Gardening Gardening

I processed ONE jar of fermented peppers so far, the one that was a mix of Jalapeños and Aji Charapitas. Made myself some scrambled eggs this morning to try it out on and WOW. This stuff is scorching hot. Wait until I get to the jar of Ghost/Carolina Reapers in a few days. I’m going to end up canning a lot of the sauce to preserve it. There’s only so much one person can eat

 

Had the first rose of the year today, its small but I'm glad to see it.

 

Nice.
Should be a foot tall by lunch time tomorrow.

 

I have garlic up now.

 

Chive this morning standing up to 22f.


Yarrow coming up in the strawberry patch.


2 of my garlic beds are looking good so far.

 

This is a first for me. I had one very small cabbage plant from last year spring back to life. I don’t have too high hopes for it but I’ll keep a watchful eye out. These particular beds are along my driveway and were buried under more than a foot of snow for a large part of the winter. Talk about perseverance. Those are chives coming up behind it.

 

I finished planting the spring/summer garden this morning. 24 tomato plants ( Big Boy, Better Boy, Mountain Glory and Brandywine) one row of yellow crook-neck squash, one row of straight-8 cucumbers, 4 Black Beauty eggplants, a few bell peppers, yellow peppers, jalapeno and heatless jalapeno peppers. I installed the tomato cages then give them a small amount of liquid fertilizer (Miracle Grow) to settle everything into the soil. Now I'm counting down to harvest time.

 

Looks great!
Did you mulch (wood chip) the bell peppers? I had good luck with mulching everything but the bell peppers.

 

Thanks TurboDiesel, I was very lucky last year when my local electrical power company was trimming the tree branches along the power lines in my neighborhood. I asked the foreman if I could have a truckload of their fresh woodchips, he said I could have as many loads as I wanted as long as his crew was in the area. I ended up with five full truck loads of chips which have been composting since last spring. I would guess them to be about 25% composted so I placed black polyester cloth down in the garden area (to control weed growth) and then added about 4 inches of this woodchip/compost mixture to the entire garden. I will post an update in a few weeks on how this experiment turns out.

 

My neighbor has a tree service so we can get chips anytime. The first couple piles are 4 years old so they are looking really good now.
You can also add grass clippings on top of the chips for nitrogen.

 

Onions are telling me it’s time to go. Nice cool overcast day to till.

Garlic seems to be doing very well. Actually seems early for this much growth. PIA to till around it.

 

Our garlic and asparagus are looking good also. We even have lettuce and onions coming up from last year. Mustuv went to seed...

 

The garlic is the stuff that started coming up last year? Mine tips are brown but close to the ground they are green.

 

We got the potato bed dug up and rotortillered this afternoon. Just needs to be raked level and the potatoes planted. I will be doing that later this week.

 

It may not be a pretty setup but it works. When I come home from work at night I can see the lights from halfway down my street. I wonder what the neighbors think Last week I transplanted almost everything from the starter cells into solo cups. Time to start playing the shuffling game, making sure to keep the plants the right distance from the lights. So far everything came up but my marigolds. Not a huge deal; in years prior I’ve started them from seed outdoors and it doesn’t take them long to take off.

 

Love it but I have 1 suggestion. When you pot up your maters bury the stem all the way up to the first true leaves. The plant will develop roots all the way up the stem.

 

This is the biggest asparagus I've ever seen. 17-18"
Our first ever picking