I Will Grow Eggplants: Tomatoes, Tree Fuzz, and Little Feathered Buggers

Here is my early-June, flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants garden update. I feel somewhat behind with respect to getting the garden in this year. May has been much cooler than it was last year, so some things (snap beans, zucchini, winter squash, and cucumbers) have yet to be planted.

Tomatoes and peppers were planted outside May 25^th and 26^th. The varieties of tomatoes in the garden are Ropreco, Manitoba, Scotia, Black Sea Man, Velmozha, Gold Dust, Dwarf Audrey’s Love, Dwarf Firebird Sweet, Dwarf Speckled Heart, Linda, Mrs. Bot’s Italian Giant, Guido, Reinhard’s Chocolate Heart, Cosmonaut Volkov, Striped German, Rozovyi Myod (“Pink Honey”), and Japanese Black Trifele. 54 planted this year. I also grew Early Annie tomatoes, but ran out of room for them! Anaheim (hot), Jalapeno (hot), and Ajvarksi (sweet, red) are the peppers.

Carrots and beets were planted May 2^nd. Dry peas (Gold Harvest) and snow peas (Green Beauty) were planted May 4^th, and shelling peas (Green Arrow) were planted May 21^st. The Green Arrow peas are just starting to come through the soil, but we haven’t set up the trellises yet. Radish was planted on May 7^th.

Flowers have been tucked into pots and raised beds wherever there is a space. Calendula (Pacific Beauty and Bon Bon, a dwarf variety), Asters (Early Charm), Dahliettas (Unwin’s Mix), marigolds (Janie Bright and Queen Sophia), pink zinnias, and lavatera (Pink Blush, a dwarf variety). I also planted a few sunflower varieties (Sunspot, Russian Mammoth, and Lemon Queen) though it turns out I didn’t need to. Volunteer sunflowers have popped up in all the garden plots and most of the raised beds! I’ll leave as many as I can and remove the ones that might interfere with the vegetables.

The strawberry bed, some tomatoes, asters & peppers.

Copenhagen cabbage has been planted in several places around the garden, as well as kale (Dwarf Siberian), Bloomsdale spinach, and pak choy.

Radishes in one bed, cabbage in the other.

There isn’t much in the way of herbs on the go this summer other than parsley (Italian Flat-leaf and Curly) and chives. There is a bit of summer savory and soup celery growing, but it is still very small and very sparse. I found some old sage seeds and planted all of them indoors under a grow light. Two germinated but they are still small, so remain in a little pot. I’ll transplant them into a raised bed once they are a few inches tall.

Chives

Today, despite the cooler-than-optimal soil, I planted dry bush beans. I didn’t plant large amounts of any one kind, but instead planted smaller amounts of a lot of varieties in an effort to keep those varieties fresh/viable. Some of the varieties are quite old; my fingers are crossed that I’ll get a few of those older ones to grow. I ran out of space to grow pole beans, but will make an effort to do that in the future. The Dolloff, Flagg, Brown Caseknife, and Kahnawake Mohawk beans (dry/pole) really need to be grown out. The dry bush beans I planted this year are Orca, Canadian Wild Goose, Tiger Eye, Black Coco, Mary Ison’s Little Brown Bunch Beans, Ruckle, Fiesta, Yer Fasal, Coco Jaune de Chine, Early Warkwick, Wiener Trieb, Tene’s Beans, Beka Brown, Kenearly Yellow, and Blue Jay.

We decided not to plant in-ground potatoes this year. We are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the garden as it is, and the prospect of planting, harvesting, and trying to store a large amount of potatoes (we have no cold room or root cellar) doesn’t feel like it makes sense any more. Instead, R. planted some volunteer potatoes he found when he was digging out the compost bin and a few newly-purchased seed potatoes (Kennebec, Norland, and a fingerling variety) in large shopping bags and large plastic totes. They have all sprouted, even the volunteer “compost potatoes” he found. The bags and totes will be much easier to deal with than digging up a garden plot at harvest time: Drag container to the garden plot. Dump. Pick out potatoes.

Potatoes in bags and totes.

Along the driveway

The lilacs and the trees in our front yard (I have no idea what they are) bloomed this week. They smell divine. The crabapple tree has some blossoms on it, but far fewer than usual. Same with our apple tree. I had been hoping for a bumper crabapple year so I could make jelly in the Fall.

Lilacs and "kitty hammock" lawn chairs.

Blossoms galore

While the scent in the air is delightful, the large amount of floating poplar tree fuzzies are not. They look pretty – soft, drifting, dreamy, pure-white wisps of fluffiness – but inhaling one by mistake is an unfortunate experience that snaps you back to reality in an instant, sputtering and hacking.

The sparrows, which we have in abundance here, have been decimating the outer leaves of the cabbage, sunflowers, dahliettas, and zinnias. They chewed on the snow peas so badly that R. had to put netting over them and string up metallic ribbons in an attempt to keep the sparrows from completely destroying them. Sparrows never touched things in the garden until last summer. I’m not sure why they’re doing this now.

An old bed sheet is out and at the ready to cover the cabbage bed at night. Deer used to only come into our property in the winter and spring, but now, they drop by year ‘round. I discovered in recent years that they love cabbage. And kale…and lettuce…and peas.

It's early in the season, so dandelions abound and there are pots, tools, and seedlings everywhere. Nevertheless, a few pictures to mark progress in the garden thus far: