how does your garden grow may 17, 2011

Come here on Tuesdays to read about my vegetable garden project and share yours.

My Garden
With all the rain this spring, our yard is so lush and green. I love looking at the tomato plants I found in New Jersey which look fabulous compared to the ones I bought at Home Depot. I have to pick lettuce and spinach every few days to keep the plants from bolting too soon. We harvested our first broccoli head on Sunday, and I’ll need to harvest 2 more tomorrow. Unfortunately, the cabbage worms have found the broccoli. The kids and I had fun hunting for worms and killing them in soapy water.

On the left is a view of our main vegetable garden. My husband is installing one of two bean fences. Originally, I had planned on growing snap peas and bush beans in the same bed, but my husband insisted on growing pole beans, Blue Lake to be exact. Unfortunately, I was only able to find organic Kentucky pole beans at Home Depot.

Thanks to a generous neighbor, I was able to mulch our raspberry bed in the back this weekend.

We also mulched the 2 new potato beds next to the raspberry bed. We’ve been using this area as temporary vegetable beds, but never set up permanent raised beds. Maybe this fall, we’ll finally set the beds up. The potatoes in these beds were volunteers from last year that I missed when I was digging up last year’s crop in the fall. I had enough volunteers for 8 plants per bed. I also threw in a few pumpkin seeds next to the wall, along with some sunflower seeds. There’s a few lettuce plants and some bean seeds at the front of the 2 beds.

The potatoes growing in the 3 buckets are doing very well. I added about 4 to 5 inches of compost to the buckets, and the next day, the potatoes were already poking through the new layer. I need to add compost to the potato beds in our main garden, and that job has to wait on the rain this week.

We’re trying a new way of trellising beans this year. In the past, we’ve used concrete reinforcing wire to form an A frame support. However, in our garden, that takes up a lot of space. My husband took some leftover lumber from a project, and used twine to create a support. I’m not sure how strong this will be, especially if we have a lot of wind.

Share your vegetable garden progress in the comments!

Also part of the Homestead Barn Hop, Frugal Gardening 101, and Garden Tuesday.