The tour, June edition

The harvesting has begun, and it’s time to show the progress!  This week we have to build a lot of support systems for our floppy plants.  We’ve also started to pickle, freeze and nibble food in the gardens.

Today I wanted to share with you all a look back at how much we’ve grown since building our gardens.

This was day one.

[Insert entire garden pic from today] At the end of the blog I’ll show you what it looks like today, but there’ll be bits and pieces as I take you on a tour around the garden!

The acorn squash/ eggplant/ bean bed. I couldn’t take a very good picture from this angle, because the two little squash plants on the front left of the picture are now taking over a tomato cage and going everywhere!

The beans and summer squashes are starting to produce.  The eggplants are finally taking off.  I have one more Rosa Bianca in the nursery, which I’d like to plant this week.  Part of the hold up has been that Mardi, our tomcat, likes to sit (and occasionally leave us presents) in the open space in this bed.  We’ve been working on deterring him, but he’s strong willed.

This was taken in April, after bringing home the half dead yellow yarrow.  We had yet to plant the okra behind the apricot.

Isn’t the apricot tree looking great?  We have been watching it and letting it take it’s shape, so that when it comes time to prune it this year we can encourage more main stems.  It’s too bad it isn’t closer to the wall, because it seems to be flat and would have been perfect to espalier.

We planted a little chamomile  that we started from seed, towards the back of the apricot.  There will be verbena and hyssop going in also.  Right now those seedlings are in the nursery, and I’ll probably transplant them into larger pots and keep them in the nursery until fall.  I hear fall is a good time to plant perennials.

Here’s the yarrow on planting day.

And today!  We will have flowers soon, and I’m pretty sure they’ll be yellow.  But the plant wasn’t labeled so we could get something else!

Here’s the potted daisy after pruning.

And we have flowers!  I am enjoying the shape of the plant, and loving that the pink flowers have come back.  Notice the red kuri squash is overtaking the pot?  David is hoping to pick up a cattle fence panel while he’s in Bakersfield this weekend.  Then these squash vine will be growing up and over this pot!

In the side yard, the shell beans and cucumbers are growing well.

This is right after I transplanted the little leaf pickling cucumbers and the nasturtiums.  (sorry it’s not a great picture, but I wanted to show the size.)

Today the cucumbers are climbing up the ladder, the dill is tall and attempting to flower and the shell beans are nearly ready to be picked.  We harvested our first cucumber from these plants today!

On the other side of the cucumber ladder is the tomato raised bed.

Here it is after we planted, and when we were still finishing up our winter growing season.

Today the tomatoes are coming along, the basil is ready for it’s second harvest and we have a pepper growing.  We have a few varieties of radishes and carrots growing, a small patch of lettuce, and one small leek that just won’t be done growing.

In the front yard we also have our mystery garden area.  

We let the compost sprout, and sprinkled a wildflower mix.  The first batch of sprouts that you see here was mowed down by hungry snails.

The snails have long been killed and we’ve discovered that wildflower mix= alyssum.  The nasturtiums survived the snail onslaught, as well as the one cosmos.  We’ve been more diligent about watering this area and we’re starting to notice a tiny bit of variety appear.

David has almost no allergies, but he’s allergic to alyssum.  It’s too bad because I think it’s beautiful, and the cats enjoy rolling around in it.

Our herb bed was cut way back when the bulbs were flowering.

This was taken right after the sage and basil were planted, and during that small window when the cilantro was ready to pick.

Currently the cilantro and oregano are flowering and ready to be cut down. We’ll be cutting back and pulling out most of the bulbs shortly.

The cilantro/ coriander flowers attract flies.

And ladybugs.

We plan to harvest some of the coriander seeds, and let the plant self seed.

And of course, here’s Rosie to point out the peppers.

This is pretty soon after we planted the banana pepper, jalepeno and cayenne.

The cayenne are green and growing well.  We haven’t had any turn red yet, but we know soon enough we’ll be drying them and searching for ways to use them.  Anyone have suggestions?

The banana peppers have already been picked and been added to salsa.  There are a handful more ready to pick this week.

And of course, the jalepenos.  We’ve picked four so far, and have a few more waiting for us to use.  These plants are small but full of fruit.

We also have other pepper, tomatillo and tomato plants but they’re not doing much yet.

And here’s the backyard today!

The tomatoes on the left were just trellised, using the Florida weave.  The arch and squash trellis should be up this week. It’ll be great when we can freely walk around again, without worrying about squishing squash vines.

I’ll try to do another tour update soon, but it may be a couple of weeks.  Life is getting busy, summer vacation is about to start and we’re already preparing food.

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Building a lasagna garden

No, we can’t cook and eat it, and we’re not growing food you’d eat in a lasagna.  Lasagna gardening is a technique of building up your raised beds, rather than digging down.

I first heard of the technique this past summer at graduate school.  One of my colleagues purchased a book on the topic, and I eagerly flipped through it. Upon returning from school, I discussed the technique with David and we decided to purchase the book and give it a try!  Our future garden was a jungle of morning glory vines with mystery lurking beneath. We knew there was at least a tire, car battery and basketball hoop buried in the vines, and we were a little fearful of the soil quality.

This is what our garden looked like last winter:

It almost had a fairy garden feeling.  David and I saw it as a wasted space for food!

We liked that the fence was covered with vines, but we figured we could grow sweet peas, string beans and scarlet runner beans up the fence, and get food out of the deal!  We toyed with growing jasmine, but as we don’t own our house, we decided that we didn’t want to purchase plants if we didn’t have to.

In December, I got an email about the Social Justice Learning Institute, at Morningside High School in Inglewood, giving away free fruit trees!  We signed up, and David went down to pick it up.  He stood in line for about 2 hours, but came home with a new apricot tree!  It was a bareroot little stick when David planted it, and he had to clear morning glories from the fence and the corner before planting.  After trying many different ways to hack away the vines, he decided that pulling a section out with one hand, and cutting it with the hedge trimmer with the other was the way to go!

After David planted the apricot stick, he donned his Ghostbusters style backpack, filled it with water, and started flooding the ants that were occupying our corner.  At this point we didn’t have a hose to reach the area (that came during my dad’s visit in March) and we had to get creative!

When the ants were adequately flooded, we planted daffodils, irises and sweet pea seeds, and continued pulling morning glories from the rest of the space.

We were all excited to see the apricot tree begin to get leaves this spring!

While the tree grew, we began to build the three lasagna beds. I took pictures of each step during the bed that I built last weekend. During our research of lasagna gardening, we learned that we should layer brown and green layers. We wanted to spend minimal amounts of labor and money, so we started to think about what we could use.

Building the beds:

First we laid down cardboard boxes or newspaper over the area.  Ideally we should have leveled it and checked that all the morning glories were out.  I did that in some places; other places I was anxious to get it done.

Over the cardboard we put grass clippings and green yard waste. We only have a small amount of grass in the front yard, so this step took about two weeks. We wanted to have a thick layer of nitrogen rich material on top of the cardboard. We hoped that none of our grass was flowering, but we weren’t that concerned with weed seeds, as this layer would be buried deep.

Then we layered a thick layer of straw. Purchasing straw in Los Angeles took a fair bit of research and question asking. We live about 15 minutes from downtown LA, and 15 minutes from the beach- not the best places to find straw.  Lucky for us, we went up to Bakersfield recently, and returned with three bales of straw!

I put only cardboard straw on the path, and under the rain barrel. The paths only contain carbon-rich layers.

And Rosie and her ball are usually in the aisles as well.  Of course, the cool driveway works for her too.

While David is out at the mulch pile, I shovel out bin 2 of our compost for the next layer.  (Notice my footwear- I’m ordering new garden clogs soon!)  The compost has been sitting in this bin since the beginning of March, and has been breaking down really nicely. Of course, egg shells, stone fruit pits and avocado skins still had a way to go, but we figured that’d break down within the lasagna.

I shoveled almost all of the compost out, noticing that each scoop was writhing with worms!  We’ve been blessed to have TONS of native worms and they will do great in the new garden bed, helping all the ingredients break down.

The nitrogen rich compost was spread onto the straw. I tried to spread it out, and tried to make sure that it was spread evenly.

Then I raked up the leaves from under the avocado tree and spread them on top of the compost.  I thought I’d need to add shredded paper in this carbon layer also, and was really surprised to find so many leaves had fallen from the trees within the past month!  These leaves have been our standard carbon addition for our compost.

The next step was nitrogen, and we used composted manure, as it’s under a dollar a bag! This is also the point where I washed Rosie’s ball, and decided that we needed to play for a little bit, until David returned home with the mulch.

The mulch pile: 

Los Angeles gives away free mulch, made from composted waste out of the green bins. On occasion we find small pieces of glass or plastic, but for the most part it’s good and it’s FREE!  We’ve been using the city mulch for a few years on our roses, and the mulch has broken down and helped loosen and enrich our clay soil.  Yes, we are a little worried about what else may be in the pile, and we haven’t used this often with our food gardens.  However, bales of soil are $7/each and this is free.  We decided in the lasagna gardens, that we would go with free.

David took this at the mulch pile.  Some days it’s bigger, some days it’s smaller.  He often runs into other gardeners and chats about projects.  On this day it was steaming as he raked into the bins, and the mulch was still warm when we put it in the bed.  David brings all the containers and pots that we have, and he fills them all.

Soon many of these pots will be filled with plants, and our mulch gathering will be slowed until fall.  All of this mulch was then used to fill the aisles and the lasagna bed.  We will need more next weekend for the side yard, roses, front yard flower bed and front yard herb garden.  Probably two more trips.  This is why we’re going with free mulch!

When I was a kid, my dad would have a dump truck full of mulch poured on the driveway, and my sister and I would shovel and spread it as part of our chores.  I get it now.
Here’s the mulched and almost finished bed.  We continued to add mulch on top of the straw, and then added one bale of potting soil onto the mulch.  This newest bed will have our winter squash, watermelons and cantaloupe that will climb the bamboo A-frame that David will build.  Today, a week after building this, we have already planted Kazakh Asian melon, Sweet Dumpling squash and Sugar Baby watermelon.

That’s it for this week!  Our tomatoes, peppers and tomatillos are flowering.  Our early planted squash is budding.  The cucumbers and beans are perking up and taking off.  I’ll update this week with pictures– there’s so much going on out there right now!