2021 Vegetable garden thread

[wdfifteen]

With the strawberry and garlic harvest and all the planting behind us the season is fully underway now.



Tomatoes, peppers, onions, green beans, and tomatillos are doing well.



The first and second planting of corn are looking strong. 3rd planting is just coming through the ground.



My grandmother always had hollyhocks growing at her garden gate, so I planted hollyhock in her honor.



This is my carrot growing experiment. Carrots like deep, loose soil and the best i had a was pile of random dirt. I leveled it off and planted carrots and they seem to like it.



I'm about at the end of the raspberry harvest, both red and black varieties. There are plenty of berries left on the canes, but I I've picked all we need and more. I'm trying to find someone to come and get the rest before they go to waste.



Black raspberries are really plump and juicy this year.



We made 11 jars of black raspberry jelly and 9 jars of red berry jelly. Blueberries are starting to ripen and we'll make jam out of some of them. That should hold us over the winter.



We took the remaining onions and garlic out of storage and dumped them on the compost pile. After all the work we went to got grow and store them, that kind of hurt.



Compost is cooking right along. It should be ready to go on the garden this fall.

[Crowbob]

Garden?

WTF!

I finally gave up and am building a fence and getting a dog who likes raw deer meat.

[Tidybuoy]

That's a great garden. It would cost me a couple $mil to have that much space here

[flatbutt]

My zucchini plot is a swinging Richard rally. No female plants at all. Maybe it's been too hot?

[jcommin]

I'm envious at the gardens. I live in the city and in a townhome. My gardening is in pots. I grow herbs: parsley, oregano, chives, rosemary, mint, thyme, etc. Generally they do very well. My rosemary bush just exploded this year and attribute to the change I made to the make-up of the soil.

I did have a hard lesson this year. I tried to grow collards. I love green food and will eat any kind of green. The plant did well in May/June until it became infested with small caterpillars. I wasn't aware of the attraction and I was reluctant to spray an insecticide. I did, but I know have small white bugs feasting on the leaves. I have all but given on this plant.-

[Tidybuoy]

My small garden this morning:

Cantaloupe:


Cucumbers:


All the Rest: Tomatoes, Peppers, Squash, Watermelon, etc..


Next year I will plant a little differently as some of these plants are way too big for their space.

[wdfifteen]

Three solid weeks of rain can wreak havoc on a garden. Everything is overgrown, mostly with weeds.



The tomatoes are 5 feet tall and not a red one to be found, except for a random "salad" tomato that I planted. They are only about the size of a golf ball, so they don't count.



The tomatoes are overflowing their cages, and even the plant the rabbits ate to the ground is trying to produce.



Cucumbers are totally out of control. I can't tell one plant from another. Hard to harvest without stomping all over the vines.



Green beans have had wayyy too much rain. Most of the heirloom "Top Crop" variety that I always grow are down in the mud. I experimented with a new variety called "Java" this year whose plants grow more upright. They aren't so muddy and rotten and they are easy to harvest. We canned 24 pints of them and we'll see how they turn out. If they don't turn to mush I'll switch to them exclusively next year.

[JackDidley]

Animals ate most of my plants in the spring. I have one cucumber plant left that is producing like crazy and one tomato plant that has lots of blooms but only one tomato . .

[stealthn]

Those are some impressive gardens. I’ve got butter lettuce (grows like a weed), peas, carrot, cucs (for pickles) and one tomato plant (my first one from scratch), none of the other tomato’s came up. Magpies have eaten almost all my Nanking cherries

Anyone done asparagus? When I looked at the package it says they take 7 years, is that true?

[Otter74]

Dang,some of y'all have some impressive gardens. I live in the city and only have two small spaces in my backyard by the garage. I do my best, and try to do a little better each year. It's confounding, sometimes, why one year my tomatoes will do fine and they next year they won't. For instance.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by stealthn

Anyone done asparagus? When I looked at the package it says they take 7 years, is that true?

No. This is year 3 for our asparagus bed and we got enough for a meal or two last year and a good harvest this year.

[wdfifteen]

I picked a 5 gallon bucket full of San Marzanos on Saturday the 5 gallons of whole tomatoes made 11 pints of tomato sauce. Picked another bucket full Sunday and made 9 quarts of sauce. All told we have:
28 quarts and 14 pints of chopped or whole tomatoes,
6 pints of tomato juice
11 pints of sauce
9 quarts of sauce
6 pints of tomato/pepper mixture (like Ro-Tels)
I didn't make any ketchup or tomato salsa this year.

There may be a bushel left on the plants. I put an add on Craig's list - "Free tomatoes, U-pick."







With the green beans, corn salsa, and tomatoes we canned, plus the jams and jellies and corn we froze and the pounds of garlic an onions in the
'fridge I'm feeling pretty good about surviving the coming apocalypse.

[flatbutt]

Jeez I was feeling pretty good about the dozen tomatoes, 6 green beans and one zucchini I picked today. Then again my garden is less than 50 ft2

[stealthn]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

No. This is year 3 for our asparagus bed and we got enough for a meal or two last year and a good harvest this year.

Thanks, I’m going to go for a batch next year, so they come up every year?

[craigster59]

Originally Posted by flatbutt

Jeez I was feeling pretty good about the dozen tomatoes, 6 green beans and one zucchini I picked today. Then again my garden is less than 50 ft2

Don't feel bad. I didn't know what a "Tobacco Hornworm" was until last week. My Roma's and German Queen's look like crap. Boy those guys are stealthy, but a snip to the head and they are done.

Also now I know where they came up with the oozing slime from "Alien".

[wdfifteen]

We planted the six asparagus roots on the left in the spring of 2018. We didn't harvest anything in 2019 and only about 10% of the spears in 2020 so they would grow and get more robust. In 2021 we harvested about a pound of spears off of that half of the row. The right half is exactly the same, only a year behind.

[wdfifteen]

I'm done.
This weekend I'm ripping the remaining tomato and pepper plants out, bringing in the last water melon, and calling it quits.
I finished canning today, 19 4 oz. jars of ketchup, 16 2oz jars of hot pepper relish plus 4 4 oz jars, plus my salsa verde experiment. A guy is coming to get the rest of the tomatoes off the plants before I tear them out. There are probably 2 bushels left, but I don't need them.




We'll be starting the cycle over again in about 6 weeks, planting garlic for next summer's harvest.

[bmcuscgr94]

This week's harvest.

[Jay Auskin]

I've been having to ripen them indoors, but fresh tomatoes, in Michigan, in November...I'll take it.

[Jay Auskin]

I was limited in space but grew vertical wherever I could.