture and the angle of the fruit makes it hard to see.    I think it should move quickly to a fully ripe status with the high heat forecasted for the next many days.                   

 I am bracing myself for this first big ripe one not to taste very good because it took so long to mature.   Sometimes that seems to create a more bland tomato than one that matures quickly from fruit set to ripening.                 

The real action in the garden is in the squash and pumpkin patch.   I should warn you that it may not be safe to stand for any length of time by my squash patch - because it is engulfing all open areas adjacent to it and the vines and tendrils are latching on to anything they encounter!   The successfully pollinated Buttercup winter squash and Small Sugar pumpkins are growing in huge leaps with each passing day.   Just to give you an idea of how fast these things grow when the conditions are right - here is a Buttercup squash as it looked on Sunday July 19th.                                        

And here is that same squash fruit 3 days later on July 22!                    

Even more dramatic, here is a Small Sugar pie pumpkin as it looked on Saturday July 18th.                                        

 And here is that same pumpkin 4 days later on July 22!                         

Green beans are setting and I am expecting they will be ready for a really big initial harvest just about the time the 95 + degree weather really hits us the hardest.   It always seems to work like that.                           

What is happening in your garden?

Had a visit from my sister and brother in-law this afternoon and we are heading out this evening to go see the new Harry Potter movie, so my garden time was pretty limited this Sunday.   I did get out this morning though and took care of a few items.   Here's largely what I did today:

• Watered the remaining garden beds not covered on Friday or Saturday, excluding the potato beds, which I will catch later this week.
• Mixed some shredded paper into the current compost heap. I have been adding a lot of fresh garden and kitchen trimmings and it was getting too much nitrogen (greens) without enough high carbon additions (browns) to balance it out.
• Sprayed all of the cole crops (cabbages, brussel sprouts, broccoli, and kohlrabi) with Bt solution. It has been two weeks since I last got to this and I noticed lots of white moths fluttering around the brussel sprouts and cabbages last week.
• Hand pollinated some more pumpkins and winter squash.
• Hand pollinated the current ears of corn that are silked.

I should probably take some photos of the hand pollination process, particularly for the corn as it is simple to do and allows full pollination if you have a small patch where wind pollination may not give full coverage.   I will need to do this again with the later maturing plants and will try to remember to take some pictures when the time comes.                             

I noticed today that the bees were back working the squash patch more actively. They were conspicuously absent during the past week or so and I did some hand pollinating to ensure a reasonable fruit set on the pumpkins and winter squash.   I have been doing hand pollinating for several days now and will probably wrap up and let the bees take over (now that they have made a return).  The results of these efforts are that I now have several good-sized pumpkins and winter squash growing.   Here's one of the pumpkins - it's about 5 inches long and 4 inches across.              

Luckily, the pepper plants are self-pollinating (a little shake now and then like tomatoes) and are fruiting prolifically in the greenhouse with little or no intervention on my part.                                     

The brussel sprouts and early cabbages are really putting on a growth spurt right now.   The Primero cabbages have formed nice firm softball sized heads.              

These are one of two red/purple varieties I am growing this year.   The other is Ruby Ball, which is also forming heads but are not quite as well developed as the Primero plants.   The Steins Late Flat Dutch cabbages (green) also have a good beginning on their somewhat flat shaped heads.   All of the cabbages and brussel sprouts were sprayed with Bt solution today (1 Tablespoon in 1 gallon of water in a pressure pump sprayer).        

Before heading in to clean up for our coming guests, I pulled some Nantaise carrots from the second oldest carrot patch.   Most of the pictures I have been showing lately of carrots are of the variety Mokum, which is planted in the oldest patch.   The Nantaise are somewhat bigger, lighter orange in color, and are slightly more tapered in shape.   These Nantaise carrots came from the second planting of the year and are getting very niced sized now.                               

Off to see the new Harry Potter movie and enjoy an evening out.   Hope you had a good weekend in your garden too.

We are continuing to enjoy some warm and dry weather and the forecast calls for it to stay around for a while.   This is good news for the tomatoes, green beans, and pepper plants.   The biggest challenge is to keep up with the watering so that these plants keep thriving and progressing to a state of providing harvestable produce.   While I was busy watering the green beans, peppers, and tomatoes today, I took some pictures of the tomatoes to share with you.   The plants are tantalizingly loaded with lots of green fruits.   I am trying to be patient, but I am really ready for the tomato season to get underway.                                   

The Stupice tomato has already provided the first ripe tomato and has another small ripe one available for me to pick.   More importantly, it has large clusters of tomatoes that are showing indications they will soon be ripening.                       

It is pretty amazing how many fruits this one Stupice plant has on it, and lots of blooms too  . It appears it will be a generous producer throughout the summer.                              

The Legend tomatoes have some really big fruits, which are also showing signs of wanting to start to ripen.                               

 The Siletz plants are not as big as the Legend but they are more plentiful.                                 

And the Celebrity, while a later maturing tomato, is working hard to rapidly catch up to the Siletz and Legend plants.                             

I did not get around to taking a picture of the sauce tomatoes, but they are plentiful now too.                                 

Hopefully soon I will being seeing red in the garden!

Yesterday's hot muggy weather ended rather abruptly last night with thunder and lightening.   The storm brought cool and overcast weather today, but very little by way of rain.   So after I wrapped up some needed grocery shopping, I spent just a little time this afternoon finishing up the watering that I largely completed yesterday.           

While I was watering, I noticed a little bird that was flitting in and out of the celery and swiss chard plantings.   It appears he was eating insects off of the plants, so this little fellow is quite welcome to hang out in my garden.    

The swiss chard plants are just about ready for another hard harvest. They are in the older vertical grow bed with a "Sunset" runner beans growing up the vertical support structure behind them.            

I really like "Bright Lights" swiss chard because not only is it quite pretty to look at with the magenta, red, yellow, and orange stalks - but it is also very good tasting.                                    

The celery is mature enough now to use for fresh eating and also can be harvested anytime for freezing too. I may tackle slicing up and freezing some celery next weekend.   This year's crop is not quite as nice as last year's, but it is still respectable looking.                         

The corn patch is getting some size on it and the "Bodacious" corn plants are starting to tassel already.                                  

Along with tassels, they are also starting to form the beginnings of ears of corn too.                             

Earlier today I harvested some strawberries for our Sunday brunch and some onion, parsley, and basil to make Italian Bean Salad - preparing it early so that it would have sufficient time to marinate/chill in the refrigerator.   This afternoon I harvested some carrots to also go with the dinner meal.       

The Sunday dinner menu is crisp roasted split chicken breasts (free range local chicken - seasoned with garlic and a little salt), Italian Bean Salad, and steamed carrot slices with a little butter/salt.                  

I hope you had a good weekend and enjoyed some time in your food production garden.

Goodness it got warm in a hurry today!   I had several things to get done in the garden so I got an early start to avoid working during the hottest part of the day.   In large part, I spent most of my time watering beds and containers, but worked in other garden tasks between watering sections - to break up the workload and keep it less repetitive.                       

I moved two of the wire compost bins next to two other full bins I have currently going.   These two bins will be the next ones to be filled up.   The finished pile that was in one of these relocated bins, is now just heaped and  easily accessible for usage.   Indeed, I used a fairly good amount of it already today - preparing the garden bed that had previously held the pea patch for planting up.   I added a generous layer of finished compost from the heap and broadcasted some general-purpose organic fertilizer over the bed.   This was then aerated and lightly cultivated.   Into this prepped bed I planted some hardened off fall cole crop transplants - 24 broccoli ("Umpqua"), 12 kolhrabi ("Koliribi"), and 12 cabbages ("Beira Tronchuda").   Granted, these plants don't look like much at this point, but they will soon fill this bed and should provide a good fall/winter harvest crop.         

I noted yesterday that the regular garlic and the multiplier onions were ready to be pulled and cured.   I went ahead and harvested both of these crops today.            

The multiplier onions are not big but they provide a nice spring crop of green onions that bridge the last of the prior year onions in storage and the arrival of the new season onion crop.   Each bulb that is planted in the late fall goes on to produce a cluster of onion bulbs.                  

After I took this picture I laid them out in our covered breezeway between the house and the garage to dry and cure.   The breezeway is a good place for this because it has excellent air circulation and is covered so the bulbs will not get wet if a rainstorm occurs.    I am waiting to weigh this harvest until the tops are dried down and removed.                             

I picked strawberries, snap peas, and some zucchini today too.   All of these crops are each producing a regular almost daily harvest.   The strawberries have been particularly good this year and are still loaded with immature fruit and flowers - promising a reasonably long harvest period too.    Each day I get one or two really huge strawberries, plus a large collection of medium and smaller ones.   Just to give you an idea of how big these are, I took this picture holding one in my hand this morning.   They are red throughout and very sweet.                 

I ate this almost immediately after taking the picture!   Could not resist the temptation of such a pretty piece of fruit.                      

Have you been working in your gardens today too?

Today was another warm and sunny day.   This morning I finished watering the last of the garden beds.   Everything was quite dry so I took extra time this weekend to do a deep soaking - particularly in the potato patches.   By the end of the three-day weekend, I had managed to get through all the beds with a thorough soaking.    

In addition to finishing up the watering tasks, I also pulled the last broccoli plants and harvested the remaining side shoots.   They were pretty well gone by and there is so much more coming on in the garden right now that eeking out a few more side shoots just is not worth the effort or bed space.   I lightly cultivated the soil in that section and then broadcast seeded some buckwheat for a green manure cover crop.   Buckwheat is one of my favorite green manure crops but I rarely get to use it because it is a tender plant that can only be grown in the warm summer months.   Typically, I have very few open sections in the garden during the summer - since I regularly plant succession crops.   However, this bed is in an area that does not get good fall/winter sun exposure so it will not be used again until next spring.   I will follow the buckwheat green manure crop with a fall cover crop planting of crimson clover, which should get the soil in prime condition by next spring.   I keep a 1 lb bag of buckwheat seed and about 3 lbs of crimson clover seed on hand because I like to use green manure/cover crops on a regular basis - particularly in the fall with crimson clover.                                   

None of these tasks took too much time, and my husband and I took advantage of the beautiful weather and headed to Point No Point beach during the mid-day low tide and had a lovely beach walk.   Played in some tide pools, day dreamed about what it would be like to live in the lighthouse, sat on the driftwood and soaked up sun, and generally just spent a few hours watching the world go by and enjoying the sea air and grand Puget Sound views.   This County Park is just a short distance from our home and is one of our favorite beach destinations.           

On the way back from the beach walk, we stopped at Port Gamble, which is an old timber town and Washington's oldest surviving company town.   Port Gamble is just 4 miles from our house and this charming location is a fun place to spend a Sunday afternoon.   We had some lunch at the General Store cafe, which is located right next to the beautiful Walker-Ames House (reputed to be haunted).                           

After a yummy lunch of cucumber salad and blue cheese/grilled onion burgers, we made one last stop at the old livery stable.   This old carriage barn and stables has been converted into an antique barn - where I found a great old compost sifter!         

I have been meaning to make myself a compost sifter using Dan's (Urban Veggie Garden Blog) directions/example, but this old farm implement will do nicely instead.   It will get many more years of use in my Modern Victory Garden.     

I hope you were able to enjoy a relaxing summer Sunday too.

Summer is here and the living is easy.   Well....summer is definitely here, not so sure about the easy living part!   Things have warmed up again and keeping the garden beds watered is turning back into a full time chore.   It's important to stay on it though - as so many of the crops are at critical growth stages right now.   Lots of items are forming or maturing fruit and need to be kept hydrated to ensure no interruptions occur in that process.             

The pumpkins and winter squash are both setting fruit now.   This is one of many "Small Sugar" pie pumpkins that are forming.                  

The vines are lush and the tiny fruits are abundant.   My biggest challenge with the squash patch is going to be keeping it from taking over the neighboring beds.   I swear that you can watch the vines grow if you are willing to just sit still and watch for a few minutes!                   

But the real stars of the garden at the moment are the strawberries!         

Long holiday weekend coming up.   Great weather in the forecast too, which means I will be spending most of it catching up on the watering chores!

We are into our fourth straight week of sunshine and warm weather.  This is unusual for us so early in the summer but welcome nonetheless!  There is a downside to the warmth and dryness though, in that the garden beds are all drying out very quickly and require quite a bit of attention for just watering needs.  Luckily, the beds of broccoli and peas are so thick and developed that the plants have formed a living canopy over the soil surface, which helps to keep it cooler and slow down the water loss.  As a result, the peas do not seem at all phased by the warm temps and indeed have been flourishing.  So much so that I would have to say that this year's pea patch may very well be the best one I have ever grown.  Not sure if it is the new horizontal support system I created this year, or the bed location, or the unusual weather itself that is the cause - but the results are astounding.  The entire bed is lush and covered in blooms or pea pods.  Here are just a few of them on the outer edge of the bed.                                                       

The broccoli is really producing well now too. I took a picture of one of the heads just before I harvested it (and several others) for the evening meal.    

I steamed the broccoli and served it with just a pat of butter and salt to taste.  The broccoli accompanied some crisp roasted free-range chicken thighs, Italian Bean Salad (made with fresh basil, onions, and parsley from the garden) and warm crusty slices of freshly baked No Knead Bread with butter.            

The summer garden is growing well and beginning to yield a greater variety of produce.  What ever is "on" in the garden dictates the dinner menu (for the most part) and with the growing (pardon the pun!) choices in the garden - meal options in the summer tend to be more interesting and flavorful.             

I hope you were able to enjoy some of summer's flavor today.