Let's see your vegetable garden
 

This is C&V related only in that planting the garden is why I have only been on two short rides this month. That is par for the course with me at this time of year. At least I get a lot of exercise forking over the soil.

Not much is up yet. The garlic and spinach look good, though. The onions, just to the left of the garlic, are too small to see, I think. I planted half of the second plot, in the background, to flint corn yesterday. I'm going to cover-crop the other half with buckwheat and, wouldn't you know it, red clover. By the time the corn is up, we will (I hope) be beyond danger of frost. We had a light one here on Sunday morning, but it was spotty and didn't even touch the few optimistically-early tomatoes or basil.

What are other people growing this year?
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You are snubbing your nose at the weather gods with all of that planting before Memorial Day in New England.

Thanks for posting this: Stirred up memories of my dog Gunny. Pics of him and my (former) garden spot. It was mostly tomatoes and squash. When wifey met with a landscape designer, I requested a 20 x 30 garden space and was given the far SW corner of our property. I pointed out our neighbor to the South had a row of fir trees along her property line and in 10 years or so there would be too much shade. Response was I'd probably be to old to want a garden by then so take it or leave it. They were right, but so was I. Anyway, it does leave more time for Summer cycling. Don
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Gunny surveys my garden
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Gunny after 6 mos of training & down 30 pounds!

Had a 1/4 acre garden a few years ago.The animals loved it.

They were kind enough to even let me have just a little.

I have a tiny urban lot in a town next to Boston, so my entire back yard totals about 700 sq ft. This year we're vegetable gardening for the first time, replacing most of the small section of grass we had left after building out a perennial garden-- we're trying to make the most of a small space and slowly replacing every blade of grass. Last fall I built two cedar beds with A-frame supported trellises out of dimensional cedar boards (not a purchased kit), These shots were taken two weeks ago and things have come up a lot since then! In the first bed are radishes, carrots, chives, sweet peppers, basil, arugula, and snow and snap peas (along the trellis). In the second bed are beets, bush beans, cucumbers (along the trellis), baby lettuces, kale and spinach. We've got several varieties of tomatoes as well as dill, fennel, oregano and thyme growing separately in pots or growing bags. Everything seems to be growing really well (knock on wood) except the beets, which are all shriveling up after growing about 6" tall. Not sure why?

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First harvest of baby lettuces:
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This is the rest of the back yard (from last September). It looks bigger than it is, the patio built underneath a concord grape arbor is only about 150 sq ft.
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Despite our half-acre having +/- 2000 square feet of gardens, not much is edible unless you consider hostess, primrose and arborvitae to be veggies. :lol: So the only thing we grow to eat is herbs, here in the rose garden (my very amateur bricklaying on display), in between the roses are containers of herbs. Success varies wildly, the oregano is growing like crazy and the others not so much. And right next to them, the roses growing so fast that two days ago my wife was filling 5 gallon buckets of blossoms to discard, so we figure the location is fine.


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bitter melon sprouts.

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got a late start on this years evolving disaster.... I think I'll fill in the empty space with sunflowers and ground hog radishes. Been working on the soil here for 7 years. The only consistent all day sun spot happened to be in a mucky clay dip. There's a lot of wood chips and gathered clay loam dragged to this spot and cover crops grown and rotted in. I have tried to keep the roto tilling to a minimum. Brother in law insisted on doing a heavy till 2 years ago. This year i took a weed burner to most of the space and tilled with one of those battery powered jobbies. It actually did a nice job cutting up the grass sod that had grown up.

Nice use of space! Sometimes I wish I didn't have so much space. Sorry I don't have any ideas about your beet problem.

Heres the "Weed Garden" its hard to see but the whole patch is carved out as a serpentine swale. there's just a little bit of slope and it is possible to water from the top end and fill the entire ditch. the drainage is to good to do that when the water table is down, but the set up dose seem to trap moisture. I think I'm going to fill the ditches with rotting wood and chips next year to get more of a sponge going on. Its an unfenced patch and has had a series of different weeds come up over the years. My girl has a thing about the past due dates on foods and apparently seeds also, so I take what ever she thinks is no good and toss it in here. There lots of vegetable's growing in there and I need to spend some time doing a little chop and drop with the other stuff. Limiting factor is the black walnut tree that I foolishly saved from the strangler vines, and now its taken off and is poisoning the ground around it.

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This is me recognizing my veggie skill level
Spinach

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I'm loving the terraced raised beds. very nice! And the spacing between the rows is very generous. Can I ask about the electric fence? How much did you have to spend for it? I have heard that Tractor Supply or Rural King sells kits and you can make up a basic setup for less than $100. Is this true? I used to have bumper crops of tomatoes every year but in more recent years the local deer population have moved into my neighborhood thanks to all the dumb housing developments popping up everywhere. The deer will discover that they can consume the entire top of a healthy tomato plant while it is tender. Once they make this realization, they habitually come back every night until each plant is decimated! I did buy a 100 foot roll of 5' high universal animal netting which made it difficult for me to manage the plants and blocked the sun a bit. The deer could sometimes act like a Giraffe and still eat over the tops of the animal netting ,

I have yet to plant this year's garden. I hope to get tomatoes and peppers out in the next few days. Basil too!. It is already too late to plant Kohlrabi seed. Oh well. I love Kohlrabi so I may plant them in late September for a fall harvest. I also plan to put out whatever seed I have including indian cor.

mine..... tomatoes...... have a couple more further up the fence and some basil. in years past the neighbor next door (not under construction would let us use his plot.....then my son and I had good garden

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Yep, around here you don't plant while you can still see "snow in the hills". And the hill they are referring too has an elevation of 5000 ft.

You and Scozim are both correct to a point, but gardening is like cycling in that you have to balance the risks involved. If you wait to plant until you're absolutely, 100% positive that all danger of spring frost has passed, you're sure to get blasted by a fall frost before things are ready.

Of course, you can always limit your garden to kale, brussels sprouts, and other things that can stand any amount of frost, but if you can't have basil and home-grown tomatoes, why bother with a garden in the first place?

I got all my electric fencing stuff at the local hardware store. The most expensive part was the solar fence charger, which has worked very well for the last few years--much more reliable than the battery version. I can't remember what it cost, but it wasn't what I consider cheap--probably close to $200. But we've all paid more than that for a bicycle that we didn't really need.

The fiberglass posts and plastic insulators and poly/wire are quite cheap and easy to use. After the fiberglass posts have been out in the sun for a year or two, they will send tiny splinters of fiberglass into your hands, so wear gloves when you handle them.

We have tons of deer and a bear who comes and eats the early grass every spring, usually with her cubs, right where the field meets the woods in the center background, but woodchucks are our main garden pest. Putting one strand of wire a few inches above he ground and another eight inches above keeps them out very effectively.

The top strand seems to work for deer, although they could obviously jump over it. I think that they come nosing around the garden to see whats up, and touch the wire and decide it's not worth hanging around. It also helps reassure me that the fence is putting out a good charge when I touch it with my leg while wearing shorts, which I always seem to do a few times a year.

I like the raised beds. The one on the left is getting pretty tender. It's a dozen years old, and I should replace it at the end of the year. I've been saying that for several years now.

My fenced in garden is laid out to get the most winter light. Long term plan is to put up a hoop house over the whole thing for winter gardening. I'll probably scale down from the full 20-25x50 foot print as that's a big sheet of plastic to deal with and it would be nice to take the cover off for 7 months of the year, or be able to put it up and take it down quickly depending on the weather. I wish I had a picture of the garden from 5 years ago. The fenced in area was a lot smaller, and I had an automatic irrigation system set up. That year we planted a lot of squash and cucumber. We ended up going on vacation for a couple weeks in early July and when we got back there was a completely filled in green cube in the backyard.

My first attempt at a garden... tomatoes, chives, bell peppers, cantaloupe, squash.. and recently planted okra.

The squash and cantaloupe definitely need more space. Live and learn..

In our yard Squashzilla reins... until the leaf mold sets in, then its a race for new growth to stay ahead of the blight. I've had the compost heap turn into a 400 sqft random squash patch.

Moderate frost last night. I knew it was on the way, so just before dark I covered the beans and basil with our stash of old bedsheets--which we use for that purpose a few times a year--and covered the tomatoes with upside-down plastic buckets. Onions and garlic and spinach and onions are fine. They can stand a lot of frost without harm.

The thermometer still reads 32 degrees, so I'll wait a bit before the unveiling. I expect that things will be fine under there, but I won't know for sure until I look. Fingers crossed.
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