Garden Diary

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

The gardens are all planted for the season. The front and side beds have 1) swiss chard; 2) pole beans; 3) zucchini & cucumber; 4) yellow squash & cucumber; 5) tomatoes (15), eggplant (4) and cubanelle peppers (6).

The back garden plots are planted with herbs and more pole beans.

The back pole beans are up, as are the cilantro in the herb garden (the basil, dill, parsley, and sage were all plantings of already started plants). In the front, the squash, cucumbers and chard have appeared. The plants in box 5 were all transplants. Pictures soon.

And the easily identified fruits, the strawberries, raspberries are in bloom. The peach tree has lots of small peaches, and I just have to find a good way to protect the tree so that the squirrels and birds don't get all the fruit, like last year...I think we only got one peach.

And we have flowers all around. The spring gave us nice blooms of crocus, daffodils and tulips, and we now have a single iris blooming and peonies in the back, along with impatiens scattered around the back yard in boxes, pots and the bed behind the house. We should have a profusion of day lilies, asian and tiger lilies and begonias later in the season.



While this garden will provide some nice fresh flavor for the table, it won't do much as a real economic force. In order to plant a real victory garden more room needs to be allocated to vegetables than to fruits (you did notice that my "vegetable garden" is mostly fruits?), especially the kind that can be stored in a root cellar so that the harvest can supply food into the late Fall and Winter: winter squash, potatoes, carrots, cabbage (though I've never been able to grow cabbage or broccoli without terrible infestations of cabbage worms). I've been thinking that next year I'll plant a big potato patch in the back yard...I can never get the grass to grow there anyway!

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