Trellised melons, squashes and our first okra

With summer in full swing, we’ve noticed more growth and vibrancy in the garden.  Our neighbors have a pool on one of the adjacent walls, and we often hear children splashing and smell grilled meat in the air.  It’s quite odd to be working in the garden and hear the sounds of play in the city.

The vines on the back fence are growing well, but they still aren’t cutting it with covering the fence.  I just transplanted two more scarlet runner beans, and may toss in a few more pole beans.  The morning glories did a much more through job of hiding our neighbors from us.

When I was next to the fence, I looked at the section in between the garage and the fence, and found Mardi sleeping away!  I ran inside to get David (and the camera) and he still didn’t wake, as we were quiet.  Once us humans continued to poke around the garden, the needy cat awoke and started meowing at us.

The two squash trellises are holding up. The melons and squashes are each climbing on their own. On the left is buttercup (big leaves), Kazakh melon (small) and Malali watermelon (on cattle panel by wall, but hard to see).  There’s a sugar baby watermelon on the far right side of the A-frame, by the window.  Next year we’ll move the A-frame; I plan to put a window box under the window.

The right hand side is mostly part of the Kazakh melon!  It’s quite a climber, has three large melons and tons of small ones.  I’ve been making sure the plant gets plenty of water, as I think it suffered a little from our vacation.

The Kazakh melon has a visitor.

The Sugar Baby watermelons are starting!  There are a few of them, and each has hooked itself over the wire, preparing to grow on the trellis. These little guys are so fuzzy; it was a little surprising for me.

We’re getting more buttercup squash, and have two that are nearly ready to pick.

I planted a small parsley patch (and two spinach plants) under the squash A-frame.  We hope that it is shady enough to grow these without them bolting.

Rosie, as always, enjoys hanging out in the garden with us.  She finds the best shady spots to relax.  I think she’s just as happy with the new arch as we are!

Our delicata squash has five new squashes coming!  Five!  That’s great, especially because these are the only ones on the entire plant.

Our string beans are sad.  I planted new ones in the nursery and plan to transplant them in.  Gardening in a new bed, I think this area dried out too quickly after watering.  When the new ones are ready to transplant, I’d like to dig in compost and worm castings to prepare the area. I planted two salvia here to spruce up the area in the meantime.

Our tomatillos are starting to take over. The ant/aphid covered borage hasn’t flowered in a long time. It looks like it has buds forming.  Near the wall are three tomato plants that David staked using the Florida weave technique, more or less.  We’re happy with the support technique and may use it more in future.

We picked our first two okra!  I’m hoping that it stays hot enough for them.  I just planted a Santa Fe Grande pepper behind them.

There will be more cucumbers in a couple of days.  Looks like I’ll be making pickles again this weekend, and have just selected a fermented pickle recipe.  It’s almost time to play with lacto-fermentation!

This week I’m hoping to get the last of the transplanting done (for now) and play in the kitchen a little.  I’m at a training for work during the day, so I don’t have hours to spend canning.  Although, David says he’ll make the peach-jalepeno jam that still needs to get made.

The peaches are telling us it’s time!

 

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Beginning of July tour

The past week has been spent more in the kitchen than outside.  Finally the heat wave broke and it’s back to the 70s outside!  David and I took advantage of the cool weather and spent a couple hours outside tidying up and working on projects.  I figured it was time to show what’s been happening in the garden.

The roses are in full bloom again.  I’ve been searching for ways to preserve the blooms and am thinking about everything from rose water to rose petal preserves.  I found a decadent recipe for coconut rose petal semifreddo, which may be an option also.  I’d love suggestions if you’ve done anything with your roses before.

Notice the tomatos in the raised bed are getting larger.  David and I staked them up the other day and we can finally see the fruits.  I also spotted two finches taking advantage of the perch.

This is Rosie’s obedient look. She just is wandering around the yard, hasn’t found her ball yet and may be getting a little impatient with my photographs.  I asked her to stop by our Abe Lincoln and Purple Prudence tomatoes.  They are both (finally) just starting to flower.  Notice the stunted peppers on the right.  I believe they are serrano or poblano and hope that they get the message to grow soon.

Behind Rosie is the mystery garden area.  There are now two mystery tomato plants as well as prolific nasturtiums.  These nasturtiums are the current source of seed pods for our pickled nasturtium pods.

We decided that it was time to fertilize the potted plants and cucumber vines.  I recently watched a video about fertilizing cucumbers and noticed that mine were starting to get a little yellow around the edges, as he described.  So, I grabbed a box of Epsom salt from under the fish tank (I bought it for the fish water years ago, and never used it) and the organic fertilizer from the garage.  I mixed the two together, applied the side dressing and then watered.  Hopefully the little guys will enjoy it!

The front herb bed finally got cleaned up.  There’s still more to do, but I started with cutting back the bulbs.  The chasmanthe had become too large for the space, so in addition to cutting them back, I dug out a couple dozen corms to bring to school this fall.

I felt like I was pulling potatoes while digging them out.  Some were large, others were tiny.  Often there was a large one with little ones clinging to it.  We will probably pull out a few more to make space in the front of the house.  I didn’t want to take out too many, because it was so wonderful watching the hummingbirds flit by this winter.

I finally pulled out our giant coriander/ cilantro plant.  We had planned to harvest the coriander, possibly in it’s green stage, but ran out of time.  At this point it is full of powdery mildew, and I’m not sure that we should harvest the coriander.  I brought the plant back to our compost bin, because it was full of lady bugs. Some of them were even spotted making new ladybugs.

Our garden in the back, near the compost bin, is full of aphids.

The borage has had ants and aphids living on it for a month now.  David and I decided to sprinkle cornmeal around the plant, hearing that it could help get rid of the ants.  It seems to have worked well so far; we have noticed significantly less ants, more ladybugs and other insects.  There are still ants, as you can see by the is two poking the ladybug in this picture. The ladybugs seem much more brazen these days.  David told me that he spotted a ladybug being chased by ants while carrying an aphid in it’s mouth!

The tomato next to the borage has it’s own ant situation.  When we returned home from vacation, we noticed that our tomato plants in the back have ants frozen in place along the stems.  They are dead and it’s an odd and gruesome scene.  We have no idea how it happened and would love to know any theories that you have.

While I played with the bulbs in the front yard, David raked up avocado leaves and added them to the side yard.  This is the last stretch of dirt with nothing in it.  We recently mulched it and then added grass clippings.  David put down avocado leaves.  Next we’ll spread a few bags of composted manure, then mulch it again.  This area has to be hand watered, and the hose is not convenient.  Our succulent pots have been hanging out here recently.  This fall we plan to plant sages, lavenders and possibly native grasses.

The backyard area is starting to fill in.  We’ve been needing to finish the A-frame squash support, but the squashes don’t seem to notice that we are slow.

The cucumbers and delicata are attempting to climb the bamboo tripod (front left).  I snagged an unplanted little leaf cucumber from the school greenhouse the other day, and planted it to fill in the front of the support.  Two baby delicata squash were flowering when I took this picture. Behind the cucumbers are the overzealous tomatillos.  We’ve been checking their paper husks, and we’re hoping to start making salsa verde in a couple of weeks.

The buttercup and red kuri squash climbing up the cattle panel trellis are doing great!  We’ve started to guide the squash back down the same side that it came up.  The supported squashes are maturing and the small arbor provides shade for us to rest on a hot day.

This is taken from underneath the trellis where a new red kuri squash is growing.  It seems to be supported by the fence and we’re debating giving it a little hammock.  While watching our squashes grow, I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell when they’re ready to pick.  A lot of what I read is not helpful for Southern California gardening.  For example, I learned that I should harvest winter squash before the first frost, but it’s ok to leave it on the vine if it’s not a heavy frost.  We don’t get frost.  Ever.  (Year-round gardening is wonderful, and our bugs are huge to prove it.)

So from what I gather, I look for mature fruit color and size, as well as the stem starts to turn brown and my fingernail can not pierce the skin.  I’d love confirmation on this from the people who know.

Our sweet dumpling squashes are just starting to grow.  I put straw underneath them, and now I notice they are covered in tiny black bugs.  Looking at the pictures, I notice that the straw is as well.  This is new to me. I wonder if it’s from the straw and hope that the squash are healthy.

We’re watching our Pinnacle spaghetti squash and I wonder why I thought smaller squash was better to order than larger squash.  The compact vines have three fruits right now, and we’re hoping for more.  The plants are getting a bit hidden by their prolific neighbor, a buttercup vine, and we’re working on fixing that problem.  The A-frame trellis got a bit held up, and we’re rethinking the support system.  I’ll write more on that as we resolve the issue.

Our Kazakh melons are taking over.  There are three fruits right now, the largest is about the size of  a softball.

The vine, however, has taken up four feet of the 8×8 bed.  You can see the thai basil poking through by the bamboo pole.  This melon has many branches, and I’m trying to get them to grow up the fence, or up the start of the trellis, but they are resistant to being tamed and keep making more vines.  This variety is supposed to be a good climber, so perhaps if I give it more attention, it will climb.  We’ll see how the melons taste before deciding if we’ll grow this again next year.  Our space is small, and we both really want squash but this year is more of a test year for the vines. Most likely we will still save seeds from this rare heirloom, even if we don’t plan to grow it ourselves.

We have a chocolate sunflower! Besides sounding delicious, we picked these because of their size.  We are enjoying it in the garden while it’s flowering.

Our yarrow has opened and the color is so bright, it’s almost florescent.  We made our first three cuts of apricot branches to allow this plant to grow up straight.  The yarrow had been reaching into the garden aisle because there was a tree branch over it’s head.  We haven’t wanted to cut our baby apricot tree, but it was time to take a few snips and help it branch out.

While we were in Florida, we picked up a friend to keep the tree and yarrow company.  This is our new giant fly, and it will hopefully protect our garden from bad bugs and welcome in the good.

We planted our sweet peas too late.  All spring we watched them climb up the fence.  Currently they are covered in powdery mildew and will be torn out this week.  So now they start to flower.  And they are beautiful.  Each of the two blooming flowers is beautiful.

Further down the fence, our yard long beans are starting to grow beans.  They are filling in the fence, flowering and climbing away.  David loves long beans.  I haven’t quite acquired a taste for them.  I’m excited to see what he does with them.

We’re also starting to get scarlet runner beans.  This is our first year with these plants and I’m in love with their luscious red flowers.  I’ve found a few recipes for them, and think we’re going to let the seed pods dry on the vine.  I must chat with people who grow these regularly to find out what they do with the beans and how they enjoy eating them.

Our zucchini that fell over during vacation is back up and fruiting!  We look forward to grilled zucchini and more zucchini pickles.

And finally, we have our first eggplant flower.  This is an oriental eggplant (unknown variety).  We are also growing rosa bianca, hansel, gretel and fairy tale.  We had grand plans for perfecting our baba ganoush this summer.  We were hoping to have so much eggplant that it was coming out of our ears.

We are thankful to have a flower.

David and I also decided that we haven’t been watering our garden enough.  We read an article that suggested when you water, dig in the soil a couple of inches down to see how deep the water percolates through the top layer. It flat out said that soil lies.  The next time we watered, with a sprinkler for 15 minutes, I barely scratched the surface and saw that it was bone dry underneath.  Having a new garden, our soil is still breaking down and we are learning what it needs.  As we don’t get rain in the summer, we must learn how to properly water our garden.

Today it is cool and overcast.  Often the marine layer burns off and it warms up.  I plan to get the tomatoes in the dehydrator started soon, and start some seeds in our nursery.  It’s time to replant green beans and plant another crop of lettuce, carrots and radishes.  Hope you’re enjoying your long weekend!

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.

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!