I finally gave up on the cantaloupe seeds that I planted, so I purchased some starts from the nursery. I added cantaloupe, watermelon, honeydew melon and grapes. I’m not sure which kind of grapes (I will have to go check the tabs). I asked for all seedless eating grapes.
Happy planting
After 2 years of talking about it, we’re finally to the point where we can plant fruit trees. Unfortunately, it seems you’re not allowed to buy fruit trees that are big enough to actually produce any fruit. From the looks of these twigs, I’d say we have another 4 or 5 years before we see any fruit.
The Scene
This is a shot of the side of the house where the fruit twigs will attempt to grow large enough to produce fruit. I think we’re going to learn patience from this.
Lemon Elberta Peach
Apricot
White Nectarine
Thornless Blackberry
It’s been almost exactly 3 weeks since we started the planting process. I was starting to get a bit anxious that it had been this long without any signs of life from so many areas, but then we had a really good rain storm the last couple days… and almost everything has sprouted now. There are still a few notable exceptions, and most the things that we transplanted from starts inside the house have now died, so we’ll have to replant those, or buy starts from the store. For now, we only have 1 zucchini plant and 1 yellow squash plant from the 10 we had (5 each). Charmaine picked up new bell peppers and Brussels sprouts starts at the store and we’ve planted those in place of the ones we grew inside that died.
Garden Area – June 5, 2008
The garden area is finally starting to look like it’s being used for something.
Bell Peppers – June 5, 2008
We gave up on the bell peppers and Brussels sprouts starts that we transplanted. Charmaine picked up these new bell peppers starts from the store and planted them this week.
Corn Row 1 – June 5, 2008
We now have 4 rows of corn planted, with two rows sprouted. This first row is looking really good… almost as good as the weeds behind it!
Pole Beans – June 5, 2008
The pole beans aren’t doing as well as I would like. They’ve been slow starting and I question if some of them will ever pop up. And one of these days I’m going to have to build something for them to climb.
Cucumbers – June 5, 2008
We’re going to have a lot of cucumbers this year. We have this large row of them, plus a second row of Lemon Cucumbers, plus 3 hills of cucumbers up by the house. We didn’t plan to have so many, but the pack of seeds went a long way!
Beets – June 5, 2008
I haven’t had beets since we grew them when I was growing up. I wasn’t particularly fond of them back then, but I’m giving them another chance.
Turnips – June 5, 2008
As far as I remember, I haven’t ever had turnips. With this many of them growing, I really hope I like them.
Squash Hill – June 5, 2008
We decided to plant squash and pumpkin plants all over the yard. Most of these places don’t have the highest quality soil. Here’s one such area. I’m amazed that the squash was able to sprout through this hill that has basically turned into cement.
Pumpkin Hills – June 5, 2008
Last week I was getting worried that all the things we planted outside of our vegetable garden area (the good soil) were not going to grow. But we had a really nice storm this week and now we have sprouts coming out of all 7 pumpkin hills in this shot. We’re going to have a lot of pumpkins this year.
Jack-Be-Little Hills – June 5, 2008
Here is another non-traditional area to be planting vegetables, where we’re growing Jack-Be-Little pumpkins. They are supposed to be these super tiny (useless in my mind) pumpkins. They’ve sprouted now, so we’ll see how it goes.
I bought a few raspberries starts today. I found them on a on craigs list while looking for a wetsuit (still don’t have a wetsuit). We planted a set just off of the patio area and a few on the edge of the garden. Very excited. Only a few more things left to plant.
Happy Planting
We started talking about our summer 2008 garden even before last year’s growing season had come to an end. We didn’t get a garden going until the middle of July last year. That’s not the optimal time to plant a garden, especially in Utah. We didn’t have a lot of choice, though, because we had just moved in (the previous fall) and hadn’t connected to our city’s pressurized irrigation system yet. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out as many vegetables as we are used to growing.
This year will be much better. We are more serious this time. And we’ve started earlier in the season. We probably would have started even earlier, but we’ve had an unusually cold and snowy Spring.
Our backyard has a large area setup as a vegetable garden. It also has a lot of area designed for trees, shrubs, and flowers. We have most of the trees planted in those areas, but not much else… which means there will be weeds. To combat the weeds in the non-vegetable garden areas, we have decided to grow squash and pumpkins. I think that means we’ll end up with roughly 2000 square feet of vegetable garden this Summer.
A few weeks ago, Charmaine started several plants inside the house. She had planters with tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, yellow squash, and green bell peppers. Around the same time she started pulling weeds from the major garden areas. Our next-door neighbor saw her out there slaving away and brought his garden tiller over and cleaned up the garden in no time. But that was only about half the area we intended to plant this year. He couldn’t run the tiller through the flower garden areas, because of the trees. So Charmaine went back to pulling weeds.
After a few weeks, she has most of it cleared and we’ve started planting. We kept a log to keep track of what was planted, when it was planted, and where it was planted.
My friend Matt has a fantastic vegetable garden every year. He gave me a hint about planting rows of corn at different time intervals, so the corn would be ready at different time intervals in the fall. We planted 2 rows of corn the first week, and 2 more rows 2 weeks later. If we had been smarter, we would have generalized that idea to planting other crops, such as carrots, onions, radishes, etc. Maybe next year.
Here’s what we have in the ground so far:
Designated Vegetable Garden area:
– corn (4 rows at the back of the designated vegetable garden area)
– cucumbers (1 row)
– lemon cucumbers (1 row)
– carrots (1 row)
– radishes (0.25 row)
– leeks (0.75 row)
– beets (1 row)
– turnips (1 row)
– pole beans (3 rows)
– bush beans (1 row)
– onions (1 row)
– Brussels sprouts (0.5 row)
– green bell peppers (1 row)
– tomatoes (3 rows)
Flower Garden areas:
– zucchini (1 plant)
– yellow squash (1 plant)
– butternut squash (3 hills)
– spaghetti squash (3 hills)
– hubbard squash (3 hills)
– Burgess squash (3 hills)
– big max pumpkins (2 hills)
– Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins (2 hills)
– Jack of all trades pumpkins (3 hills)
– cantaloupe (6 plants)
– Jack Be Little pumpkins (3 hills)
– Sppoktacular pumpkins (3 hills)
– Giant pumpkins (2 hills)
– cucumbers (3 hills)
I’m hoping we get around to planting:
– acorn squash
– peas
– strawberries
– lettuce
– spinach
– jalapeno peppers
– potatoes
– sage
– chives
– basil
– rosemary
– grapes
– raspberries
– fruit trees (peach, apricot, something else)
I need to start construction on cages for tomatoes, beans, and peas. One of the biggest obstacles has been the wind. When Charmaine transplanted her starts to the garden, almost all of them were destroyed by a windstorm that night.