Relax and Watch the Veggies Grow

Ahhhh... doesn't this look comfy? I love lazy mid-summer days.



The weather in New England is beautiful. We don't get sizzling heat (at least for the most part unless we get a heat wave) and it's the perfect time to enjoy all the hard work I put into the garden during the spring planting season.

Let's take a little break and see how the veggie garden is doing.

Bed #1 looks great! I've got tomatoes (12 plants - all different varieties), 6 sweet pepper plants, and 6 eggplants. So far this year my tomatoes look better than any other previous year. I think the raised bed made a huge difference. The soil is much richer and I don't have to water as often. Today I sprayed the tomatoes with copper fungicide since late blight is prevalent in our area. Thankfully I have no signs of it so I'd like to keep it that way.



No red tomatoes yet, but tons of green ones of all sizes. Here's a small one, but I've got many large tomatoes that I'm just drooling over waiting for them to get red. A few are pink so they are getting there.



The eggplants are small but healthy with many flowers and a few tiny fruit.



This pepper is almost ready to pick.


Bed #2 has carrots on the far left, parsley, bush green beans, and cucumbers. I'll start harvesting the beans this week.


The cucumbers are doing well. Here's a close look at a baby cuke.



Bed #3 has broccoli, several herbs, beets, cabbage, and cauliflower. I had difficulty early on with leaf loopers but stomped them out with Spinosa. The biggest challenge with maintaining this bed is keeping the slugs away. They've done more damage than anything else.


A floret growing nicely.



The cabbage is starting to form.


Bed #4 has onions, lettuce, basil, swiss chard, and butternut squash over on the far right. I didn't think the squash would grow so I just stuck it in this bed, now it's taking over as winter squash always do. I've asked Andy to build me tepees for them to vine up.


Bed #5 is the squash bed. I have zucchini and yellow squash here. They've almost doubled their size in the short few days since I took this picture - how fast they grow always amazes me.


You'll notice in the back of the squash bed are some container plants of tomatoes. These are the ones that I grew from seed and started very late. I didn't think they'd make it but they did and by the time they turned around I had already bought plants and put them in the ground so I had to get some containers for these.

The zucchini I grew from seed. The variety is Cashflow from Johnny Seeds. I picked these 2 today - my first ones of the season!


The yellow squash is Zephyr from Johnny Seeds. I love the 2 tone color. I can't wait to taste one.

Here a flower is starting to form on the winter squash. This is butternut squash - Waltham by Johnny Seeds.


I had some left over pepper plants so I stuck them in some bright pink buckets. I love the color they add to the garden. These are small plants for this late in the season but they are doing well and have tiny peppers on them.



Finally, here's the potato bed. I sprayed them with copper fungicide as a preventative measure against late blight. Today Andy and I hilled them with Mainly Mulch straw mix. I'll show you in another post later this week how we did it.



The last bed I don't have a picture of since there is nothing to show. It had the snap peas in it and I pulled the plants out last week since they were done for the season. We got nice harvests from them but not as much as I had hoped. Next year I'm going to put in a few more plants to get a higher yield. The peas were the sweetest ever and we enjoyed them for many meals. In a few weeks I'll be sowing in this empty bed for some fall crops of kale, collard greens, and lettuce.

The Beds are All Made

Last weekend Andy finished making the raised beds and installed them for me. I was so excited to see them all finished. After installing them he made me a template and marked off 1 foot increments on the frame so I could measure out the spacing of the plants. He also made a support board for me that I can use during planting and harvesting so I can easily lean into the bed without damaging the plants or compacting the dirt. My man is so awesome!

Here are the finished beds by the fence and near the rhody tree. There are 5 beds in total which are 4'x8' each. This picture was taken from inside the guest bedroom (sorry for the bit of window glare on the left side of pic).



Here's the first 3 beds with the seedlings all planted.

A closer look at bed #1. This bed contains 12 tomato plants of several different varieties, basil, 6 peppers (2 each of yellow, red, and green), and 8 eggplants.

Bed #2 has two rows of carrots (haven't sprouted yet, but are sowed), parsley, green beans (bush - blue lake), and cucumbers off to the far right.

Bed #3 has 2 rows of broccoli, 2 rows of beets, 1 row of cabbage, 1 row of califlower, and 1 row of bok choy.

A wider view of the 2 beds near the house and the rhody tree.

Ellie inspecting bed #4 - the lettuce. She's on varmit partrol! Bed #4 has onions, mixed lettuce, broccoli rabe, and 2 butternut squash.

Bed #5 - the squash bed. This has yellow summer squash (Zephyr) and Zucchini (Cashflow). Both of which I grew from seeds that I bought from Johnny's.

Around the back of the house near a huge holly tree is the pea bed (which are doing great - surprisingly so - and has lots of flowers!) and an empty bed near the bulkhead in which I'll plant potatoes. This area actually gets a good amount of sun even though the holly tree appears really close in this picture. The sun sets in the direction opposite from the tree so it doesn't shade the plants.

Ellie near the future potato bed. I bought potato seeds from Gurney's which are expected to arrive this Monday. Hopefully I'll have a late summer/fall crop. Ellie had just finished chasing a chipmunk and is all wired up - love my little terrier!

Another view for you so you can get some perspective.

Yet another view... On the left is the fence where the 3 beds are. To the right are the 2 beds by the rhody tree. Look at that lush green grass! Andy is so proud especially considering that he started with a mess this spring. His hard work has paid off.

Along the fence to the left of the beds is a peony bush that is ready to burst forth with flowers as well as a clematis vine growing upwards towards a birdhouse. Right after that is our small berry patch where about 20 little strawberry plants are and two baby blueberry bushes reside. At the end of that area is a butterfly bush, lavender plant, and then another holly, which is out of the picture below but you can see it in the picture above. The bird house in this area is prime digs. It's occupied every spring - usually by either a titmouse or chickadee family. Right now there's a chickadee nesting in it, but a few weeks ago a titmouse was nesting. Seems as soon as one bird family moves out another moves right in. I'm awful at taking pictures of birds so I don't have any to show you, but the chickadees are in there - drives poor Ellie nuts as she sits underneath the bird house and barks like crazy.

Well that's my tour. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll post more pictures as things progress.

It's Bed Raising Time!

In rural 18th and 19th century America when farming and agriculture was the foundation of our nation members of a community often gathered together to raise a barn. Back then caring for livestock and working the land was essential for survival so activities like raising a barn, preparing a field for sowing seeds, and harvesting became events for celebration. Today we had our own little celebration at Ellie Mae's Cottage as we installed our first raised bed.



To those of you who have been gardening and growing vegetables for awhile this is no big deal, but to me it was something I've been dreaming about for the past year (silly I know... some women dream of the finer things in life while all I wanted was a decent patch of fertile soil). I got my first taste of vegetable gardening last year when I interplanted some veggies with perennials on our small plot of land. It didn't take much to hook us on home grown vegetables -- one taste of a sweet pea and a crisp cool cucumber was all it took. Although we got a decent harvest from our haphazard approach to gardening I knew that things could be so much better if we did a little planning and had a little better soil. So, after many months of research by looking at blogs, reading magazines and books, and talking to anyone whoever grew so much as a a tomato plant I came up with my own version of a raised bed.

The basic is a traditional raised bed. The frame was easy to build (at least it was easy for Ellie Mae's Dad - he owns a home improvement business and is a woodworking craftsman so building a square box frame was as easy for him as it is for a fine chef to make a grilled cheese sandwich). The hard part was figuring out where we were going to install the bed, how big it would be, what type of soil it would contain, and what kinds of vegetables we would plant in it.

Stakes for the bed all lined up and ready to go.


2" x 8" pine boards ready for framing (No treated lumber. Would have used cedar, but it's not in the budget this year. We'll have to replace these pine boards in a few years.)


A neat way to stack up the boards so they can be easily drilled for the screw holes - hubby knows all the tricks!


Holes all drilled.

The stake installed.

The finished product. Isn't she beautiful!


My first point of reference was Mel Bartholomew's All New Square Foot Gardening.


After reading this book the ideas in it made tons of sense, but he lost me when he recommends not using the soil that is already in the ground. Amending existing soil as long as it's not contaminated is sustainable gardening, while ignoring it completely just doesn't sit well with me. True it may take a little longer to get the soil to an optimal level when starting with the land beneath your feet, but building upon something that is already there and watching the wonders of Mother Nature transform it - worms and all - is a small miracle to me. Of course, it you don't have this option and want to garden where no soil exists than using Mel's Mix makes perfect sense.

The second book I read was The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith.



Here the author advocates the W-O-R-D system, which is Wide Rows, Organic Methods, Raised Beds, and Deep Soil. In my opinion the Smith method is more sustainable, but does lacks some of the quick fix ideas that Bartholomew's book provides. The Smith book is a comprehensive nuts and bolts approach to vegetable gardening that you can use as a foundation for learning, while the Bartholomew book will get a new gardener out of the gate and running in no time at all.



In the end I combined what I thought was the best advice from both books. We built a traditional raised bed of 4x8 feet, but instead of filling it with Mel's Mix we used the existing soil and amended it with topsoil, manure, compost, and peat moss. We then sprinkled on some lime since the home soil test indicated that we needed to neutralize some of the acid, and tilled the entire mixture together.



How much we used of each I really couldn't say (I know I should have measured and recorded what we used), but my approach to gardening is similar to the way I cook - I do it by feel using a little of this and little of that until it looks and feels right. The Vegetable Gardener's Bible helped me more in that respect since instead of giving me recipe for creating the perfect planting mix he outlines the basics of how to tell if you have a good soil. I certainly don't know if I got the mix right - as a matter I know that I didn't (it's still too sandy and rocky) and I realize that it can take years and years to work a good soil - but, I think we made a good foundation that we can build upon. Like everything else about gardening it's a process and patience certainly is a virtue.



The plan I drew up calls for 5 - 4'x8' beds (3 will go along the side yard fence and 2 near a rhodie tree). The area doesn't get as much sun as I'd like (only about 5-6 hours of full sun a day - I'd prefer 8 hours for veggie garden), but it's the sunniest place on our property outside of the front yard perennial bed. Unfortunately cutting down trees is not an option since they are on our neighbor's property - do you think they'd notice a masked bandit at night cutting down a few trees?



So with the challenges of a partially sun plot and some Massachusetts south coast sandy soil we embark on a new vegetable gardening season. We've got one bed completely built, installed, and filled with 4 more to go. At least in New England it's still early in the season - like everything we do it's taking longer than I would like but that's how we roll. Onward and upward as we say cheers to raising our bed!