Gardening: Update

 
 
 






It's getting close to 2 weeks into April now and the garden is getting along pretty well, for the most part.

 

Generally speaking the tomatoes seem to be doing fairly well

 

Though the Flordad tomatoes are still just sitting there doing nothing. I'll leave them alone for now. Who knows, maybe they're waiting for 90 degree days and 70 degree nights.

 

The orange bell pepper plant doesn't seem to want to grow up and leave home either.

 

But quite a few of the other tomatoes are about to pop their first flowers. The Cherokee Purples are going gangbusters and the Yellow Pear and Beefsteaks are also budding.

 

The cucumber and zucchini are - well - growing, but not very fast yet. 

 

We've already been harvesting a little bit of our two different lettuces, the spinach and Swiss chard.

 

Something else has also been harvesting the spinach. I'm thinking that if I don't want to share I might have to put the non-flowering vegies under row cover to keep the insect visitor count down.

 

But I'm not sure that will help the carrots much. They haven't been doing much and it's getting late in the season for them. That might be because they're too wet. The instructions for the grow box are pretty emphatic about filling it with potting mix right up to the brim, which I didn't, and the surface has stayed pretty wet the whole time.

Not brave enough yet to dig up one of the onions to see if they are forming bulbs under there (This box is also not filled properly with potting mix.) but I have cut off a few damaged leaves and they taste pretty oniony

 

The potato experiment seems to be going nowhere so far

 

But the wild blackberries have just about finished flowering and the resulting berries are looking promising. These are usually done and over with by the end of May so we have to keep a close eye on them. It helps if you map where they are when the white blossoms make them easy to see. They tend to wander a little each year.