Mid-August Update - Main Garden Beds

This past month was about mulching.  I finally finished doing the paths in area #1 and the front of the house and now I have to move on to the paths in area #2, which I hope to finish this weekend.  But even with lugging all that mulch around, I was able to get some work done in the beds and start some fall crops.

I’ve picked all of the main broccoli heads and am now relying solely on side shoots.  Most are fairly tiny, but there is one plant that is producing huge ones:

Broccoli Side Shoots
 

The baby choy that I sowed a couple of months ago has sized up & isn't much of a baby anymore.  I'll have to look back in my notes as I'm not quite sure which variety it is at the moment.  I'll be harvesting these any day now for a stir fry:

Baby Choy
 

The Just Right turnips are a 60 day salad variety & they are getting to a harvestable size now.

Just Right Turnips
 

The Contender bean plants started to yellow a few weeks ago & their production was dismal this year - I think they may have had blight:

Yellowing Bean Plants
 

I pulled them a while back and now the only bush bean variety left is the Oceanis, which is not showing any signs of disease, even though they were right beside the Contenders:

Oceanis
I'm leaving these to mature so that I can harvest the seed for next year
 

Oceanis was a very sporadic germinator - I think I must have sown 20+ seeds and only ended up with 3 or 4 plants.  The beans themselves look really nice - they are a fillet variety, which I've never tried before.  I decided to let the few beans I did get go to seed - maybe I'll have better luck growing these next year when I use my own fresh seed.

The rest of this bed held the spring planted favas & sugar snap peas, both of which were pulled a while ago, so I decided to sow the fall lettuce here.  I scattered seed for 5 different varieties in strips on half of the bed.  I'm crossing my fingers that they germinate, but with this recent hot spell, I'm having my doubts.  I'm also going to pre-germinate some spinach seed to see if I can get some fall spinach happening.

The cucumbers are not doing that well this year – dribs and drabs is all I’m getting.   I once again made the mistake of spacing the plants too closely as I had more seedlings than space - one of these days I'll learn.

Cucumbers
 

So far, the most prolific variety has been the lemon cucumbers.  Funny how things change from year to year - least year, the Garden Sweets were the star performers.

Lemon cucumber vines have already
reached the top of the trellis
 

The Suyo Long plants at the end of the row were too shaded by the other cucumber vines and they barely grew at all, so I ripped them out.  The rest of the vines are yellowing/browning – after examining the leaves & comparing them to photos on the internet, I'm pretty sure what I have is a case of downy mildew.

Suspected downy mildew on cucumber leaf
 

The 1 month old Romanesco is now fairly large, all things considered:

Romanesco Zucchini - 4 weeks
 

It also has some babies on it, so that is especially promising:

Baby Romanesco
 

The late sown tromboncino is vining:


Tromboncino
 

As I recall, the tromboncino was a late producer last year and with this years late planting, I’m not sure if it will end up giving me a harvest or not.

The carrots are doing well, but I do need to get out there and do some thinning:

Carrot Bed
 

Next up are the tomatoes.  These have been doing ok, although not fabulously like last year, even though the weather this year has been prime tomato growing weather.  I haven’t been feeding them as often as I should have and this may account for the slower growth compared with last year – the garden has been in a constant state of catch up practically all season, so I have let some things slide.

Tomato Beds
 

As with many other aspects of the garden, I’m still trying to find my “way” when it comes to how early to start the tomatoes and the best configuration for the beds.  This year, I placed 3 rows in each bed with plants 24” apart within each row – and I don’t like this layout at all - much too crowded.   I prefer what I did last year better, where I had 2 rows in each bed with a shorter crop on the south side of the bed.

Amish Paste

Bloody Butcher



Brandywine



Chadwick Cherry



Costoluto Genovese



Juliet



Mountain Magic



Opalka



Speckled Roman



Sungold



Taxi



Yellow Pear

These photos were taken a few days ago and since then, I have seen ripening tomatoes on almost every variety except for Brandywine & Opalka.

The tomato bed is not without it's bad news, however.  I have early blight running through the beds especially on the Brandywine, Yellow Pear and Costoluto Genovese.

Early Blight on Tomatoes
 

I also have several cases of septeria leaf spot.  Once again, the Yellow pear is infected, so perhaps that variety is just more susceptible to it which is why I’m getting it again this year, even though I purchased new seed from a different source.  And the Speckled Roman, which is right behind the Yellow Pear, is afflicted as is the Costoluto Genovese, which is actually the worst of the lot.

Septoria Leaf Spot on Costoluto Genovese
 

More devastating still is that I've noticed late blight lesions on the Costuluto Genovese stems.  This variety wasn't that bad in terms of disease last year - pretty much average - but this time round, it seems to be a disease magnet.  So far, it seems to be the only variety with late blight & I've picked off all of the tomatoes that have started to change colour so that they can ripen off the plant.

I’ve been cutting off the yellowing leaves and I gave the plants a good feeding of fish emulsion.  I’m hoping the plants stay ahead of the blight, but since it's still so early & the plants are not as vigorous as they were last year, I'm not overly optimistic that they will last into mid-September.

The 3 allium beds were empty except for the perennial bunching onions & four leeks in bed #6.

Jolant Leeks

Perennial Bunching Onions
 

Both the Nebuka & Evergreen Hardy perennial bunching onions are looking more promising than the He-Shi-Ko variety I grew last year, which were a good 1” or more thick before they even thought about multiplying (I prefer bunching onions that are on the smaller side).  Both of the current varieties are splitting into 1/2" thick or smaller stems, which is good, but the rate of multiplication is fairly slow.  There are many single stems, a few doubles and only one or two triples.

Nebuka's dividing
 

This bed had some space on either side of the bunching onions which I decided to make use of.  I sowed cilantro in a 2x4 spot as I really need to replenish my stock in the freezer.  The other, larger 4x4 spot will be sown with overwintering spinach in early September.

This past weekend, I planted up the other empty allium beds.  I had a couple of cell packs with transplants (Komatsuna & Joi Choi), but most of the beds were direct seeded with rapini, baby choy, kohlrabi, turnips, tatsoi, mizuna and radishes.  I haven’t grown most of these as a fall crop before, so I’m considering this a bit of a test to see how my timing is for each variety.

Some of the recently seeded brassicas
have already come up, such as these radishes
 

Speaking of transplants, I had quite a few issues starting the lettuce and Swiss chard this summer – I’m actually thinking that my seeding mix or soil tray may be infected with the damping off fungus as germination was fairly poor and I also had a few of the Swiss chard seedlings keel over shortly after they emerged.  I had a similar problem with the Bright Lights chard in the spring, but no issues with the lettuce – this time round, however, the lettuce seeds sprouted, but then they just as quickly died.

I transplanted the Bright Lights seedlings that survived into the vacant spring spinach spot.

Bright Lights Seedling
 

Right beside them are the spring planted Peppermint & Fordhook Giant chard plants, which I had recently harvested from:

Peppermint & Fordhook Giant Chard  



I ended up with only a handful of lettuce seedlings:



Lettuce Seedlings
Why does my camera always want to focus on the drip rather than the plants?



Not exactly impressive, are they.  On a positive note, my lettuce seedlings often look pretty pathetic when I first transplant them but they usually recover quickly and end up giving me a great harvest.

I normally do a big cleaning & disinfecting of all my trays, pots, etc. in the fall & purchase fresh seeding mix in the spring to help with damping off (I had BIG issues with it a few years ago).  If I purchased new seeding mix now, by the time spring rolled around it would be “old”, so I didn’t want to do that just for a few cell packs of seedlings.

I definitely needed more lettuce than those few transplants which is why I decided direct seed some in the fava/pea bed using the scatter method.  I prefer to harvest larger leaves of lettuce rather than baby leaves, so this method is a bit of a pain for me as it requires a lot of thinning, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The weather hasn't exactly been conducive to cool weather crops this week with highs in the 90's, but things are supposed to get back to seasonal as of today.  Hopefully I'll see some germination from the lettuce patch soon.

My shady bed # 8 has been stagnant for the last couple of months, so last week I finally decided to rip everything out & salvage what I could of the veg in that bed.

Bed #8 - Beyond pitiful
 

My original plan had been to direct seed the fall lettuce in this bed.  However, after pulling up the brassicas, I struggled to aerate the bed as it was matted with thin, fiborous roots.  I had noticed this last year as well when I dug up the carrots & had just assumed that the roots were from the carrots.

This time round I noticed that the ENTIRE bed was covered in these roots and it was extremely dry, even with all the rain we had recently.  Every other bed I worked at that time was still moist an inch or so down.  And that’s when I realized that my issue with the bed may not be solely about light.  I have a feeling that these roots are from the same renegade willow tree that is shading the bed - it is sucking all of the nutrients and moisture out of that bed.

My plants strong growth in the spring followed by absolutely no growth during the summer all of a sudden makes complete sense.  The spring rains & the amendments I worked into the soil before transplanting gave my seedlings that initial burst of growth.  But within a couple of months, the willow would take over and suck that bed dry of both moisture and nutrients and my plants would languish.

The tangle of roots is so bad that it has made the bed essentially unusable:

Bed #8 - Nothing but clumps of matted roots from end to end
 

That tree has got to go; I’m hoping that we can get to it this weekend.  Unfortunately, the bed is a write off for the rest of the season.  Once the tree is gone, I'll turn over the soil & mulch it heavily - if I'm lucky, a good chunk of those roots will rot away by next year.

And lastly, a bit of good news - it looks like both my red and yellow spring planted raspberries are going to give me a tiny bit of fruit this year:

Heritage Raspberries
 

I won't celebrate just yet, though - they still have a ways to go & I'm probably not the only one eying them.

Till next time...