Howdy, gardeners! It’s been a minute since I posted, but my PNW garden is just getting up to steam!

My first cukes came in, I’m growing ‘Spacemaster 80’ slicing cucumbers and ‘Homemade Pickle’ cucumbers, for obvious reasons. Cukes I’ve just made my first batch of pickles using a Claussen knock off recipe from the forbidden site, so we’ll see how that goes. It just went in the fridge for cooling, so I get to try it in just a couple days!

I’ve started researching canning, as I want to can peppers, tomatoes, beans, and maybe corn - should the Corn Experiment prove bountiful. Learning how to Not Get Botulism seems pretty important!

My tomatoes are doing well - I’m growing Roma, Gardener’s Delight, and Oxheart. I’m endlessly fascinated by how the Roma tomatoes look like they do on the label of the can :) Those are in containers. The other two varieties are trellised and are going nuts!

Gardener’s Delight: Tomatoes

Oxheart: Tomatoes

Gardener’s Delight Closeup: Tomatoes

Oxheart Closeup: Tomatoes

All the peppers are finally flowering. I’m growing Serrano, Jalapeno, Poblano, Shishito, and Ground Cherries. They are all growing rather well except a couple of the Shishito’s in the raised bed seem quite small.

In my Three Sisters Garden, corn is growing fairly well, it seems half of them are ‘normal’ size and the other half are still half height, so I may have packed it too tight. I’m growing Blue FM1 pole beans, which have just flowered and are doing well, as well as pumpkins, of which two have grown so far, still green.

Corn Boys

In the Squash Garden, I’ve got crazy vines from my Kubota squash, with 4 or so gourds growing. I planted beans here but they never really took off.

Squash Garden

I also built a ‘Wildlife Garden’ this year. It’s open to the public (animal visitors) and I don’t do any pest control here. It’s also gone NUTS! I have Blue Hubbard squash growing a mile a minute with 8 gourds on the vine, scarlet runner beans reaching for the sky, some ridiculous sunflowers pushing their way up, chamomile, clover, feverfew, boy it’s wild! It’s fun to look at.

Wildlife Garden

For salad greens we’ve had the ‘Tower of Power’ going for a few months - it was a strawberry planter that I stuck a bunch of transplanted lettuce/chard/kale/mustard plants into. It produced salad for us every couple days, pretty excellent! My wife asked me to start migrating it back to strawberries, so I’ve started that process. Due to that, I’ve replanted a bunch more greens to keep us going!

THE TOWER PROVIDES Jumpstarting Strawberries Jumpstarting Strawberries

And speaking of those strawberries, I’m propagating a bunch of strawberry plants (june-bearing) to have more ground cover for next year in addition to the strawberry tower, and I’m hoping my ever-bearing strawberry will put out runners, but it’s still fruiting consistently!

I got a small onion harvest (time to figure out how many onions I’d actually need in a year), and plenty of garlic. This was my first year growing onions, and half the garlic was from last years harvest!

I also have numerous other things going - my lemongrass is growing really well:

As is my celery in a pot:

I’ve been growing marigolds and nasturtiums all over the place. The nasturtiums are great in salad! My cabbage started doing pretty well once I defeated an Aphid Menace that was stunting them.

So, that’s my big ole report! What’s growing on with you all?

(Apologies to LallyLuckFarm@beehaw.org if I stepped on your toes, I felt compelled to make a weekly thread!)

  •  xylem   ( @xylem@beehaw.org ) 
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    34 months ago

    I missed seeing the weekly thread yesterday, thanks for posting it! Those cucumbers look great - mine are pretty much done here on the opposite side of the country (maybe I underwatered in July) but my tomatoes are doing great. Sunflowers are so close to blooming, which is super exciting.

    Here’s the coolest thing I saw this week - a large caterpillar on my tomatoes studded with parasitic wasp eggs. What a crazy insect - it infects the host caterpillar with a virus that prevents it from molting!