Growing up

There are some people that look at the garden I have now and say that it is easy to garden when you have this much space.  Actually, it is harder to garden when you have this much space!  There are more weeds, more ground to cover, and more time to do it all.  It does have its advantages, but limited space should not be a reason to not garden at all.  I have kept some type of garden in most all places that I have lived in my adult life.  Many times the space was limited.  Vertical gardening is the way I made the most out of limited space.  There are many crops that prefer growing up rather than out.  You also don't have to spend a bunch of money on fancy planters when an old garden gate or some fallen branches can supply a support for those upward bound crops.  Pruning a tomato plant to grow up more than out will also provide you with plenty of fruit without all the space.  Even crops that don't grow up naturally can be put into a planter which stacks your garden for low growing crops like lettuce and strawberries.

I have used the netting from our Christmas tree wrapping to train vines up which has gotten additional use out of something most people would discard rather than put in storage for the next six months.  If you are in a community that doesn't allow vegetable gardens, vertical use of space is a great way to sneak those edible crops into the landscape.  That alone is a whole topic yet to be discussed.  Some of the best crops to go vertical with are:

• pole beans
• peas
• tomatoes
• hardy kiwi
• cucumbers
• small melons
• squash
• pumpkins, especially smaller pie varieties
• Malibar spinach
• any crop you can put in a small pot or planter such as lettuce, strawberries, baby carrots, etc.

Your imagination and creative use of height will be your only limitation to how high you can go.

New veggies coming in

Bringing in the first picks of the season is always exciting to me.  The first radishes and lettuce are like manna from heaven.  I enjoy the sweet, little Alpine strawberries each day as they produce just enough to satisfy the taste buds.  The peas are producing and are even starting to show the signs of decline with the warmer weather.  These are my "quick" crops which I can have two or even three rounds of crops before the summer produce starts rolling in.

My 4th of July tomato has only green fruit on it.  The cabbage is not quite full headed.  The green beans have been blooming and are now bearing tiny little beans on my first crop of bush beans (I planted three bush bean varieties two weeks apart from each other to space the crops out for fresh eating).  The 8 ball zucchini are the size of large marbles.  I plucked several pickling cucumbers off the vine for the first real picking this year.  A few warm, sunny days will push many of these to full ripeness.  Of course, I will probably miss them while on a camping trip.  Like a working mother missing her babies first steps, I will enjoy my first beans as the first beans that I get to eat.  I will probably have more than enough zucchini to eat and then some.  The cucumbers will be there, too.  I will miss that first vine ripe tomato, though, as that is like tapping the keg on the new beer of the season.  I shall survive.

My daughter will be my caretaker while I enjoy some much needed time off work.  She has been working in a garden center at a big box hardware store this season.  After years of scooping custard, she was ready for a change.  She has been trained to water and care for plants from a stern teacher, someone other than myself.  It is fun to think that I don't have to rely on the careful eye of experienced gardeners in the neighborhood with my daughter on the job.   

I held off on publishing this post until after vacation for various reasons.  The garden came through great, very few fatalities considering an 18 year old was facing her first time alone and managing mom's garden.  This was compounded by the fact that we had no rain and the temps hit 103 degrees one day.  She has a full-time job working in a garden center (she's a newbie at this), but she came home and took care of business here as well.

I picked the first 4th of July tomato on July 21st.  The rest of the tomatoes were just buds when I left, but the heat and sun have set so much fruit that they didn't look like the same plants.  The onions were mostly fallen over so the tops have all been pushed over as well (see onion harvesting and other).  The beans that I thought would be ready got picked, but there was a whole bunch more ready for picking on my pole beans which became part of a post-camping supper.  

Since there is dill coming in, I may have to do some dilly beans which I posted the recipe for in the same link as onions (above).  I saved some dill before vacation in a jar with white vinegar in the frig.  This technique worked very well last year to preserve the dill until the vegetables were also ready.  My vines of everything else are going everywhere!  I am spending some time to separate and nip the tips to control where some of them are going.  Lots of flowers but no fruit yet. The pickling cukes are also doing well, the window box cukes hated the heat, the ones I nestle against the wall by the tomatoes are also starting to form very nice fruits.  I had to pick and slide the first one out between the wire trellis and the wall.  Any bigger and it wouldn't have made it out.  

This is truly the time of the garden race.  Enjoy the fruits of yours.