July Roll Call

About 3/4 inch

One of the two surviving bean plants found the twine and spiraled its way up a couple of feet. The other plant seems clueless about it's next move. Maybe a twist tie will educate it to the way of the twine. While the number chard plants is disappointing—only six plants from a whole pack of seeds—they provide all the we care to eat. The zucchini is predictably out of control. Periodic trimming doesn't appear to slow its growth, and flowering is good. The carrots will remain on a wait and see status for some time to come. They are all about thinning at this point. Green peppers good. Peas nibbled to stubs. Must plant something in place of those (garlic?). Onions! Looking good, should start thinning soon.

Swimming in Lettuce

A bit crowded?

I thought it would be a simple matter of thinning the seedlings over the course of a week and leaving, say, four plants in each square foot to mature and continue supplying leaves through the cool season. The lettuce had another idea—grow crazy fast, faster than we can eat the stuff. We are big salad eaters. Literally, we eat big salads. But we haven't been able to keep up.

There is still a lot of thinning to do. The leaves are packed so tightly that the lowest ones are in the dark, finally surfacing with an albino pallor that does not pique the appetite. In general, the green leaf lettuce seems limp. Characteristic of the plant? Or, of overcrowding? Delicious, nonetheless.

I was unprepared for the ordeal of washing the lettuce. Lots of careful rinsing and spinning of small batches. Larger batches suffer from too much handling, don't drain well in the spinner, and ultimately aren't fully cleaned.

The onions are looking happy and we are looking forward to picking some as scallions in a few weeks. Something is nibbling at the beans, but the peas are thriving. I'm not sure when to thin the carrots, which I over-planted. No rush.

First Thinning Makes a Dinner

Thinned and gone

Hard to believe it's only a week after posting the pic of lettuce at 23 days. I thought this would be a good time to thin out some of the plants and make room for what remained to mature. I filled a large bowl, and will have to do it three more times to finish the thinning. Maybe more.

Pretty great, though—two giant dinner salads, home grown, mostly, with a few on-hand carrots, blueberries, and leftover chicken tossed in.

Add a Trellis and Another Box

20-year-old sandbox repurposed

We decided to add a second, deeper box. Nothing to build this time; a 20-year-old sandbox I built when the kids were kids has been waiting to actually be used for something. It's "treated" wood, but any potentially harmful chemicals that once resided within leeched out of this thing a long, long time ago. I'll be planting carrots, zucchini, and hubbard squash (well, maybe) in this, along with a variety of other things.

To cut some of the cost of filling this monster, I filled the bottom few inches with topsoil and peat. I still needed another bag of vermiculite and brick of peat to fill the rest, along with manure and mushroom compost, worm castings, and our own homegrown compost.

To the original box I attached a string trellis for the peas and beans to climb. Half-inch pvc tubing, pipe-strapped to the back of the frame, finished with vertical runs of twine. The pvc seemed a bit too flexible, so I jammed a length of old bamboo cane up each tube to make it more rigid.

Lettuce At 23 Days

Two weeks since my last post, and the lettuce looks great. Onions sprouted, and are so whispy that they hardly show up in a photo. A few chard are up, but many are not, and I'll be adding more seed soon, more generously than before. I suppose that's one of those newbie lessons everyone has to go through—seeds don't all sprout.

Take peas, for example. Of the 16 seeds planted, two sprouted (sigh).

So yesterday I soaked beans and peas to give them a head start, and carpet bombed the back row of the bed. Steady rain today and some sunny days ahead.

Pea Egress

View from behind

Or chipmunk access. We shall see. I've looked on the forums to see how others handle this. Some gardeners protect the seedlings until the plant matures, at which point the rabbits don't bother with them. Another sampling of posts suggests that you fence off your area, not the frame. Definitely not ready for that. They also describe gardening against a privacy fence and attaching vertical twine to that. I have such a fence, but my frame is not positioned near it.

In any case, it seems that I should have put "cageable" veggies in the frame and trellis-lovers somewhere else—either another box with no cover, or in the ground. For now, with everything as it is, this looks like a setup no one has reported on yet, so it's worth a try.

Waiting for the peas to show; no rush on building the trellis.

Critter Cage

Not as seen on TV

I'll wait a moment for those of you who read the book, "All New Square Foot Gardening" to have a good laugh and catch you breath. All done? Okay, it's no engineering masterpiece, but it should get the job done. I think. Yeah, let's leave room for doubt where raccoons and chipmunks are in play.

The old adage says, "Measure twice, cut once." I guess with me twice is not enough, and it was back to Loews for another $10 roll of chicken wire after cutting one strip too long, which left not enough to cut the last two strips. I'll add a simple hook-latch setup from whatever is on hand to secure the cage in place.

The first sprouts showed on the 28th, a little of everything except the peas, which are more deeply planted.