The End of an Era

Well, we made a big decision to say goodbye to the garden plot.

[play taps]


It was a spring of what can only be decribed as "meh" about the garden plot.

I went out there once and spent over an hour just cleaning out the smallest bed and planting lettuce.

An HOUR!!

It was absolutely thick with weeds.

This picture shows them all piled up next to the tiny bed.

It was crazy.

Other than that, the garden was a mess!
Our winter cover crop never sprouted, bed edging desperately needed to be re-done, and there were not horrible amounts of weeds all over, but definitely very tall ones in certain areas.

Spring was so delayed anyway and then I had a busy few weeks while garden plot partner was out of the country and so there it sat.

A mess!

We had decided to scale back anyway and try to focus on what we could grow well and do more established plants instead of seeds.

I was thinking that perhaps I wasn't "feeling it" because we'd had some pretty miserable fails the last two seasons.

And frankly - a community garden only works if you live nearby.
Apparently working nearby isn't enough  because staying after work means fighting extra horrid traffic on the way home (or staying there even later and starving!).
Or going out in the heat of the day over lunch breaks to weed and water...not ideal (and actually, 4-5 is typically the hottest part of the day here, so after work is even worse than doing an early lunch around 10 or 11!)

The more I read, the more I realized that consistent watering is so key.

NOT our strength!!


So partner gets back from her trip, we compare notes on how poorly we've done with it and she finally says, "Soooo....how committed to the garden are you this year?"

Oh dear. How do I graciously say that I'm struggling to get motivated and pessimistic that our watering habits will be any better?

Then she lays on me how I'd feel about giving it up because she's really not feeling it this year.

Oh!

We discussed it for awhile and since she has moved from an apartment to a townhouse-with-a-gardenable-backyard since starting the plot, we both agreed that it wasn't ideal for us anymore.

We wondered about having to muddle through the year planting only a few "sure-fire" crops.

She decides to email the garden organizer just to see if there is interest...

Hears right back - yup, there is definitely a waiting list; someone would be ready to take over the next weekend!

Well alrighty then!

So she spends that Saturday doing a smashing job cleaning it!
I went out for a bit the next week to grab a few things and give it a final look and then slowly walked away from what has been a fond, fun (mostly :-D) and educational journey.

And that's it. Just like that we pass along a really spectacular garden plot weeded and with lettuce growing and blueberries, strawberries and grapes already blooming.

Dear stranger: please take care of it!!

I'll miss the beans and soybeans which always did well.
I'll miss the peanuts.
Other than that, it was so hit or miss from year to year what worked and what didn't!
So I won't miss that. Or the "stress" of when to get out there and finding over-ripe veggies because neither of us could make it, etc., etc.

Now I just need to get creative on growing more edibles in my quite-shaded-except-for-the-front yard!

Farewell, little garden. 

Peanut Harvest

Well hello there, strangers!

Yes, I am enjoying my 2 months without gardening (although the 60 degree weather started giving me a teeny bit of the gardening bug). Not that I don't love gardening, but it's nice to have a little bit of time to focus on other things.

But I did finally take advantage of a break in the psychotically frigid weather to finish brushing the dirt off the now-dried peanuts and roasting them!

Here's the whole bunch when I harvested them.

And the crop after roasting!

Not the largest abundance, but very decent considering only about 4 of the peanut plants actually "took" in the bed this year.


Just a side note: peanuts are a pain in the patootie to "clean"!
Aside from individually scrubbing each one with a slightly abrasive scrubby, you'll never get all the dirt off...and there was NO way I was individually scrubbing each one!

I would put them bunches at a time into a mesh bag and shake it all around so that they'd help clean the dirt off each other...I also put the scrubby in the bag to help give more abrasion too!

(And then of course the time I didn't have the opening held closed all the way so there went half the crop flinging all over the yard when I started shaking!   [sigh]   You're welcome, squirrels for whichever ones I missed in my pick-up.)

So after I do the best I can, I just give up and we know not to chew on the shells.

Closing Up the Garden

Well, the time came to put the garden to bed...except instead of covering the beds and saying goodbye for spring, we put them to work!


Here is the mess we arrived to a few Saturdays ago:

Yes, there were teeny, baby, unripe peppers
still on there that I took home!

But it was highly productive and we cleaned up and re-planted six beds!

Re-planted with what, you ask?

A cover crop!!

We bought a mix that's great to restore nutrients into the soil along with an inoculator (which we can never remember the name of nor do we really know how it entirely works).

We cleaned out the dead plants and weeds, turned over the beds, planted the seed mix, and spread leaves on top (and hose on that to keep the leaves from blowing away until they'd been rained on).

We also found a scary amount of slugs :-/
That has not been our previous experience, so this is concerning. Also explained the super bizarre "jelly sacs" we found in one of the beds. (Like, did our garden get into bubble tea...? ooohhh....Google says no, it's something far horrible-er.)

So I entered myself into the slug-throwing discus contest and got some pretty decent awards for distance. (The benefits of having a plot next to the woods!)
Nasty buggers!


The leaves for covering I brought from home.
How do you keep a tall (and ridiculously stuffed full) bag of leaves from falling over in your car?

I was insanely proud of this one! :-D


Just pulled the backseat's seatbelt into the "trunk" and it fit around the back absolutely perfectly so it wasn't going anywhere!











We were sore and largely numb after 3 hours working in 50 degrees, but were very pleased with the progress.

     The beds all (almost all) cleaned up!

And we didn't leave empty-handed because we harvested our potatoes!!!

They're mostly little squirts, but I roasted mine up and they were delicious!


Because of time, coldness and the fact that there was still quite a bit of green on the peanut leaves, I said we should leave them in the ground and I'd come out some weeknight and harvest them.

Yeaaaah, except that I forgot the time change was that night which means it gets dark at 5!


So this week I left work early to give me about an hour and a half and ended up needing every minute of that! Shockingly, not because of the peanut harvesting, though!

So last year, we had read that you're supposed to loosen the dirt around them and gently pull the plants which will come up with all their little "fingers" still attached to the subterranean peanuts.
Except that we waited until I think December to harvest them and they were not a nice shade of yellow...they were brown and dead and a disaster!
We ended up digging for the no-longer-attached peanuts in what had become a mud bed!


This year, because of the frost we got at the end of last week, the plants had gone from their green with yellow tips to that deep green/blackish color of frosted plants. Perfect time to get them out!

So, rather skeptically, I dug around them with my shovel, gathered the plant arms, gentle pulled ....aaaaaaaand.....


out they came!!!

It was beautiful! Sure enough, most of the little "fingers" were strong enough to hold onto their peanuts and lift them from the dirt.
Made me so happy!



I dug around a bit and found a few more as I was turning over the bed, but that only produced a small pile of loose ones; by and large most are still attached on these huge bunches! Perfect for hanging to dry! In case you couldn't tell:    I'M SO EXCITED!!!


Here's the stash on a full size black garbage bag. Great crop!

We were disappointed that in about half the bed, the peanuts we planted just never "took". But this is a great crop! Probably more than last year since we had quite a few rotten ones because we'd let them sit in the muddy earth so long!

In turning over the bed, I discovered what I think is the reason why the peanuts only took in one part of the bed:

Clay.

Thick, mucky, horrible, rock-like clay!

I do NOT remember that when we turned it over last year, so no idea what happened there, but everywhere the peanuts hadn't grown was this awful stuff that took me forever to dug out and try to chop up.
By then it was getting dark fast and I was sore and my fingers were going numb ("50 degrees means I'll be fine in a long sleeve shirt and gardening gloves if I'm working, right?" mmmhmmm.)

So I did the best I could, planted the cover crop and we'll have to do some major restoration on that in the spring!   Come on alfalfa seeds and wormies! Do your magic!

I finished up, proudly slinging my peanut filled black Santa sack, just as the sun was setting and clouds were rolling in...

And here's what it looks like with one more bed all cleaned up. 

Just have carrots and garlic to harvest at some point.

And then the atrocious strawberry bed and tiny bean bed to clean-up, but you know what? It's cold. They may just wait until spring!

So some successes, many failures. 

Next year is another year!

Hose Methods

My garden plot partner and I need help; we just cannot seem to decide which method of watering is more effective!


Method 1:

Drag hose weaving through the garden beds to get to those at the far end; trying to avoid plants and frequently getting it caught on corner of beds or trellises only to look back and realize you've also just taken out a poor garlic stalk that's now parallel with the ground. 
This is the method we have been using for about 3 years now.

Method 2:

Run the hose down the nicely mowed path next to the garden and water at the end of the plot from the side working your way back towards the front thereby avoiding all plants, bed edging and trellises. 
This method was discovered by partner 0.5 weeks ago.

There are not enough facepalms for this situation.

Harvest Time with No Harvest

Welp, the garden wrapped itself up rather early this year...because everything died.

[sigh]

It started off SO promising!

We have some theories on watering and row cover and weed barrier and things that may have prevented good ground seepage. And then there's the fact that every melon and squash imaginable got a different kind of beetle eating them!!

Remember how excited I was at the beginning of August about our fabulous melon plants?!

Here's our melon bed by the end of August:


Yeaaaaaaah.
That's sad.

And remember that adorable little watermelon that had started to grow?!
Yeah; that's as big as it got.  😑

His vine died with him hanging there no bigger than in the photo I'd taken before.
I went out one day and found he had dropped and rolled away, so I "rescued" it and cut it open.
Tasted horrible, but it was so cute!!

The one my garden plot partner grew in her yard, however, was delicious!


The tomatoes actually did give us quite a good harvest; we just weren't great about getting out there fast enough. They split open very quickly or rotted away way faster than it seemed they should.

And as usual we had quite the jungle growing!

Huge tomatoes and medium tomatoes and grape tomatoes and roma tomatoes and asparagus and pumpkins, oh my!

The pumpkin vine wove itself through all of the plants, through the tomato cages (and by 'through', I mean in, not between), out the other side and started eyeing up the pepper bed next door before finally also succumbing to the beetles and leaf mold.

Not before producing some pumpkins, though!

One happily plopped itself right in the smack middle of a tomato cage!

[shaking     head]

Only our psycho garden!


The other one just lay peacefully in the mulch towards the end of the vine which means he actually ripened all the way and looks like a real pumpkin!!

So he got picked and put to very good use.
In fact, should he stay alive for a few more weeks, he will be put to the ultimate use for a pumpkin. Just have to figure out my design :-D

The tomatoes eventually all died out with such finality, you'd think we had been mistreating them. Sad dead vines with rotting tomatoes strewn in their wake. Alas.



The grape vine....good gracious that thing went crazy! And we had grapes!!

The raspberries also started producing again. What? It's August!














Also oddly, the peppers make a huge comeback! Like, actual peppers growing! A bunch! I picked a big, crunchy one and it was delicious!

The edge around our fence was in need of trimming / weeding so badly, but near our trash can was this vine and one day when I went out - behold! Beautiful white flowers!

I was so excited that I showed my partner a picture and she replied with a big groan. "They're morning glories! Get rid of them!"

Oops!

They grow a bit too intensely for our plot's taste, so alas; away they went.

So, aside from some random rogue things that have amounted to very little, I'm hoping some peppers grow well enough to eat and then our hope still lies in our peanuts and potatoes! 

Peanuts, potatoes and peppers!!!
(And garlic and carrots, of course. And the random bok choy that grew; I must have left the root there when I harvested it earlier!)

The garden wrapping up in mid-September:

Garden Plot Update

Yet another year and, boy are we a mixed bag of results!

I mean, things are for sure growing! (Scroll through the last pictures I posted from late May / early June if you need proof!)

At the beginning of July, here's an overview...

And then last week, the beginning of August:

Crazy!
I was about to point out that we harvested the beans, when...it has come to my attention that I did not share the beans story!

Well...green beans. Who doesn't loooooove green bean?! Green beans right off the plant...sooooo good! Crunch, crunch, crunch. Love it!

And the bean plants at the plot started growing so well! And then remember that time when your "bush beans" suddenly started climbing the white support mesh...?!
What?! Okay!!


Well, with my love of green beans, imagine my excitement when I show up at the garden plot and see the bean plants FULL of green beans! Yaaaay!

Some were a little too plump and so as I tried them, figured they were just a bit overripe - but others looked just great!

So I picked a bag full!

And came back to the office raving about the wonders of the harvest including - GREEN BEANS!!!

After several minutes of jubilee, my coworker garden plot partner says: "You know those are drying beans, right?"

                      They're what?

Sooooo....you know how you have hard, dry beans that you can soak and cook if you want to do black or refried beans or something not from a can?

Am I the only one who never thought about where they came from?!!


"So...uh...why did we do that?!" {crushed}
"I'm sorry! I thought we decided on those!"
"Well, yeah, that does sound like something I'd do!"  {images of "ooooh, that would be different and fun and exciting and I'd love to have beans like that all winter long!" flash into my head: yup, sounds like me. I have a FABULOUS memory of what we decide in the winter for the spring plant :-/ }

Well, then she tells me the best part:
With these types of beans you can either pick them early, like when they're smaller (before you'd normally pick ripe green beans) and then just eat them like green beans. Or, you leave them on until they dry on the plant and that's when you finish drying them to cook, re-fry, etc.

I basically picked them right in the middle.

Too late for the "early eating" and too early for the drying.

I quit!!!

Thankfully the plants did produce a decent amount more, so hopefully we'll have enough for a whole whopping like 1/2 cup of refried beans.


So after they had turned totally brown and sounded like baby rattles for pygmies, partner harvested the beans that are not green beans and we shall see how they turn out!


For weeks now the lettuce has most definitely bolted!
(But I hate wasting, so I'm eating it anyway! Think I've basically picked off all that's fit to eat; some got REAL bitter! Some only slightly so :-D)

And then the squashes!! (yes, it's way more fun than just saying "squash"...I mean, how boring is a word that's its own plural!!)
Here looking so promising and full and - whoa! - randomly a huge yellow one that was definitely way too far gone to be great, but I attempted to eat it nonetheless.

A humungo zucchini (pretty sure this one came from garden plot partner's home garden, not the plot):

With it I made a double batch of chocolate zucchini bread and a 9x13 pan of zucchini brownies...and still had a third of the thing left!

But sadly, very soon after the photo above was taken, the nastiest little bugs (I'm not an "ew bugs!" kind of a girl...I love bugs - they are beautiful and necessary and fascinating...but not all of them! Some are downright creepy and these guys are straight out of a science fiction movie. I'm quite certain they have little chips implanted in them from an alien race and they're sent here to take us over. Real nasty.) took over. They lay their eggs under the leaves and multiply and decimate squash plants. And spraying did not help...and actually seemed to make the plant die faster! :-/

So very sad on the zucchini front. The squash plant is hanging on - ish - but not producing more flowers yet. It's probably also too late in the season.

So yay for ONE of each kind that were oversized and then all the other little guys rotted away before they got full grown. Very, very sad.

But not all have succumbed to the nasties...

Let's look at the melons in early June:

And July:

                                                                                                       And August!

(Large pumpkin plant from the right corner whose stem
was rotten was removed.)

And why yes that IS the cutest little watermelon starting!!!

Another pumpkin plant doing just dandy...

With a little baby pumpkin peeking out!!
















The late crop of Strawberries is coming! We tasted some very delicious ones recently!
And I'm very happy at how quickly the woolly thyme is filling in; hopefully next year we'll have a lovely, carpeted path!



The potatoes (far back) are finally doing wonderfully! The peanuts did not take nearly as well as we'd hoped, but the ones that did are looking great and a couple tiny sprigs are still trying...














Our peppers this year, like the last few have just been so sad! We have a few promising ones, so we'll see if they get to full size!

And let's talk about tomatoes, shall we?! 

What? Did I hear you say 'jungle'? 

Well yes, that is accurate!

Early July:

So many little grape tomatoes!!

And August:

Please also note the pumpkin vine that snaked its way through all of the cages before we could re-route it! Wouldn't be our garden plot without such happenings, now would it?!

And I cannot get over the size of some of these!! (Hard to get scale here, but those Beefstake are gooooooood gracious! Enormous!)

 So many colors!!!

So yes, while there have been some disappointing failures and "meh" things, the tomatoes are just too much to handle. 

And the grape vine. Ooooohhhhh, the grape vine! Which pulled down the disappointingly weak (and not as advertised) nylon string we used on the perimeter. So we got out last week to put up thick wire (no pictures yet...we just dodged a thunderstorm so there was no chance to stop for a photo op!)

And just for fun...I had extra bulbs and planted them around the perimeter of the fencing. Most got weed-wacked, but the calle lilies were such a fun thing to walk up to!

So there we are. The garden plot in August. Little of this, little of that...little of you don't know what to expect each time you go out!! Hey, what's new?!