Garden Walk in the Rain

Finally some normal June weather.  Everybody (animals, plants and humans) is breathing in a sigh of relief with several days of rain!  I just did a walkabout this afternoon between showers and snapped a few photos of the garden crops.

Over the past weekend we were able to get most of the garden planted except rows left open for fall crops.  I felt pretty smug on the weed front on those hot sunny days.  Now with three days of rain I’m not so smug anymore.  There is nothing like real irrigation to germinate seeds, whether it’s weed seeds or garden seeds.  I look at this and see only weeds, but actually the plants look pretty good if ignore the pesky weeds, most of which will disappear when we thin the vegetables.

Dryland garden plantings in order in the photo starting at the bottom:
Music garlic, just showing the first tips of scapes.
Red Cored Chantenay, two double rows (Jane).
Turga parsnip, one double row (Jane).
Lutz beet, one double row.
Brilliant celeriac.
Cascade Ruby-Gold flint corn, Welcome TSW sweet corn, three rows.
Purple Viking and Desiree potato, three rows.
Uncle John dry bean, one row.
Pollinator row, dill, cilantro, zinnia, calendula, centaurea, sunflowers, marigolds, cosmos, cerinthe, torch and I forget…mostly anything I find in my seed box that needs to get gone.
Joan rutabaga and Gilfeather “turnip”, one row. (My dogs go bazacko for Gilfeather)
Sweet Meat, Musque de Provence winter squash, Spookie pumpkin one row.
Dark Star and Cocozelle summer squash, and hills left open for Naked Seed pumpkin which is giving me fits and starts and may not happen this year.
Three fallow rows.

Same garden from the other side.

Main garden

Ugh, I’m really struggling here with weed management. Seed plants and early planted dahlias are giving me the fits here.  It’s funny what you see when you’re on the tractor, you find things you lost in a field and kaboom ideas hit you too.  I decided next year, NEXT YEAR, I will use plastic mulch on my replanted crops for seed.  Saving seed is a messy business if you like the look of a weed free garden.  In fact so much so, that seed companies tell you that if you think you want to save seed for them as a business consider this, it’s a whole ‘nother ball game than gardening.  Tall, unruly, ugly-looking plants and weeds are your future if you want to do any biennial seed saving.  Keep that in mind.

There isn’t much see here since it’s all above the keyline and it’s almost all direct seeded except a small brassica planting.  Next garden post I should have something to show for our work.  More carrots, beets, parsnips, cucumbers, summer squash, and some flowers got planted out this weekend in this garden.

Turga parsnip flower

A lot of our garden action is still going on in the greenhouses.  In a span of a couple of weeks, outside we planted winter garden, then summer garden, and now we’re working on our fall garden seeding which puts us back in the greenhouse.  Gardening is like that, first you have nothing planted and then all of a sudden you have no room to plant anything, and you’re seeding more for the final planting of seeds whose fruits you will eat this winter.  I told my family the garden season was over this weekend, and summer hasn’t really begun! They covered their ears.  Rantings of an old seed lady, I’m not into cats, so Old Seed Lady will have to do and actually fits me much better.

Besides seeding in flats in the greenhouse we are barely keeping the kale and romaine at bay…tough I know 😉

I swear you would not believe we eat kale three times a day, have enough to supplement the hens and baconators and these plants keep rewarding us with phenomenal growth.  There is just something about the hen-pecked compost that the brassicas love.

Sugar Sprint peas are about done,.

The carrots are sizing up nicely.

Kohlrabi is about one of my favorite brassicas.  If you just want to say no to row cover, grow these.  They seem to be immune to most brassica problems…and they are delicious.

In the other greenhouse (we call it the lone wolf), with drip irrigation and plastic mulch, we don’t spend a lot of time in here.  I turn on the drip once a week, and other than attempting to prune and trellis tomatoes and pick strawberries we don’t come in here as often.  You could view that as a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it.

Same greenhouse, different view.  Strawberries, peppers, melons, cucumbers, tomatoes and a row of brassicas on the cool edge make up the plantings in here.  While we aren’t spending a lot of time in here right now, that will change as the solanums start to need harvesting.

So that concludes the “garden” tour this first week of June, I hope things are growing well in your gardens too!