The Modern Victory Garden

Tomorrow I will be flying to Pennsylvania to spend some vacation time with my daughter.  I will be returning home afterwards alone, as she will be staying on with a friend until it is time to move into the dorms and begin her first year of college life at Lehigh University.   In order to avoid thinking about this too much, I have kept myself incredibly busy over the past several days getting things taken care of ahead of time as much as possible.    

I was off from work today to do some required shopping and errands and to get the garden in good order so my husband (who is staying behind to take care of the homestead and animals) won’t have to worry about it.   Throughout the afternoon and this evening, I have managed to get the entire garden and the container plantings thoroughly watered. That is quite an undertaking to water the entire garden in less than one day.  It is supposed to be reasonably warm all weekend and on into next week – so I wanted to be sure all of the plants were set to grow unchecked in my absence.   The other chore I got completed was the planting out of the kale and chinese cabbage transplants.   I tucked the chinese cabbages in and around the basil plants that are growing in the longest vertical grow bed.   This bed gets partial shade so hopefully the cabbages will grow well and not bolt from heat.   The kale was planted up in the retaining wall bed in the spot where the garlic had been growing previously.  

I have not shown you the tomatoes in the greenhouse for a while.   These are Celebrity tomatoes and they are growing quite well.                               

I lopped off the top most part of these plants last weekend because they were pushing up against the ceiling of the greenhouse.   At this point in the summer season, I don’t want these plants to continue vining, instead I want them to concentrate all energy to setting and ripening fruit.   Which is what they are doing.                      

Out in the main garden area there are two varieties of tomatoes that are racing ahead of all the others – Market Miracle and Siletz.   Daphne of Daphne’s Dandelions gave the Market Miracle seeds to me and I had some high expectations based on her glowing reports of this tomato.   It looks like those hopes were well placed as they are forming nice clusters of really good-looking fruits!                                      

The really heavy and early producers are the Siletz tomatoes.   I started these ultra early, coddled them through late winter, kept them in the greenhouse until the weather really settled down, and they are growing in big black pots which adds additional heat around their root systems.    All of that extra effort is proving worth it as the plants are loaded with fruit …                          

…. and today I picked the first ripe tomato from the Siletz plants.                  

I sliced it up and ate it still warm from the vine.   It was so good!   There are more coming along right behind this one and I am so ready for the tomato season to get underway.                                                   

I am not taking a laptop with me on my travels, so I will not be posting a “Harvest Monday” recap this week.   I will however be back mid week and will post an update on how the garden fared in my absence.   The zucchini is pumping out the fruits right now so I expect to have some monsters waiting for me when I arrive home.   I may have to break down and make some chocolate zucchini cake to use it up.   Have a great weekend, and I will catch up with all your comments when I get back.              

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener