July 20, 2009

Hi everyone!

Things have been progressing well at the garden, and it looks absolutely beautiful right now. Last week, we started digging the perennials bed and planted a section of it with the strawberries. It looks great, and there's still room for more- twelve plants in total. Our plans are to include two more beds for asparagus and rhubarb, but those need to be planted in the early spring so we have some time before the beds need to be finished. We may dig some temporary herb beds above the terrace as well and establish some perennials there.

In the meantime, I have replanted the recently harvested beds with some new crops- bok choi, spinach, arugula, brussels sprouts, collard greens, and summer squash. I'm looking forward to the latter, as they should be highly productive fairly soon. Brussels sprouts are a good choice for this time of year, as they will produce their least bitter crop towards the fall. We also planted the new trellis with indeterminate sugar snap peas- those'll be good producers for the rest of the year.

With the garden planted for now, we'll be turning our attention to some other things. First off is weed control- we'll be weeding fairly regularly; we've already finished one side of the bean terrace that was almost overgrown. We'll do the same thing in and around the raised beds this week. This will prevent the weeds from seeding our beds any more than they already have. We also need to mulch the squash and tomatoes; this will give the frequently thirsty plants a more constant water supply. We'll also harvest regularly and dig new areas.

June 30 2009

Yesterday I picked a lot of the beans, hoping to stimulate later growth. There are so many!

I also pulled up the remaining five beets and picked a row of edamame to see at what stage of ripeness their flavor is best. I cut about seven branches of NZ spinach that were sticking out around the bed. I weeded a bit and pruned one of the broccoli beds, trimmed back the cilantro that had started going to seed, and pulled up some of the salad greens that had already bolted. My boyfriend and I picked off the tops of some of the lettuce that looked like it was getting to bolt; we ate it for lunch as a salad.

Today I get to cook all of that. My boyfriend is doing the cooking; he also helped me in the garden yesterday and today. He's a wonderful cook. I picked and washed the spinach leaves. They look delicious.

The leaves are more fibrous and have a much stronger flavor than regular spinach- we sauteed it with onions, lemon and garlic to complement the flavor. We also baked the beets- we wrapped them in tinfoil and put them in oven at 400 degrees for an hour. We sliced the beets and put them over the spinach, and ate them with pan-seared chicken marinated in a soy sauce mix.

We also did some work in the garden today. I bought some seeds for the garden from Home Depot, and we planted them! In the spaces left from the plants I picked, we planted radishes, bok choi, and sweet and genovese basil. We also planted two frames of the new trellis with a type of long bean good in stir fry. We decided to give the potatoes one more week to finish producing and then pull them up and replant the bed.