Community Garden, Part VII

Wow, we haven’t had a garden update since the end of June! I guess since we got back from our Germany/France trip this summer, things have been a bit busy! There have been some garden casualties, as usual, which might have deterred us from writing a garden update. Specifically, all of the corn was eaten while we were away, and not by people — ground squirrels apparently fatten themselves up on all the corn in the community garden. We didn’t get a single ear! The cantaloupes, butternut squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins also died without even really making any flowers… might have been too cold for them? We ended up with about 11 out of the 100 onions we planted due to hungry gophers. But there were some steady producers that are done now — we actually got about four good miniature watermelons from our vines and more lettuce/salad mix from our salad buckets. Read on for the crops we’ve still managed to keep alive, including tasty carrots, beets, and zucchinis, and the new crops we’re trying to get growing over the winter!

Here some general shots of how the garden’s looking these days:

We’ve started putting black, plastic trash bags over the areas we’re not planting over the winter to prevent weeds from taking over.

The zucchinis still amazingly make some zucchinis, though it’s been dwindling the last few days… We used to get 2 or 3 every other day, but now it’s about two a week — they’re definitely winding down for the winter.

The strawberries are also still hanging in there. They’ve spread a bit, with lots of runners, so we’ve made their enclosed wire mesh area bigger, but they’re still not making much fruit, and it’s hard to keep those weeds out… We’ve maybe had 3 or 4 strawberries this whole time, but I think they’ll start producing more next year. I think we finally made it secure enough that nothing’s stealing the fruit at least.

The pepper plant is still there and is finally making some fruits, but they’re not doing so well — a lot of them are a little spotty…

The rose is also still there, but is still doing great! Still covered in blooms even though it’s the middle of November! Great freebie.

And as for our produce already harvested — here’s one of the four-or-so tasty miniature watermelons we got:

And here’s our carrot harvest from our raised bed! We also got about 7 or so beets from it — they were quite tasty in some borscht!

And now for the new stuff…
Speaking of raised beds — one morning Andrew made an amazing raised bed from some wooden boards and wire mesh we bought! (You can also see it in the back of the zucchini picture.) We’ve planted a row of carrots (left) and some snow peas (right) in it. Even though we have it covered with wire mesh and bird netting, something got in and ate off a lot of the carrot tops and most of the peas… We fixed it by securing a wire mesh top, but it was a bit too late for the peas. I planted some more a few days ago, and so far it looks like nothing else has eaten the remaining plants…

We also dumped out our salad mix buckets (they were really pretty done — some non-tasty greens had taken over in eat pot) and planted some carrots in each — we’ll see how they do!

And speaking of carrots — we planted some more, with beets, in the old raised bed… Should be seeing them popping up soon!

And lastly, we planted some peppermint mint to make some peppermint tea! Since it grows like a weed, we figured it might survive in our garden! It’s going quite well now, and we’ve already made a couple glasses of tea from the plants I’ve had to thin out.

And that’s it for the fall garden update! Hopefully there will be more happy news in the next update! Thanks for reading! 🙂

One Response to “Community Garden, Part VII”

---

You should both get gold stars for effort! What a lot of work – growing vegetables can make one very grateful for grocery stores and farmers markets. Our big goal for next year is to learn how to get better apples from our 3 apple trees. They produced a lot this year (their first big year), but the apples were small and mostly damaged (bruised, wormy).
Btw, you may need more phosphorus (i.e., bone meal) in your soil – that would account for plants having trouble setting flowers and fruit. Heat doesn’t quite seem the cause, since you got watermelons. Could have been a combination….

Meg - November 15th, 2010 at 7:39 am

---

Leave a Response (or trackback on your own site)

You must be logged in to post a comment.