Veggie Garden Update-June 09

Skeeter's Veggie Garden Update:

Good and not so good news from my Georgia Garden! First the white radish were so hot we could not eat them. Sigh, We were too late getting them into the ground and our hot days fired them up.

My once beautiful heads of cabbage,

have now become a meal for some type of insect. I don't know what to put on cabbage to destroy the bugs without harming us when we eat the stuff. Again, we were too late in getting the cabbage into the ground as the heat is giving it a slow death!

On a happy note, we have Roma Tomatoes growing strong for us! If we gather half as many as we did last year, we will be happy! The Purple and German Queen tomatoes are doing well also but no fruit as of yet.

We ate lettuce and spinach and now they are no longer with us. We replaced those empty spots with Yellow, Red, Orange and Green sweet Peppers. The Saint put in a couple of hot Peppers also.

A surprise is good! I found this plant growing in the compost bin after the spring rains! Do you know what this is? A potato plant! Ha, too funny, I am keeping my eye on this and piling up the soil as it grows. Not sure which type of potato this will be but will be fun if we are able to harvest a potato since we have never grown one in our life!

I am sad to say the Veggie Garden will be no more for us next year. We have too much rain in the spring and when the soil in the fenced area is finally dry, it is too hot for us to plant anything. We did transfer a few things which survived the heat of being in the containers but they do not look too well. We now need water on the rest of the yard but this area remains moist so maybe they will survive with the hot sun making them grow like weeds! Oh well, we gave it a try and it was not meant to be for us in this yard. We will continue to have tomatoes, herbs and sweet peppers as we have such luck with those things and they are working out well on the edge of the flower garden.

Now lets see what Tina has to say about her Tennessee Garden!

June has been a month of highs and lows in the vegetable garden here in my Tennessee garden. Highs because of some successes-namely the peas and green onions. Lows because of the failures-broccoli, and Brussels sprouts.

In the picture above we can see the peas. They are the tall kind and I will be sure to buy this kind in the future. Remember! Fresh pea seeds each year! The bed behind it holds garlic, yellow squash and other vining crops. I have to confess, I've been a very bad vegetable gardener this year. I haven't even planted the cucumbers yet and have not been well organized in it. Fortunately, what does grow there takes care of itself otherwise it would be quite a jungle. This is another bed. Here we can see my over the top planting style. This means I plant veggies on top of veggies on top of more veggies. Can you see a problem here? I don't have a big enough garden but will make do with companion planting I suppose. The lovely green plant in the foreground is Swiss Chard, grown from seeds Frances sent me. Not sure why it does not have the bright red color it had when young, but it healthy and looking good. How do I eat it?? Behind it and also to the right in the cages are pepper plants. The warm season crops have been very slow to take off this year. While the tomatoes do have baby tomatoes forming, the plants themselves have been slow to fill out. Part of the issue has been the rain and the wonderful spring temperatures we have been experiencing here in Middle Tennessee, but more likely it is the fact that the oak trees just to the south of my vegetable garden have grown so much that the vegetable garden is almost too shady to get any good growth. Not much I can do about that as the trees take top billing here. I might just convert the whole veggie garden to an ornamental garden when I get really tired of fighting the shade. I'll give it more time to see how it goes before I make that drastic decision though. Most vegetables need a full 8 hours of sun to really produce a good crop of vegetables. I think this garden is hard pressed to get 6 hours on even a good sunny day. Throw in all the cloudy days and it's been a real struggle. The garden is oriented east to west and I think that now the sun is nearly at its highest the vegetables may begin growing better. I hope so anyhow.

The garlic and onions should be ready to harvest any day. I usually dig one or two to check for maturity before digging them all. I then leave both outside on a covered porch for a few days so that they can cure. That is, they dry and the soil that comes up with them is easier to brush off. Once dried and cured, I will brush off all the dirt and braid the foliage and store in a cool dry area in the house.

The peas will be pulled after one more harvest. I had tons of peas from these vines this year. The best year yet! And I didn't even burn them when I cooked them! An extra bonus for us all. Once the peas are pulled I'll be planting my zucchini in this bed. Right now it has a cherry tomato and catnip growing in it. I'll add a layer of compost and turn the soil, plant the seeds, then mulch well, being sure to leave the area over the newly planted seeds a bit bare so the seeds can peek through.

The chard and lettuce stay put until I need the space. I don't mind the old plants growing in the garden as they serve as a living mulch for the beds. When the plants get too ugly they find their way to my nearby compost bin.

I have a few other beds. One of the beds (not pictured, also has garlic in it. This will come out soon and the entire bed will be filled with corn (that's the plan right now anyhow). The last bed (which you can just make out the A-frame in the foreground in the second picture) has peppers and tomatoes growing in one half of the bed. The other half (the half with the A frame) will have cucumbers growing in it soon. The cucumbers will grow above the pepper plants on the north side of the bed, therefore the peppers should not be overly shaded. We shall see how that works. Remember I told you I have to be creative? Yup, more like crowded but I usually get a good crop of all the veggies I grow though I am not sure how.

One other note, there are many herbs growing in the vegetable bed. I've planted basil in with the bananas, chives with peppers, catnip in a couple of beds, and stevia in the ornamental flower bed, along with zinnias and Indigofera amblyantha. I am really enamoured of the catnip (Nepeta cataria) and the stevia. I like to pinch off a leaf of the stevia just to have something to chew on when I walk around the garden. It is so neat! The catnip is a bit more open than the catmint (Nepeta faassenii) and is loving the vegetable garden. I'll try to post a picture of it at some later date. So far Orkin has not found it; which makes sense since it is the dog's yard where she avoids like the plague when they are around.

I've spent a lot of time talking of companion and succession planting simply because growing vegetable is a challenge when you are limited on space. It can be done but it is difficult. No matter how often I tell myself two plants can grow in the same spot at the same time or close to the same time, it really cannot be done well. Planting like this is a necessity when you do not have a lot of space and I hope some of these ideas help others who are also spatially challenged. I do not fear planting some of my crops late here in Middle Tennessee because our growing season is very long. In fact, I hope that by planting cucumbers and zucchini later than normal that I will avoid many of the usual pests that bother these plants. We shall see as only time will tell.

How are your vegetables growing this month and do you have any special challenges?

Mom, did you get your potatoes all planted? Dawn, how is your veggie garden coming? Lola? Anonymous? And all the rest of you-how's life in your veggie garden?

in the garden....