bevedog

I figure if I’m going to quit F-book I need to up my blog/newsletter frequency and not just wait for some big inspiration. So this is about my garden. Might be boring, who knows.

Our house has a section of the the lot next to the garage that already had three garden beds laid out when we moved here. One of those has since been lost to Siberian elms, but I planted the two other beds this year with pretty good success.

In one bed I planted greens, broccoli, and green beans (both bush beans and climbing beans). We eat a lot of green beans so I planted a lot and they were quite successful this year. The greens were OK, but didn’t do well in the hot weather. I feel like they do better in containers for me? The broccoli grew very impressive leaves but not a lot of edible heads, and what I did eat I didn’t like, so back to supermarket broccoli next year.

When the greens stopped growing I planted pumpkin seeds there and ended up with our largest pumpkin of the year. We also planted them out front and got a lot of smaller pumpkins.

In the other bed I planted parsley and cilantro in one front corner. The cilantro immediately bolted, like it always does, but the parsley did very well and still looks good after a light frost. It’s the only thing still growing in the garden.

Next to them I planted marigolds. I always picture marigolds as cute small flowers but always end up not reading the seed packets properly and I grow huge unruly flowers. They were nice, but too much. Maybe I’ll do the flowers in containers next year.

When I pulled up the marigolds last week, I planted garlic in that spot. This will be the first time I have tried garlic, so that will be interesting.

In the middle of that bed I planted two red cherry tomatoes and two yellow pear tomatoes. They went crazy, spread all over the place and made it difficult to harvest the tomatoes and some of the other plants. So they grew great and produced a lot of fruit but also drove me crazy. I was living this meme.

I have raised cherry tomatoes in containers before and will probably plan to do that again next year to keep them managable.

At the back of that bed I had cucumbers, first time I had grown them. Despite getting shaded and kind of engulfed by the tomatoes they did very well. I even found a few ripe cucumbers while putting the garden to bed this week.

I also had oregano and thyme in a container which did very well—I harvested and dried them at the end of the season & wonder if they will come back next year. I also had basil that Corie gave me in large containers that did very well.

Next year I want to try carrots again (never had much luck with them) and onions. Perhaps peppers as well.

I’d love to hear about your gardens or your garden advice! That’s one problem with this newsletter though, I’m not sure it’s great for sharing comments among all the readers? I’ll check the settings.