January 10, 2024

New year new dreams and hopes

 Those metal beds from last year are looking very pretty but many still need bales of dirt and compost in them.  Of course the bottom half in most of them is filled with wood chips which mean we are only putting about 6 to 10 inches of dirt in any of them.  We will need to top them off each year for a while the chips breakdown and settle but still saved us lots of funds for now.  As you can see those beds have made  huge change in our yard. 

The square bed to the right will have corn in it this year.  There is a smaller round bed to the left that will hold squash bushes.  My tall blue one will have trailing vines and hanging basket tomatoes.  That leaves me four 3 by 6 ft beds for my tomatoes and beans.  We are talking about putting an arch over the sidewalk and putting pole beans and scarlet runner beans in there with lettuce and greens on the side away from the sidewalk. 

 I am limiting my tomato plants this year and most will be dwarfs which don't need staking  I will have 3 vining tomatoes, Velvet Red a fuzzy red cherry, Marbled Mystery a bi color tomato and something called Extravagante Rouffiange a fuzzy brown with green stripes from Belgium.  
The dwarfs will be Dwarf Mandurang Moon an ivory/white cherry. Wooly Kate an indet dwarf with fuzzy yellow tomatoes with  blueberry colored shoulders,  Gandalf a bi color dwarf with yummy heart shaped tomatoes (late but very prolific) and probably Large Barred Boar or similar large fruited tomato.   Hmm what was I saying about limiting my tomatoes...  I count 7 varieties and those are the outside tomatoes...  I do hope to have a lot of my little micro dwarfs in the 1 to 3 gallon grow bags scattered around the yard.

May 9, 2023

Garden 2023? well maybe....

 The front yard is looking pretty with all the new, still need to be filled metal beds... back garden is cleaned up but the fence is still not fixed  so I keep having to let Lani out as she can get into but not out of the garden area.  LOL She reminds me of Jazz when she was still very little and could go through the holes in the fence wire but couldn't figure out how to get back out the same way.   Of course little Duchess knows how to got both into and out of the garden through the fence... 

However the potatoes and onions have been sitting in the house for a few weeks now waiting for those beds to get ready. Last week I picked up a few seedlings from the Fort Collins Nursery and from the local Master Gardeners plant sale which means I have 7 tomato plants and 7 cauliflower seedlings to get into the ground also.

Then this weekend Makaila was over and climbed over piles of things to reach my seed starters for me and I managed to clear a path to my growing table so while they are 2 months late I did get some tomato and pepper seeds planted.  Now comes the wait to see how many of those make it outside but I still have until June right?



May 19, 2022

Peas...

 While looking for information on something else I discovered that pea seeds don't have the same longevity as tomato seeds.  In fact 3 years is about what most folks say... and looking at my pea seeds from the swap I realized I really needed to test the germination and get to growing them.   I have 3 types.  Dark Seeded Early Perfection from 2016,  Thomas Laxton from 2017 and Salmon Flowered Crown Pea from 2018.  

I let my peas soak over night then moved them to damp paper towels to see how many would germinate.  My loser was Salmon Flowered Crown Pea with only 4 of the 20 seeds germinating. :( Of course this was the variety I wanted to raise the most.   Dark Seeded Early Perfection had 7 of 11 seeds germinate. Thomas Laxton blew me away.  All eleven of the seeds I had germinated! Looks like I need a bigger pea patch... 

I still need to go though my beans and see if there are any that really need grown out but mostly I am looking at fresh seeds that have properties I want to put into my bean collection.  Like a fast, tasty, productive dry bean...  

May 13, 2022

First potting up day for this year...

 And I am pleased with most of my numbers...  Normal procedure for me is to plant 3 pellets with 2 to 3 seeds per pellet.  Move the seedlings to a cup soon after they show signs of growing a real leaf...  

This year I am not sure what I was thinking but Big Hill was planted in 6 pellets as was Micro Tom Gold.... and then there was Lucinda OMG I don't know what I was thinking but I planted 12 pellets with the seeds for this variety and have ended up with a large number of these to hand out...  Lucky me these may go as a novelty as they are carrot leafed and very distinctive.  Also very distinctive is the bright green of the Cherokee Tiger Black.  This one also was planted in 6 pellets and I ended up with 9 plants.  

Sadly there were a few failures...  Melon Ball only gave me one seedling out of the 6 seeds planted.  Large Barred Boar has not come up at all but I will give it a bit more time... and some varieties I really wanted to plant got misplaced and started very late 

April 29, 2022

I may be slow but some of those tomatoes aren't!

 Micro Tina was planted either 24/4/2022 or 25/4/2022 and today 29/4/2022 I have at least one seedling!  Kilimanjaro marigolds planted in the same time frame are also up and I can see signs of life in the Teddy Steak and Teddy Globe peat pellets...  

Of course I still have a few pellets that are open and I am trying to decide which greens I want to get an early start on or should I do more tomatoes... 

  

April 27, 2022

2022 garden is off to a slow start...

 I have lacked the energy to do much so everything is either not getting done or as I am slowly gaining energy some things are getting done late.

The last 3 days I have been getting my tomato seeds planted into starters.  That is about a month late so I dumped most mid season varieties and tried to stick with early season.  I still ended up with 18 varieties in the seed starters. 

Indeterminate 

1. Black Cherry - early/mid brown cherry

2. Zluta Kytice-  mid season multiflora yellow

3. Large Barred Boar - early/mid brown green stripes 

Determinate 

1. Melon Ball - white regular leaf midseason

2. Dwarf Artic Rose - 60 days seeds back

3. Fuzzy Wuzzy - dwarf bi color fuzzy early 

4. Utyonok - orange dwarf early

5. Puck - red -determinate 55 days

6. Northern Light - red determinate 55 days

7. Silvery Fir Tree - red carrot leaf early

8. Cherokee Tiger Black - purple green stripes chartreuse foliage

9. Lucinda - green on green strip carrot leaf

10. Big Hill - bi color big flowers

These two varieties were selected out of Big Boy and Better Boy, by a TomatoJunction member. 

1. Teddy Steak

2. Teddy Globe 

Hanging Basket Tomatoes

1. Pendulina Orange

2. Shimofuri 

3. Ladyfingers

I also got some Thai Lavender Frog Egg eggplant seeds and some flower seeds but still have some open spaces I need to fill up... 

We got our onions and potatoes about 2 weeks ago as well as a sunchokes and  horseradish roots for growing.  Stuck the horseradish in a pot and hope it is fine there.  The sunchoke roots went outside in planters and yep blasted squirrels dug them up and munched on them.  So no more sunchokes for me...  The horseradish is inside. 

Today I planted some of the onions spacing some for green onions and some for bulbs.  I still have about 20 onions to plant soon but ran out of get up and go. 

The potatoes are sitting in the light chitting but will probably need to go in the ground fairly soon. 

So that is the start of the garden season here. 


November 18, 2021

 Injuries side lined us for much of 2021 so things I wanted to do didn't happen.  We did get a nice crop of potatoes so will try them again this coming year.  Some of my other attempts didn't work as well...  Groundnuts need more shade and moisture.  I think the squirrels ate my sunchokes,  Runner beans were another winner.  Among my tomatoes Dwarf Pink Passion and Black and Red Boar were both winners but few others were as outstanding.  And those injuries meant that potatoes, tomatoes, and runner beans were about all we got planted... 

Hopefully 2022 will be better.  We really liked the fresh potatoes so will be growing them again.  In fact we have already ordered our seed potatoes.  We are bringing back AmaRosa a late red fleshed fingerling I really liked and Adirondack Blue a mid season blue fleshed potato that we both liked.  Then I added two yellows that are new to us Natascha which is an early season and Daisy Gold a mid season potato.  For storage I added Kennebec a white fleshed favorite in the US.

AND I once again joined in the MMMM seed swap.  Got my envelope mailed in today and of course now I get to wait and see what shows up.  I asked for more varieties of Runner Beans to trial as I liked what I got last year.   

Runner beans are a different species then regular bush and pole snap beans.  They prefer cooler soil conditions so I can plant them earlier and if I do a combo of regular snaps and runners I should pretty much have continuous bean production. That of course depends on the local insect population as unlike normal snap beans runner beans require insects for pollination.  But any pods I get can be eaten as snaps, left to mature and eaten as fresh shell beans or left to dry and cooked like dry beans in the winter.  Plus of course they have lovely flowers and are often grown for the flowers alone. 

My tomato plans for next year like much of my garden will be up in the air until I get my returned package from the swap but I do have a few will be grown already picked out...  I will post about those later