Success...and failures
The 2012 growing season was by far my most bountiful...but I did learn a great deal about what to do and what NOT to do in the garden. I began sowing seeds in April and I dropped a variety of plants in shortly after that. This was a late start as direct sowing seeds season is concerned. In very general terms, the timing of sowing seeds and planting is based on the "frost date" for any given region. There are a bunch of websites that will give you your average spring and fall frost dates and it is this information that you should use to determine what you plant/sow and when you do it. Moongardencalendar.com has a "Frost Dates Lookup" where you input your zip code and it will give you the average frost dates for spring and fall. Almanac.com will do the same and go one step further, they will offer you recommended planting dates, for a variety of common garden plants, based on the frost date in your region.
My raised bed was looking pretty good by early May with a variety of plants and sown seeds doing their thing.
Starting from the top left and going down rows, there was pac choi (directly sown), Chinese broccoli (directly sown), "Bright Lights" Swiss chard (mix of yellow, white, red chard, transplants of milk jug seedlings).
2nd row, mustard greens (directly sown), parsley and sweet and opal basil (direct sown).
3rd row, mixed salad greens (sown way too thick) corvair spinach (direct sown) and a single rosemary plant.
4th row, tomato plant (gift from a friend), a few pea plants (also gift from Shannon, woman of the earth) and a few more tomato plants and a few corn plants (gift from my sons kindergarten class), with some basil (direct sown) in a row at the bottom in front of the tomato plants.
You may notice some yellow flowers at the top and bottom of the garden bed, they are marigolds. The fragrance of marigolds will keep away a number of non-beneficial insects without scaring away the most beneficial guys that help pollinate and keep your garden in order. Yes there are good insects and bugs that aerate your soil, pollinate your flowering plants, eat the EVIL insects and just plain chill out with no harm done. Bugs can be GOOD!
By June, my raised bed was doing pretty well. Nearly everything I planted was about doubled in size, I was harvesting lots of salad greens...
as a matter of fact they were going so well, I decided that I should build two new, smaller beds and really take advantage of this newly acquired knowledge. The new raised garden beds were 4' x 4' x 6" (about the size Mel suggests using at Square Foot Gardening). I Immediately filled them with the same mix of compost and bagged top soil used for the larger bed. One was sown with half corn plants, eggplant plants, 1 sage plant and 1 bay leaf plant. The other had a few tomato plants (a gift from a good friend Michael, a Teresa Caffe friend), 1 tomatillo plant (also gift from a Michael), 2 sweet pepper plants, 1 poblano pepper plant and 8 oriental cucumber plants.
The harvest!
Long story short, the two smaller beds produced moderately well for me. I got 10 or so tomatoes, 10 or so tomatillos (more info on these later)
, about 2 dozen cucumbers (more than I could handle for the season) a handful of poblano peppers, nearly no sweet peppers. The other bed gave me 10 or so eggplant, 10 or so sweet corn ears (still not good quality), and plenty of sage and bay leaf.
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| Tomatillo |
The larger raised bed was obviously where the bounty of the harvest came from. Plenty of pac choi (both leaves and full heads), spinach, basil, tons of chard, mustard greens, salad greens, and a fair amount of Chinese broccoli leaves.
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| early Pac Choi |
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| Beautiful specimen of Pac Choi head |
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| Salad Greens being washed (always wash your greens) |
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| Sisk Chard leaves (I thank my cousin Kenny for that naming) |
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| Mustard Greens |
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| Mustard Greens and Chard everywhere but bottom right, Chinese Broccoli leaves |
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| Cherry Tomatoes up top, mixed Tomato varieties (mostly Heirlooms) and 4 Tomatillos |
Don't get my wrong, this was 1 harvest in late July (I believe) and it was pretty impressive, but this was the most plentiful tomato harvest I had. I gifted some of the larger heirlooms, snacked on plenty of the cherry tomatoes, and the tomatillos went into a number of sautes I prepared. I did not have another harvest of this quantity or quality subsequent to this. Disease and heat dominated the later half of the summer and before long the dreaded black spots invaded just about every inch of my tomato garden. EARLY BLIGHT! (<---click here to see some more info on Early Blight). If you check out some images of this, you can see what happens. Heart breaking! The season ended well over all. I had a number of fall plantings survive the early part of the winter, pac choi, Chinese broccoli leaves, spinach, and cilantro. Once the early part of 2013 hit and the heavy frost and snow visited, they were lost...except for the spinach and cilantro. 20 of each plant survived and have been transplanted into a new home this year. Nature is awesome!
The 2013 season was fast approaching and it was time to begin thinking about my strategy for this coming season. There was much to plan, much to contemplate and a new raised bed to build. Until the next post!
The 2013 season was fast approaching and it was time to begin thinking about my strategy for this coming season. There was much to plan, much to contemplate and a new raised bed to build. Until the next post!
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