Side Beds on June 7th.
Things are growing well. I haven’t had much time at all to spend in the garden, but luckily with the SFG method, not much time is required.
We’ve been harvesting Romaine Lettuce, Spinach, Peas and Broccoli which have made for some nice salads.
The Tomato and Pepper plants were transplanted about the third week of May and seem to be doing well in their new home. I overestimated how many tomato plants we would be able to grow, so we have quite a few that are going to end up as compost. We started 27 Roma plants, and only four made it into one of the side beds.
Tomato Bed on June 7th.
All in all we have one Cherry Tomato (Baxter’s), four Roma, three Beefsteak, and five San Marzano. We initially planted 14 tomatoes in our tomato bed and had planned to put in another eight Roma’s.
Mel suggests that you can do indeterminate plants at one per square foot, but after looking up some pictures of some San Marzanos online I think (hope) that they will be too large for this spacing even though I plan to keep them to a single vine.
I also found reference in several places to Romas getting much larger than ours did last year. I understand that it was just a bad year all around for tomatoes last year, so I’m thinking that our results won’t be the same and we will have much larger plants. We opted to skip the bush beans this year and transplanted the Romas to the side bed where the beans were planned.
Lessons Learned
We let the Peas go too long before trellising. I put it off and put it off, and before we knew it the plants were almost four feet tall. We ended up putting the trellis to the south of both ”rows” instead of between them, and used some string to hold them against the trellis to keep them upright until they grab hold on their own.
I have never been a big fan of peas. Though I will eat canned peas they aren’t something that I ever crave. These Sugar snap peas straight off the vine, however, are just outstanding. Amy and I both keep dipping into the container after we’ve harvested to grab a couple more to munch on.
Having just had leaf type lettuce last year, we really didn’t notice the slugs being that bad. This year is a different story. Slugs have invaded our Romaine Lettuce and Cabbage plants and the little baby slugs seem to be living in them. We’ve looked around for Sluggo but none of the stores that we have checked so far has carried it so we’ve been left to just picking them off by hand.
We planted too many Romaine Lettuce plants too close together in both time and space. I think we will spread them out to about 4 plants every two weeks for next year and maybe only do two or three per square. They grew faster than expected and with the close spacing have started to twist and spread.
The Broccoli is finished and the plants have been pulled. The variety we planted, Calabrese, seems to form smaller looser heads than others I have seen. The side shoots didn’t get very big at all before they started to open a little, so we harvested what we could and called them done. I think we may try a different variety for a fall harvest this year.
Eggplants, Peppers, Onions, Marjoram, Parsley, and Romaine Lettuce.
Peas, Spinach, Romain Lettuce, and Carrots.
Broccoli, Brussel's Sprouts, Cabbage, and Onions.
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
Your garden looks really cute and tidy. Everything is arranged properly and you can access every plant bed easily. Not like my garden, you can’t just guess where the tomatoes are or where the carrots are under. LOL. But thanks for posting this one. This inspired me to tidy my garden a little bit.