The whole garden
Almost everything is continuing to grow really well. The tomatoes and zuchini are flowering like crazy, the peas and beans are beginning to, and many of the peppers have lots of buds. Some of the tomato flowers have been pollinated and are already forming fruit. I had a picture, but our digital camera has been having problems focusing where I think it will, especially on close-ups. The picture is pretty blurry, so I'll try to get another one soon.
I said "almost everthing" up above because there is one thing that's giving me problems: the garlic. I have two separate plantings of each variety. One is in the middle of the garden, next to the lettuce and the onions. The other is in one of the beds along the fence, with the peas. One thing to note is that the garlic in the bed along the fence is doing much better in general. The plants are bigger and look healthier. However, even in the bed, one of the varieties, the Extra Select, is doing very poorly. I don't have any other explanation, so for now I'm going to assume that this type just doesn't do well either in my soil or in my climate.
 Broccoli, ready to pick! |
 Herbs (front to back): parsley, garlic chives and coriander |
 Tomatoes |
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 Tomatoes in bloom |
 Zucchini in bloom |
 Bean flower buds |
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 Pea flower |
 Female zucchini flower |
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Some thoughts on the above pictures... A book I have from Ortho on vegetable gardening suggests harvesting the first head of broccoli when it's about three inches in diameter. Three of the four plants are well past this point, but I'm going to try on the smallest anyway. Supposedly it will encourage additional side shoots to develop.
I initially thought the zucchini were already forming fruit (lower right picture), but again that Ortho book claims that this is a sign that the flower is female. The flowers don't even stay open a full day. Usually they are open first thing in the morning, and by the time I get home from work, they've closed up. We do have bees in our yard, but only time will tell if the flowers were pollinated.
The peas aren't very bright. They're sort of anchoring to the wire mesh, but not as well as I'd hoped. To be honest, the plants aren't nearly as bushy as I had expected them to be at this point.
If you look carefully at the herbs, you'll notice I have a bit of weeding to do this weekend.. the bed with the peas and garlic is even worse. I think it's also time to get the basil and remaining peppers into the ground.
What a difference two weeks makes! Compare the view of the tomatoes with the picture I took just over two weeks ago. I think next year the tomatoes will get their own space. Right now they're crowding my serranos. Some pruning may be in order!
I picked the first real radishes out of the ground last Thursday. Last time was just for thinning, and none of the radishes were full-size. This time, there were some big ones (golf ball sized).
Everything else is coming along great. I've run drip irrigation to almost all of the peppers now. I need to set up the boxes along the fence again and the one area with the carrots, garlic, onions and lettuces. I'll probably try and tackle that this weekend.
The tomatoes are flowering again, and this time I'm going to let them go and see what happens. Each plant is getting very strong and bushy. Some of the peppers are also starting to put out buds.
The peas were starting to topple over, so last week I also threw together a quick-and-dirty trellis using a couple of stakes and ½" wire mesh. So far it seems to be working well. The plants put out these little tendrils that used to wrap around the garlic, and now they're anchoring to the wire.
The broccoli are all forming heads, now, too.
This past weekend I decided that watering the tomatoes was getting a bit difficult. The red plastic really gets in the way of soaking the plants, and their water requirements are only going to get bigger as the plants grow. The solution: drip irrigation. Instead of flooding the plants all at once, I can drip in the same amount of water over 20-30 minutes.
We already have a drip system throughout most of the yard, and in fact the prior owners used one of the eight circuits for the garden. The problem I saw with it was that it didn't go into the big boxed in area, where most of my plants are. A secondary problem is that it wouldn't fertilize the plants.
So instead of using the existing circuit, I ran an isolated circuit just inside the box. To water, I run a hose out, hook it up to the open end of the ½" drip tubing, and turn it on. I bought an automated feeder from Miracle Gro and it just hooks up to the system in-line. So far I've run drippers to the tomatoes, broccoli, zucchini, cucumber and a couple of the pepper varieties. Eventually I'll run it everywhere. Since they make ¼" tubing with holes already in it, it will even work well for row plants like the carrots, onion and garlic.
The only other thing I did yesterday was to snip off the flowers on the tomato plants. A friend of mine told me he read that this is a good way to keep the plant growing, instead of producing fruit. I've read the same thing about fruit trees (you aren't supposed to let them set fruit the first few years of life, so they grow stronger), so it seemed a reasonable thing to try. Worst case, I've set the plants back a few weeks and I don't do it next year.
Here are some new pictures. In general, the captions are clockwise from the upper left.
 The whole garden |
 Zucchini, cucmber, broccoli, Peter Pepper, and Fluorescent Purple pepper |
 Carrots, onions, garlic, Little Caesar lettuce, endive, spinach, arugula |
 SuperTasty tomato, Early Girl, Viva Italia, Sugar Snack, Serrano peppers |
 Green pepper, Carnival Sweet peppers, Barker's Hot peppers, Poblano pepper, Cherry Bomb II radish, Tenderpick beans in the back |
 Garlic, Sugar Snap peas (front to back) |