The Modern Victory Garden

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At Last

Posted on June 26, 2010 at 11:16 PM

Many items in my summer garden line up are slowed down considerably due to the lack of any real warmth and our sun that insists on hiding behind heavy clouds more often than not.   The temperatures have moderated somewhat over the past few days though, and I am noticing that the garden is responding with more vigorous growth.   The cucumbers, mesclun mix, and the most recently planted lettuces have particularly grown a lot in the last several days.   The cucumbers are not quite tall enough yet to lie over onto the support structure, but it won’t be long before they will be.

                  

    

    

      

 

    

    

The blueberries in pots and growing in front of the shop are really loaded with berries this year.   I hope I can manage to keep the birds at bay so we can harvest most of them when ripe.                                     

                              

   

 

We have errands and other activities planned for most of the weekend, so my time in the garden will be limited.   However, I did manage to get the container plants watered today and I gave the broccoli and cabbage plants a spray of Bt solution this morning.   A few of the broccoli plants are now forming central heads (at last!) and so I want to make sure that I keep up the regular bi-weekly Bt applications to avoid having a harvest of worm infested broccoli crowns.   Broccoli is one of my favorite vegetables and I can hardly wait to start harvesting.

 

    

 

I am still swimming in lettuces at the moment.   We are eating lettuce salads daily (dinner and often lunch too) and I am still not keeping up with it.   However, the current big lettuce patch is looking like it wants to bolt soon, and when it does I will pull them up and replant that section of garden with another bed of carrots.   Tonight’s dinner harvest still included more greens (swiss chard) but it also included zucchini, green onions (green and red), and sugar snap peas. These were turned into a stir-fry made with lean pork strips, the garden vegetables, and cooked and drained chinese egg noodles tossed with a sweet and spicy Shanghai Orange sauce.                   

          

   

   

It’s nice to have sugar snap peas and zucchini back on the menu to break up the recent steady diet of lettuces.   I have more coming right along behind this first zucchini and I am looking forward to a bounty of zucchini soon.               

 

       

 

While it is great having lettuce available daily, I must confess that I am overjoyed to have other crops starting to become mature enough for harvest.   If only the raspberries and strawberries would start to ripen up soon too - I would be in harvest heaven!                                   

 

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener

Categories: Harvesting, Vegetables, Plants

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20 Comments

Reply Sandy
01:53 AM on June 27, 2010 
Hi Laura,

I'm surprised you don't have strawberries yet. I've been swimming in strawberries for over a week. I made jam last weekend, dried some this week and am thinking I might need to pick some more tomorrow and then freeze them. I must be getting just a tad more warmth than you are no. No raspberries yet though.

Sandy
Reply Heather
08:59 AM on June 27, 2010 
The lettuce can be such a blessing, but can drive you crazy. It produces so very well. Those zucchini look yummy, mine are just starting to produce male flowers.
Reply kitsapfreedomgardener
09:30 AM on June 27, 2010 
Sandy - my strawberries are in the less sunny part of the garden which causes they to be later than others anyway, then you add this late start year and they are just ... well... late! Variety will have some influence on when they mature too. Your place looks like it get's much more sun (longer portion of the day) than my property does based on the videos and pictures you have posted in the past.

Heather - I do enjoy them and am grateful we have had a rather long uninterrupted season of lettuce production - I just want to layer on some other vegetables to it and have the salads be more normal sized affairs.
Reply Sandy
01:02 PM on June 27, 2010 
Laura, that explains it. My berries are on the south side of our lot (near the greenhouse). This whole section of the yard is lucky to get a lot of sun. It was one of the reasons we bought this house. The southern side was cleared out (tree free)and the wooded area is on the north side of the lot. It couldn't be oriented any better. Here's hoping you start getting berries soon!
Reply Thomas
10:19 PM on June 27, 2010 
I'm starting to apply dipel dust to my brassicas on a regular basis as well. We've had so many white butterflies fluttering around that it would be foolish not to. I still get tiny holes on my leaves but at least it doesn't progress to something worse.

What type of bt solution do you use? The dust can be a bit tricky to work with.
Reply Sustainable Eats
11:09 PM on June 27, 2010 
I'll say it again - zuchinis? Wow! I forgot did you start them in the greenhouse or something? Mine are puny still. This time last year the plants were dwarfing my 6 year old sitting next to them. I'm not so sure we'll be getting any summer squash at all this summer, I've all but given up on them and the cucumbers. Poop anyway. But what a year for lettuce, eh?
Reply kitsapfreedomgardener
11:22 PM on June 27, 2010 
Sandy - You are lucky indeed to have good sun exposure!

Thomas - I use the liquid concentrate Bt that you mix with water and then spray the plants. I don't like handling dusts as it is too easy to inhale the powders by accident.

Sustainable Eats - I start them inside under lights and a heat mat and then move them outside for hardening off. I find the earlier start gives me a much longer harvest period then direct seeding provides. Same with cucumbers, pumpkins, and other squashes.
Reply Sustainable Eats
12:01 AM on June 28, 2010 
That's what I'll do next year. Just finally started most of my winter crops today. I'm always a few weeks behind you but bringing up the gap a little more each year. :)
Reply foodgardenkitchen
08:43 PM on June 28, 2010 
I used Dipel dust last year and had a pretty severe allergic reaction to it. I applied it in the evening and woke in the middle of the night looking like the female ape from Planet of the Apes - the lower portion of my face was swollen, especially the area between my nose and upper lip.

Thanks gods for the internet. We were able to research at 2 a.m. to figure out this was a potential side-effect of Dipel Dust and the first step solution was Benadryl. 10 or so years ago, this would have warranted a trip to the ER! The remaining Dipel Dust went into the trash and we only use the concentrate liquid now that we dilute and apply with a sprayer.
Reply foodgardenkitchen
08:44 PM on June 28, 2010 
oops, the message was supposed to be in reply to Thomas' message...

foodgardenkitchen says...
I used Dipel dust last year and had a pretty severe allergic reaction to it. I applied it in the evening and woke in the middle of the night looking like the female ape from Planet of the Apes - the lower portion of my face was swollen, especially the area between my nose and upper lip.

Thanks gods for the internet. We were able to research at 2 a.m. to figure out this was a potential side-effect of Dipel Dust and the first step solution was Benadryl. 10 or so years ago, this would have warranted a trip to the ER! The remaining Dipel Dust went into the trash and we only use the concentrate liquid now that we dilute and apply with a sprayer.
Reply Dan
10:08 PM on June 28, 2010 
Your harvests look great! We have had a lot of hot weather so far this season with lots of rain in between. It is cooling off tomorrow some maybe hot weather is on its way to you. Seems we have opposite weather most of the time. We have been enjoying lots of the Cascadia peas this spring, been munching on them for four weeks now I think. Thanks again for the seed!
Reply kitsapfreedomgardener
12:21 AM on June 29, 2010 
foodgardenkitchen - That is the kind of thing I worry about with powders and dusts. Just too easy to get it inhaled when handling it. I am glad you figured that out quickly so you could take action to control the swelling.

Dan - I am so glad you are enjoying the Cascadia peas. I really love them too and am glad they are finally starting to produce. The plants are flowering profusely so I think I have quite a few weeks of good eating ahead of me too.
Reply Daphne
04:48 PM on June 29, 2010 
I wish I still had lettuce from the garden. I'm eating the last of it up. It is all bolting since we have been getting really hot weather. My tomatoes are eating it up, but I'm used to lettuce for a long time in the summer. Not this year.

And your colander looks like the perfect stir fry.
Reply Mike
04:59 PM on June 29, 2010 
Our crops are finally starting to grow as well, now that the sun has shown itself. We have had a few ripe strawberries but the raspberries are still way behind. Nice zucchini, I am looking forward to our first ones. We are one of the few that can never get enough of them...I have 12 plants and will replant a couple more sometime in July so we can have more young plants producing. A pizza is just not the same without a little zucchini on it.:)

Thank you for the wonderful information on blueberries, we did mix sulfur in around all of our plants the other day and hopefully that will help. I wanted to let you know how much we both appreciate many of the informative posts you do. Even though we are pretty good at gardening and I have been doing this for many years now I do learn a whole lot from blogs like yours.
Reply kitsapfreedomgardener
10:38 PM on June 29, 2010 
Daphne - I harvested over 5 lbs of lettuce last night from the main lettuce patch and the newest planting is ready for some first harvest already! I have lettuces coming out of my ears at the moment. If you were only closer - I could share some with you.

Mike - Right back at ya! I learn so much from others and enjoy the exchange of information and ideas. As to zucchini, I think they are a great crop for the food production garden - good taste, high production per squarefoot of space used, and they come on fairly early in the season and if cared for will keep producing until frosts. Who could ask for more from a working kitchen garden crop?!
Reply Annie's Granny
11:36 PM on June 30, 2010 
Isn't it nice to have something besides lettuce to eat? I might harvest my first zucchini this afternoon. My strawberries have been really slow to produce this year, even though they greened up and blossomed really early. The berries are really tiny on the 2-year old plants, and I wouldn't expect that until at least the third year. If they don't shape up, I'll be removing most of them and allowing the remainder to set runners for next season.
Reply kitsapfreedomgardener
12:17 AM on July 01, 2010 
Annie's Granny - I am looking at a dismal strawberry harvest this year. They are late, they are sparse, and the few that are trying to ripen are being ruined by slugs. I had already planned to put a new bed in next year, and remove the oldest bed (I do a every third year rotation on strawberry patches) but now I am thinking I may start up two new beds and just clear both of these out even though one of them is only in it's second year.
Reply Sustainable Eats
01:06 AM on July 01, 2010 
KFG just curious why you shephard the strawberries so much? I have a patch and I just let the babies come up then snip them apart and take out the non-productive ones at the end of the season. This is the fourth year of the patch - am I setting myself up for somthing in the future by not rotating, etc? The chickens clear it out after the strawberries are done and eat all the bugs for me, then I replant all the ones they dug up again and fence it back off for a month in the fall to let the plants rest. I'm tempted to put some over in the front orchard under the fruit trees as well but it's really close to the raspberries and I'm not sure if I'd be inviting any troubles that way.
Reply kitsapfreedomgardener
08:47 AM on July 01, 2010 
Sustainable Eats - I used to manage my strawberry patch in a similar fashion to what you describe (minus the chicken bug feed), but got some advice from a dear gardening friend that made sense to me and I found once put in practice was true. The mother strawberry plants slow down production after two years and by the end of the third are producing at a very low level. So you have a couple of options; 1) let the runners root within the bed and then vigilantly come in and actually remove the mother plants periodically - this of course requires you to be able to remember which is which when they are a tangled mass of vegetation; or 2) you can direct the runners into a prepared area next to the mother plants, then remove the mother plants and amend that bed area well so it is ready for the runners from the newly established plants to be redirected into it to grow in the coming year - literally creating a moving bed that moves sideways and then back year after year - this requires perpetually tieing up double the bed area you otherwise would but works well (I did this in a widerow garden for years); or 3) After the third year is completed with a bed, you use the rooted runners from your bed (that you root out in pots and grow well enough to be ready for transplant) and plant up an entirely new bed which has been aerated and amended well You remove the old bed entirely aerate it and amend it and then use it for other crops for a few years.

The advantages of the latter approach (to me) is that it allows the soil to be aerated and amended well (compost, rock minerals, ph adjustment if needed) periodically which a permanent bed will not get quite the same impact from just annual additions of compost mulch and fertilizer. In addition, the rotation does not allow perennial weeds to get such a strong foot hold in the bed. This method never ties up more bed space than you actually need to grow the patch. Finally, it is always preferable to rotate a crop out of an area periodically to keep soil borne diseases kept in check. The way I usually do it is to start rooting up the runners in the summer on a year when I am rotating a bed, and then either in the fall or the following spring, plant the rooted babies into a new bed. If I do two this coming year like I am thinking about I will need as many as 80 young plants which I doubt I can pull off from runners alone - so I may end up buying some more - but usually if I do just one bed a year (with one year off in between which was this year), then I can do it from runner rootings alone.
Reply Sustainable Eats
01:40 AM on July 02, 2010 
That makes perfect sense. I think I'll come up with a hybrid approach since I don't have any more room than I am currently using, they are in between a rock retaining wall and lawn. Maybe I'll take them out, aerate, compost and put them back in again. Need to think some more. Thanks for taking the time to post such a thoughtful response!