Harvest

Today's harvest: arugula, too-damn-much mizuna, chives, snow peas, chickweed, our first round zucchini! and a borage blossom.

ALERT: Exploding Garden!

Early Girl tomatoes

It's been a little over a month since I planted my seedlings, but it seems like it's been so much longer! Checking on the plants day-by-day (and sometimes hour-by-hour), I somehow failed to notice how vigorously everything was growing. Oh, sure, I knew the mizuna and arugula were out of hand, but when did the cabbages start to overtake the snow peas? And what about the zucchini that were barely the size of a rubber Hi-Bounce ball last week? When did they start to look like real zucchini? The Early Girl tomato has started fruiting and has already exceeded the height of its cage-- and its neighboring Brandywine and Roma plants are beginning to flower as well.


The squash bed, with round zucchini, pattypan squash, jalapenos, eggplant, nasturtiums, and marigolds.

I've also discovered proof that my double-dug beds make for happier plants... a stray nasturtium seed sprouted in the path, but came up all small and sad and runty, while its brothers in the beds are flourishing.

Elsewhere in the garden, the pattypans have just sprouted a first female flower, the dahlias in the cutting garden are starting to form buds, and the lavatera that F transplanted last fall is taller than I am!

We also harvested cherries from our two giant cherry trees this past week. The robins got most of them, and the pickings were slim to begin with since the trees haven't been pruned in ages. But all told, we netted about half a colander's worth of tart little pie cherries... none of which survived to be made into pies ;-)

I'm so optimistic at the moment that I've started to decorate the garden. R, speaking of wedding anniversaries, do you remember this windchime? It hung on my balcony in Italy while we were there, but I hadn't found a place for it here... now it hangs from a cherry branch that shades the vegetable garden.

And can a garden with gay gnomes be anything but exuberantly happy?

Zucchini flowers

Two of my zucchini plants have started flowering. They seem too small to be producing flowers already... eep.

Compost

Finished compost!

The compost heap was one of the first things we added to the yard when we moved into this house two years ago. F built it for me out of leftover pallets from our fireplace wood, and at first, I was so excited about it that I saved every little scrap of vegetable and yard waste I could find for it. But over the course of a year or so, we found that it was too cold in winter to go out and dump scraps on the heap, and that it was too much of a pain to go out and turn every week, so the pile fell into disuse...

...until this year. You see, we were forced to buy compost to enrich the deep beds this year-- it cost about $50 for a cubic yard-and-a-half of the stuff, and that amount still wasn't enough to feed my aspirations. Our soil is pretty nice, but the best garden soil comes from years of good amendment practices and lots of organic matter. So after the beds were filled, I began to despair that there hadn't been enough compost left from that yard-and-a-half to enrich the uppermost layer of soil.

That's when I remembered the compost pile.

On the outside, it looked pretty much the same as the way we'd left it eighteen months earlier-- like a big sunken pile of dried-out grass. But digging deeper, I discovered what gardeners call "black gold"-- beautiful finished compost. With glee, I set the uppermost layers aside and shoveled three inches of homemade compost on the tops of my planted vegetable beds as mulch.



Having rediscovered this lost backyard resource, I've decided that the pile needs to be tended again. So a couple of days ago, I went out and thoroughly turned it. Lawn clippings that F had just added to the pile went to the bottom, covered by a layer of shredded paper. Next came the sod I had cleared in preparation for the garden almost two months ago (which was already decomposing nicely). Then more shredded paper. Then... ugh!

The most disgusting smell to be found outside of a sewer hit my nostrils as I reached the layer beneath the sod. Luckily, I was prepared for this eventuality, but the neighbors must have come home to a nasty surprise when stepping out of their air-conditioned cars-- the center of the compost pile had become an anaerobic mass of slimy, squishy, smelly sludge, and the stink immediately began to waft through the neighborhood.

Dear neighbors: I'm very, very sorry. (But not sorry enough to stop composting) ;-)



Another thing about this layer of the pile: it was full of earthworms! Now, I already knew there were earthworms in the pile-- I rejoiced when I saw them wriggling their way down through the compost mulch into my beds. But they don't belong in the type of fast pile that I'm now trying to build, in which the center heats up to temperatures inhospitable to worms and their ilk. I flipped them into the turned pile along with the sludge and more paper, but they will soon have to find another home.

Finally, beneath the slime, there was more finished compost to be had! I cheerfully stored it for later use by shoveling it into a spare 44-gallon trash can-- the garden's equivalent of a well-stocked pantry larder.

One of the most interesting things I found in the finished compost was what at first appeared to be an intact avocado pit. Just as I was making a mental note not to add any more avocado pits to the pile, I picked it out of the bin with my fingers and the papery outer covering crumbled in my hand, revealing a core made of perfectly smooth, rich compost. Nifty stuff :-)

Garden survives hail, heatwave

First, we had hail, which shredded the leaves of my uncloched plants-- so I added more cloches.

Then, we had a three-day heat wave with temperatures into the 90s, which scorched leaves on the cloched zucchini and tomatoes-- so I took the cloches off.

Then it went back to normal Pacific NorthWET weather, and the birds hit my uncloched plants again, killing one of my Roma tomatoes. So I put the cloches back on.

The birds have now moved on to the uncloched marigolds. :-/

That said, all is well in the garden. I took a day to put a stone edging around the perimeter using tiles the previous owners had left behind:


It's kinda crooked.

In the garden itself, we've set out beer traps for the slugs, but going out in the early morning to pick them out of the beds seems to be the best solution so far. I've got nasturtiums coming up from a direct seeding almost a month ago, and dahlias (four varieties just purchased) are coming up as well. I'm harvesting three or four stalks of rhubarb each week, then washing, slicing, and freezing them. We've also picked our first tiny Quinault strawberry, and the arugula is growing like crazy since the overcast weather set in again-- which is great, because I love arugula!

Some of the zucchini and tomato plants have outgrown their pop cloches, so I'm on to a new solution, bamboo stakes and Ziplocs:



And finally, a sample of what's growing:


Clockwise from top left: eggplant, snow peas, arugula, savoy cabbage.

Summer usually hits us in mid-to-late June, so I'm prepping for big growth spurts on the summer veggies... my tomato cages are ready and waiting!