It's Getting Warm!

The temps for the next week or so are going to be in the 90s with a heat index of up to 110F Sunday and Monday. I'm a little worried about fungus on my favas and how my peas will fare, but other than watering every night and harvesting radishes tomorrow before they bolt, there isn't much I can do.

Here's another round of garden pics in the usual order with a couple of highlights! As always, you can click on each picture to see a bigger version.

The Alliums - Bunching onions to the left, Cortland onions in the middle, Red Wing onions and garlic to the right.
These Red Wing F1 onions might just be the nicest onions I've ever grown so far.

The Legumes - 2 types of peas to the left, 3 favas in the middle, 1 fava and 2 pole beans to the right.
I'm harvesting about a gallon of peas every 2-3 days.

These are the Ianto's Yello favas. They could use some staking.

The Nightshades - 20 tomatoes and 6 peppers

These are Red House Free Standing tomatoes. They're late and I never get a ton of fruit but I love the plants.
They're so lush and stocky!

The Other Stuff - Odds and ends on the left, Quinoa in the middle, 13 types of Amaranth on the right.
Volunteer sunflowers, lots of dill and many, many calendula scattered about.

"Calendula corner" - you can't see these behind the sunflowers in the pic above.

A bigger picture view from the southwest corner. I realize that everything beyond the tomatoes is kind of a jumble of green at this point but I love it :-)

Schweizer Riesen Peas

These are the peas that I keep forgetting to take a picture of. Schweizer Riesen from Solstice Seeds in Hartland, VT. As you can see, they're huge! They're also very tasty.

Schweizer Riesen peas

My Garden Didn't Miss Me :(

I've been out of state since Saturday and, of course, wondering how my garden was doing with out me. It did so well that I think I should go away more often! There are some weeds to deal with and other little things, but there are also peas, radishes, good sized tomatoes on the way, and everything is huge!

The sun was pretty far to the west when I took these and I couldn't get a decent picture, but the peas are bearing heavily. Schweizer Riesen is ahead of Shirk Family but both look good!

I purposefully organized these like my post from last week for easy comparison.

The Alliums - Bunching onions to the left, Cortland onions in the middle, Red Wing onions and garlic to the right.

The Legumes - 2 types of peas to the left, 3 favas in the middle, 1 fava and 2 pole beans to the right. I didn't take any close up pictures but the peas are bearing heavily!

The Nightshades - 20 tomatoes and 6 peppers.

A Heidi tomato, coming along fast!

The Other Stuff - Odds and ends on the left, Quinoa in the middle, 13 types of Amaranth on the right.
Huge volunteer sunflowers, lots of dill and many, many calendula scattered about.

A bigger picture view from the southwest corner.

Taking Pictures to Avoid Weeding

I finished weeding the quinoa tonight and then focused on taking pictures rather than sorting through the poppies and such in the last row. :-)

Pics are below. As always you can click on them to see a bigger version.

The Alliums - Bunching onions to the left, Cortland onions in the middle, Red Wing onions and garlic to the right.

The Legumes - 2 types of peas to the left, 3 favas in the middle, 1 fava and 2 pole beans to the right.

The Nightshades - 20 tomatoes and 6 peppers.

The Other Stuff - Odds and ends on the left, Quinoa in the middle, 13 types of Amaranth on the right.

A bigger picture view from the southwest corner.

Gardening through Neglect

Other than watering now and then I haven't done much in the Intervale since straw day. I did go weed the amaranth and half of the quinoa tonight though I didn't think to take a pic. The quinoa got mulched but the amaranth is still a little small.

That said, the garden is doing great! The peas and favas are blossoming, the beans are growing, the onions are huge and the tomatoes have settled right in.

Schweizer Riesen pea blossom

Windsor Fava blossoms

Side story: I spent most of last week getting my Craftsbury garden ready and planted only to have a frost on a night when the expected low was 45F. I'm waiting to see what comes back from the abuse but it wasn't looking good yesterday and they may have gotten another frost last night. Vermont gardening is rough.

Straw Day

First, I didn't get around to posting about it on Wednesday but I finished weeding the north end of the garden that evening. The bunching onions went a lot faster with the new, mini Rogue Hoe pictured a few posts back and I cleaned up the beds I'd done previously as well as the edges. It all looked pretty great if I do say so myself and the lack of bugs continues to be a nice surprise.

I did a quick job of weeding the Amaranth bed this morning, mostly to knock the weeds back a bit. The seedlings are still too small to put up with much soil disturbance beyond that. The good news is that they all seem to be coming up!

I started doing the same with the quinoa bed but the poor plants were tipping over if I got anywhere close to them. The germination there seems a little spotty, especially the southern half of the bed. There's definitely some lambs quarters in that bed too which will be interesting. I can't tell them apart so I'm leaving both for now.

I did a little poking around where I planted poppies and even found a few little sprouts! They're also spotty and don't seem to have come up anywhere that compost landed on them. Whoops! A lesson for next time! I think poppies in general are probably easier as transplants.

I did all of this weeding to kill time until the straw truck came! BACG organizes a big straw and hay buy that any gardeners can get in on and it costs less than buying it at the local stores. It's nice stuff too, fresh from the grain fields in Quebec. I ordered 6 bales which is definitely overkill but I hadn't planned on having all of the leaves and straw in my tomato section when I ordered last fall. Once the straw came I mulched the entire north end of the garden as well as the tomatoes in the southwest corner. The southeast quarter is where all the seedlings are and they're still too small to tolerate the straw, so that's on hold. Check it out:

The north end - Peas/radishes, favas and pole beans in front, onions and garlic in the rear.

The tomato bed with a fresh coat of straw.

A Break in the Bugs

The mosquito levels have been much more tolerable for the last couple of days and I've been taking advantage to spend some time weeding. All of the favas are done as are the garlic and bulb onions.

I spent two hours tonight doing half of the bunching onion bed. That one is slow going as the bunching onions are much smaller and blend in with the grass that I'm pulling. So far so good though, I just ran out of day light.

I also planted Sicitalian Black Swamp Beans (more on those here) and Aleppo Arab Runner Beans from the Roughwood collection. I started those inside so that I was less likely to have any gaps as the window for dry bean planting is already so narrow in Vermont. The runner beans were so big that they didn't really fit in 72 cell trays. I had to wedge them in diagonally!

Fava beans (foreground), pole beans (middle) and bunching onions (background)

You'll notice that the dry beans are surrounded by some green mulch. The lawn down there got a bit shaggy before it got mowed and there was a lot of fresh, half-dried grass laying around. I either just scored some great mulch for free or laid down an extra thick cover crop of dandelion seeds. We'll see.

Here's another pic of the same area, this one before the grass mulch was added and mostly to show off the fava beans. It's so hard to take a decent pic down there when the sun is low, but look at the size of those suckers!

Favas, pole beans, and alliums

Obvious I have some string work to do still but that should be quick.

One excellent byproduct of weeding is that I've been snacking on volunteer daikons the size of pencils. Yum! Lambs quarters are a good size right now too and have me excited for quinoa greens.

Tomato planting!

Twenty of the 22 tomatoes are in! I don't seem to have any Black Beauty tomatoes in my Burlington batch and I can't remember if there was a germination problem or whether they're just hiding in my Craftsbury trays.

One Speckled Roman has some weirdness with its foliage. I should have probably culled it but it looks more like heat/water stress than anything so I'm just going to keep an eye on it.

The western most row has 4 Dora and 3 Druzba tomatoes. The middle row has 3 Opalka, 2 Heidi and room for the 2 Black Beauty, and the eastern row has 3 Red House Free Standing, 2 Speckled Romans and 3 Baylor Paste. That row got one extra because I planted the RHFS 18 inches apart rather than 24. All rows are listed north to south.

20 of 22 tomatoes going in the Intervale!

I pulled the bottom branches off from each plant and planted each one a few inches deeper than they were in the pots. If you click on the picture to make it bigger they look a little short and bedraggled but they'll recover and have healthier roots in the long run.

Tomato Prep

My new Intervale outfit consists of wool socks, balled up thickly around my ankles, long Carhartts, a thick long sleeved t-shirt, a wind breaker over that, wraparound headphones to protect my ears, the wind breaker hood over those, sun glasses, and thick gardening gloves. It makes the mosquitos almost bearable.

I finished prepping the tomato rows tonight - the stakes are in, all the compost that I had left is spread on top of the soil, and the straw is all pulled back enough for the soil to warm up a bit.

Prepped tomato rows

It's supposed to be sunny and HOT tomorrow but then cloudy and/or rainy all weekend. I'm hoping to get the plants in tomorrow night but I'm building beds in Craftsbury tomorrow so tomatoes may wait until Saturday. Either way they should have an easy day or two to start out.

Borage seedlings in the onions

There are probably 100 borage seedlings growing in my onions all of a sudden. There was a huge borage plant growing in one corner of my garden last year and it seems to have left me something to remember it by. These are likely to meet the hoe soon but they look cool in the meantime.

Amaranth Progress and Tomato Prep

There were too many mosquitos to hold still and take pictures, but the amaranth is up and the rain made everything grow quite a bit over the last 48 hours!

I started pushing in stakes for tomatoes but only brought enough for two of the three rows and the bamboo is cracked enough that I didn't push them in very far. I didn't want to impale myself in front of all of my garden neighbors! :-) I'll go back with more stakes and something to make pilot holes soon.

Seriously though .. the mosquitos were intense.