“Green bags” are ubiquitous these days, supposedly meant to replace plastic shopping bags. But we’ve collected so many that we don’t know what to do with them all. As a lark, I filled three of them with soil, cut a hole in the bottom, inserted some extra transplants up the hole, stapled the hole together to keep the soil back, hung the bags on our fence and hoped for the best. And I gotta say, I’m impressed with the zucchini plant. There’s hardly any soil in the bag, the plant is alive, flowering and producing zucchinis. They’re not as large as our regular zucchinis, but they’re not too bad.

Here’s a shot of a zucchini in a large container, grown from a seedling planted around mid-June and doing well. We’ll be picking our first zucchini from it in less than a week.

All growing upside-down, from left to right: Tomato in a bag (no fruit yet); 2 peppers in a bag, one out the bottom, the other on top — and looking great; and a tomato in a bucket (just starting to show fruit).

Here’s a shot of one our mini potato towers, the Red Organic Chieftain potatoes that have been slow to grow but should be alright in a couple weeks. I discovered the best way to hill the plants as they grow is simply dump more soil over the entire plant as soon as it pokes through the soil a couple of inches. Then you just stop when the plants reach the top of the mini-tower.

Here’s the mini-tower with Blue Pride potatoes (they grew much faster and first blossomed a couple weeks ago).

This is our new 4 x 8 raised vegetable garden bed.

In our 4 x 8 bed, we have two experimental crops, broccoli on the left (we’re not growing it next year) and celery on the right (mixed in with some cucumbers, both of which we’ll grow again). The tiniest head of broccoli began to show yesterday, but it seems to be more trouble than it’s worth. We’re also growing some carrots and beets in the 4 x 8 bed. The beets are sad and the carrots are okay, but this time last year we were thinning both and eating up all the delicious tiny ones.

This is our 8 x 8 raised vegetable garden bed (also available from this angle and this angle).

From left to right: slow-to-grow onions; lettuce we’ve been eating for about 10 days now; slow-to-grow carrots; and bush beans and pole peas, which have barely begun to flower.

From this angle we can see the peas beginning to climb up the netting (netting is the way to go). The pole peas, ironically, don’t grow as high as the bush snap peas, and the slugs seem to prefer the pole peas. So next year we’re going back exclusively to bush snap peas. They’re sweet, juicy and delicious.

These are the 4 Latah tomato plants in the 8 x 8 bed, grown from transplants, just now beginning to show some fruit (not much to see until September).

Two cucumber plants and 2 celeries in an old speaker, grown from transplants and doing well (most of our transplants were planted around mid-June this year). We’re eager to sample the celery.

Then we’ve got a cucumber in a bucket by the shed; three tiny raspberry bushes also growing up against the shed; some radishes in a window box gone to seed; a blueberry bush that was packed with blossoms, but the blossoms got knocked off or died or something, so there are no blueberries this year; and an overgrown strawberry patch where all the ripening strawberries are hidden by the plants (we began eating them this past week).

A slug-eaten broccoli in a large container. Broccoli takes up too much real estate. These better be the world’s most flavourful broccoli. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

On the left, a tomato plant in a container doing well; on the right, a blue potato plant growing in a small pot just for fun.

Spanish onion and a few leeks growing inside an old speaker. The onions grew beautifully for a while. Then we went away for a week, and when we came back, most of the onions had been eaten away by slugs. It was gross and it was sad. We’ve since moved the speaker onto our back deck where the slugs can’t get at them as easily. We’re hoping they’ll rebound. Damn slugs.

Two herbs in pots growing like a jungle. Cilantro on the left grown from seedlings; dill on the right grown from seed. I sprinkled in a whole package of seeds, barely covered them with soil and presto! More dill than we know what to do with. (We have another pot of cilantro grown from seed, but it’s kind of pathetic.)

We have a few window boxes full of green onions like this. Easy pasy. Chop ‘em up and put them them in the bowl before pouring in your soup — beauty. Grown from seed tape.

On the left, oregano in a pot grown from seedlings (we haven’t picked any of it yet); on the right, pots of basil and mint — the basil is perfectly paired with tomatoes and the mint works well in springs rolls. We’ve been pulling leaves off for about a week.

Thyme in a pot grown from seedlings. We’ve been eating this for about a week too. Excellent in soups and tomato-based sauces.

That’s a unknown type of tomato with large leaves growing well in a pot. And over here is our rosemary we bought on sale for $11 last year at Home Depot. We kept it inside and harvested it for most of the winter. Its growth slowed down only after we put it back outside this year. We’ve been letting it grow (not easy because it’s our favourite herb), but it’ll be soon time to start picking it again. Best deal on rosemary we’ve ever had.

I could show you two more tomato plants growing in buckets and a sad, slug-ravaged pepper plant, but it’s a pitiful sight. So let’s just end off with some baby carrots growing in three window boxes all in a row. Sweet, sweet juicy carrots. They taste fabulous with dirt.

We didn’t have a problem with slugs last year, but this year they’ve nearly decimated our container broccoli and some Spanish onions that have been growing beautifully in a speaker on the side of our shed. They’re eating away at our pea plants and beans too. I’ve used containers full of beer and spread out coffee grinds as pesticides, but neither seem to help much. From now on, we’ll have to go out at night and pick them off with our hands and kill them. That’s apparently the best way to get rid of them — squish the adult breeding population. I’m not sure what brought the slugs on in such force this year. We picked some long green caterpillars off one of the broccolis today too. Maybe the broccoli are too attractive for the slugs and bugs to ignore. The broccolis move in and there goes the neighbourhood.

Another discouraging development is the lack of growth in the beets and peas. Here’s a photo of a row of beets on the left next to two rows of carrots on the right. It’s pathetic. We’ve pulled out weeds that are larger than those beets. This time last year we had to thin our beets, and even those beets were 10 times larger than what we have so far this year. We didn’t add much lime to the new garden bed this year and we planted the beets a couple weeks late. But they should have caught up by now. Do beets need lots of lime? I don’t know.

But I do know what’s happening with the peas. Last year we planted bush peas that grew large and had no problem crawling up some poles. They were delicious to pick right off the vine. We planted more of those this year along with some actual pole peas — but it’s the pole peas that aren’t growing up the poles (see them on the right in the linked photo). The slugs seem more attracted to the pole peas too. What a waste of space. I hope they hurry up and catch up with the bush peas that have grown at least 3 times as high so far. We won’t be wasting our garden space of pole peas next year.

We’ve had to deal tons of weeds this year too. Only in the past week did we managed to clear away most of them.

So I don’t have high hopes for the broccoli, the beets or the pole bees. If the broccolis don’t produce, the solution is simple: we won’t try growing broccoli anymore — especially if they’re responsible for attracting the slugs. The pole beets we’ve already decided not to plant anymore. Bush peas that have no problem growing up poles will be our source of peas for now on. And the beets — we have to figure what happened there. Beet greens are delicious and fresh baked beets and pickled beets are even better.

But we’ve had surprising success (so far) with some other crops. So stay tuned!

UPDATE (July 27/10): Jenny was just talking to a fellow gardener about slugs. He said there aren’t any in his garden, but has had problems in the past. Planting crops that don’t attract them (like broccoli) is the most effective defence. Also, broccoli and other cabbage-relatives attract the cabbage moth — those are the green caterpillars we saw on the broccoli leaves. Apparently they can decimate broccoli, but don’t migrate to other vegetables. The bottom line is that broccoli is a trouble maker. We’re not planting it next year. Stupid broccoli.

The story of these speaker crops will unfold in this photo album throughout the 2010 growing season. Are you excited? I know I am. Stay tuned!

To fill these boxes, and to have enough soil for the next few levels of the potato tower, we bought a huge industrial-strength garbage bag full of soil from Ross Traverse. Ross is a well-known local horticulturist and his soil is his own special mix of compost, topsoil, peat and lime. I don’t know how large the bag is, but it’s huge and it has to be the best deal in town: $11. If you live around St. John’s, Newfoundland, and you need some good gardening soil, don’t go to any of the big stores — just visit Traverse Gardens because. We plan to go back to buy 3 or 4 more bags at least.