Thursday, May 26, 2011

The Garden Grows, the Weeds Grow Faster!

unfortunate garden streams

peas and onions, oh my!

Wow, it seems like in the blink of an eye we went from winter to weeds that are 3 feet tall!  Overall it has been a bit damp this spring with the garden being pretty swampy.  We did manage to get our potatoes in - during a stretch of a few days of sunny dry weather and they are beginning to show themselves. Other things went in the raised beds.  These includes copious amounts of onions and shallots.  I broke a companion planting rule and planted my peas with my onions.  I am tired of critters always eating the peas down - so thought perhaps the onions might help deter and figured it was worth the risk. So far the peas look like they don't mind being with the onions.  In fact, it is time to give them something to climb on.

broccoli, cabbage and spinach

We also put in some cabbage, broccoli, spinach, kohlrabi, beets, carrots, turnips rather early using our hoops and agribon.  Now that it has warmed up they are really taking off.  So far we elected to not  put in too many fragile things - only a few tomatoes so far.  And this year we are trying out Karl's new "modular" tomato cage design made from PVC pipe and tacked in the ground with a little rebar (Did I mention we get what seems like gale force wind around here?) He's also designed some for pole beans, too.  Which I'll show in a later post.

Karl's PVC tomato cages
The rest of the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, squash and herbs are still in the greenhouse waiting both for our last frost date to pass (June 1 for us) and also for the garden to dry up a bit.  The good part about the damp weather is that most of the fruit trees have beautiful blooms and all the perennials are looking terrific (and all the weeds are, too).  Hopefully we won't get a late frost (like we have the last couple of years) and these blossoms will give us some fruit this year!
veggies in the greenhouse
 pink crabapple blooming