We began pulling up baby carrots from our flower boxes last week, and of course the carrots are delicious. The carrots grow until they reach the bottom of the flower box. Then they grow sideways.
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The regular carrots in our raised garden bed are still growing slowly.
In other riveting garden news: Our zucchini plants are producing so much that we can’t keep up with them. We’ve been eating peas and beans for the past couple weeks, though not in large numbers. The beets are coming along, slowly. The celery looks beautiful but not large enough to harvest yet. Cucumbers are just beginning to grow on the vine. And our run of fresh strawberries for dessert every night is over. It lasted about 3 weeks. Oh — and we cut the splitting head off our garden bed broccoli last night and had it with some pan-fried cod. The broccoli was okay, but hardly worth the 2 square feet of garden space we sacrificed for it.
Lots of changes for the garden next year. This is still a gardening blog, right?
Back in July, more as a lark than anything else, I filled up some so-called green grocery bags (cloth and vinyl bags) with organic soil, planted various crops in them, hung them along my fence throughout the yard and hoped for the best. I called them Bag Crops.
One bag had a zucchini plant growing out the bottom and it looked like this on July 27th and it only got better.
Read on . . . »
We picked our first zucchini of 2010 yesterday.
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It was rotted all the way down the middle.
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We had some rot like this last year, but nothing this bad. Apparently this type of common zucchini rot is caused by a lack of calcium and magnesium in the soil. It probably doesn’t help that we didn’t add much lime to our soil this year. I know some gardeners who feed milk to their squashes to give them an extra calcium boost and help prevent rot. We’ll give a try the next sunny day and see what happens.
This hasn’t been the best year for vegetable gardens in Newfoundland. It seems like most farmers are struggling a bit this year. A wet cold spring gave the slug population a big boost and hindered pollination from bees. Everything is growing later than usual, slower than usual with more pests and weeds than usual.
UPDATE: We picked other zucchinis from the raised bed and a large container. Some were okay, some partially-rotted and others were completely rotted. But check out the bag zucchini.
I took photos yesterday of every single thing growing in our backyard. We’ve had some hardships in the garden this year with slugs eating away at the broccoli, onions and some other crops. Our beets are pitiful and just about everything else has grown at a much slower pace than last year. But things are starting to pick up and there have been a few surprises. So here’s a pictorial review of everything growing in our small backyard (this is a long post), starting off with a zucchini plant growing upside-down in a bag:
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Stores all over the place have their own “green bags” these days, supposedly to replace plastic bags. The best ones are made from cloth that’s easy to wash. The bags provide an excellent breeding ground of E. coli bacteria if they’re not cleaned every couple weeks, especially the fabric bags with vinyl on the outside — like the ones I’ve converted into growing containers. I took three bags, filled them up with soil, planted some veggies in them and hung them off some fence posts in my small backyard.
Bag #1: Two pepper plants, one them on top and one of them growing out a hole in the bottom. It’s ridiculous, I know.
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An 8-minute low-rez video shot on my Sony Cyber-shot S700 camera (not a good camera). The sound was recorded on my Zoom H2 digital recorder, so at least it sounds okay.
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