Showing posts with label Pond. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pond. Show all posts

Sunday, February 12, 2012

The Waiting Game

All the hard work is done. I prepped the beds with worm and chicken poo. Tilled last years mulch under. Cleared out all the old dead plants from last year and thew them into the new hot compost pile. And laid the seed for my winter crop. Planted about 15 different patches of vegetables altogether.

It's been awfully warm around these parts, we have not had a cold or wet winter at all. Although my water bill does not appreciate this, it also makes for rapid seed germination. It's the waiting game at this point.

Ready. Set. Grow.

Most of the seed packs I used for Winter, not including potatoes, onions, peas and beans
Swiss chard
Pea trellis
Pea sprouts
Baby Carrots
Kohlrabi
Stella Bell the Duck
Radish
New gardening station/germination sun table for this warm winter. Germinating tomatoes for March transplant. 
Artichoke
New compost hot pile this year: All food scraps but meat and dairy, Stella's straw soiled bedding and grass clippings
Photobomb.
Side bed, arugula seedlings at base
Back yard raised bed
5 Elephant garlic, used the ones I grew last year to propagate new ones for this season
Red Onions, 60 of 'em
Good 'ol Yukon Potatoes 

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Filling in the holes

The patches of dirt left bare between the seedlings are beginning to fill with new life as the baby plants stretch out their new arms to compete for the sunlight. Watching a garden grow is such a rewarding experience for me. Every morning, I walk down my back steps, let Stella out, and examine all the growth that took place the night before. Then I go to work. When I return, I water the plants that look stressed from the heat of that day using Stella's pond water and examine the changes that took place that day. Maybe over the course of the week visitors may see some differences, but to the gardener, we see them every day and night. 


 The Zucchini plant is healthy and has gotten huge. I had to take down the little white picket fence aka "duck barrier" in front of the plant because this huge Zucchini grew right into it. Technically, you should not let your zucchinis get this big because they become fibrous and woody, less juicy and not as sweet, however, we are going to let this one go, and go, and go, and see how big we can get it. We might make zucchini bread, or a roasted zucchini boat out of it. We have plenty of others that we will be eating. It was a good thing I tool the picket fence down when I did, because it's been growing an inch a day.

The zucchini leaves get bigger every day
Remember the first pics of it??
Watermelon vines
Flowering cucumbers and summer squash
 I don't really know what is going on with the leaf at the very bottom on the pic below. It seems to be a healthy green leaf, but the veins are turning white. To me this indicates a deficiency, a disease, or a pest. I'm going to do more research to find out what it is. We did just have a heat wave, so I'm hoping it was just the result of extreme heat, but it might be low in iron or something.

Cucumbers, one with white vein (bottom)
Kohlrabi
There are a lot of advantages to successive planting. Unfortunately I do not do it as often as I would like. The nice thing about successive gardening or planting, is that not all your crops mature at the same time. It is the best way for a home gardener to have a continual harvest, its just hard to remember. I also have a hard time hold back on seeding my entire plot!

Below is a pic of my radish crop that I am successively seeding. I planted some 1 month ago, and the others 1 week ago, and I still have some fallow dirt.
Successive planting of radishes 
My worm bin, started last year sometime
My little red friends
More worms in the bin
My pumpkin patch 
Stella loving her new pond, she gets in herself 
Midget melon flowering, can't wait for this one
Huge tomato vines
Like, huge, like probably 5 feet
GARLIC!!!
Laura's red onions
Bolting lettuce. I need to eat this stuff.
Peas Starting to climb

Monday, July 4, 2011

4th of July on the Urban Farm

It's been really hot in the Bay Area the last couple of weeks, with the exception of a cloud burst system which made a cameo mid-last-week. When I say hot for the Bay Area, that is anything above 80 degrees. This is hot even for plants and can damage them sometimes if it gets too hot, especially if you are not diligent with watering. I seem to have an issue with "blossom drop", a common symptom of the plant overheating in the summertime. Simply put, the blossoms drop off at the elbow, instead of turning into tomatoes. Unfortunately, there is not a whole hell of a lot you can do about this since we can't control the weather.

My mulch has been proving helpful in retaining soil moisture, although I haven't been able to mulch the rest of my seedlings, because they aren't big enough. As a result,  some of them are drying out because they are so tiny and fragile, only the strong shall survive.

Here are a few pictures of the property and how far it's come since we've moved in. We finally sank Stella's pond into the ground and got a filter, fountain and some pond plants. The best part of my day is looking out our kitchen window to watch our duck get in her new pond and take a nice afternoon bird bath.

Side yard
Stella pond+side yard+garage+house
Stella's duck house, and today's egg
4th of July Stella egg
My beautiful sunflower that a squirrel planted for me
Yummy Strawberries coming into season
Pond and duck house
Side yard beds
Wilted radishes in the afternoon sun, they come back to life every night.
Daryl brought home the kiddie pool, I didn't complain.