Food Growing Your Own Food

I usually judge its ok to plant when the plants show up at Lowe's.

 

Well the weather finally decided to cooperate and I was able to get my vegetable garden in.
Here is what I planted:
2 tomato
1 cherry tomato
1 yellow squash
1 zucchini
2 cucumber
4 eggplant
1 each red, yellow and green bell pepper
1 watermelon
1 canteloupe
1 honey dew melon

The melons are experiments. I have no idea if I'll get anything off them. Planted watermelon last year and got a dozen fruits off it, but I picked them too soon. Apparently melons don't ripen off the vine. Was reading up on the other 2 and they can be tricky to grow but what the hell. Might as well give it a shot.

 

We got ours in yesterday as well.
We seem to be vulnerable to frost here up until Memorial Day but the forecast for the week looks warm so we went for it.
Brandywine heirloom tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes. Pickle sized cukes. Butternut squash. Buttercrisp lettuce with leaf lettuce to follow. Peas.
And we are trying brussell sprouts for the first time on the recommendation of a friend.

I'd also like to plant asparagus but it's so good at the farm market now that I never get around to planting our own.

 

Asparagus sounds interesting to grow but I never see shoots for sale around here. At least not in the big box garden centers. Maybe next year when I expand the garden some more.

 

I have expanded my raspberry crop this year to take up 60% of my garden, and it looks like they will be ripe a month earlier than normal. What is interesting is that the plants in the hot greenhouse didn't do as good as the ones outside in late March/April. It was warm here, but I figured hotter than summer temps (120-140F) would have helped instead of the 50-70F temps outside during the sunny days.

But now the bees are happy that there are lots of flowers.

 

So are these purely cultivated raspberries?
We have lots of wild ones around here and we do what we can to encourage them to go forth and multiply.
We get some nice fruit that varies a lot year by year and I'm guessing the cultivated ones would be more productive and predictable.

 

I wonder if the possums around here are grateful for the amount of work my wife does to give them tasty things to eat.

I have the complete opposite to Baraka - we have a pretty large suburban block, so space is not an issue. It is coming into winter here, but that is actually pretty mild so planting happens all year round.

The yard includes:

• 2 orange trees (a navel and a blood orange)
• 3 lemon trees
• a lime tree
• strawberries
• a blueberry tree (no fruit yet - hopefully next summer)
• 5 garden beds for veges/herbs

We have rosemary, parsley, thyme, sage, coriander (what you call Cilantro) and will plant basil in season. The possums are really giving the parsley a good seeing to.

I know there are snow peas planted, and definitely some salad leaves - no idea what else is planted - this is not my domain - I just enjoy the fruits of my wife's labour

 

My tomatoes and tomatillo plants are blooming, my kale is expanding, the pepper plants are beginning to get little flower buds on them, and my other plants continue to grow! yay!!

My list now comes to:

3 tomato plants (cherry, patio princess, purple heirloom)
1 tomatillo plant (I hear that they don't self-pollinate well, so my hopes are not high for it)
2 bell pepper plants
1 banana pepper plant
1 zucchini plant
3 everbearer strawberry plants
a bunch of kale
sunflowers
green onions
basil
mint
rosemary
lavender

I LOVE my patio this summer!!

 

Well we've had a pretty substandard yield so far this year. The zucchini was infested by stink bugs and some form of fungus. The tomato plants are already dying. Critters got at the eggplant and pepper plants. The yellow squash, cantaloupe and honeydew plants are all undersized.
The cucumber and watermelon plants are thriving. Getting a good number of cukes. Only 3 watermelons so far but still weeks away from harvesting them.
This is also the first year I didn't add Miracle Grow garden soil to the garden prior to planting. Only used loam from the compost pile.

 

If you're in the northeast I would guess it's been dry like it has been here.
Did you water?

 

Not really. We've been getting fairly regular nightly storm cells. Those quick downpours that soak everything in 5 minutes, then is gone.

 

Tomato drowning commenced here a few weeks ago.
We're eating them as fast as they come off the plants.
A BLT with homegrown bacon, tomatoes and lettuce from the garden on fresh peasant bread is a sublime experience.

Anyone else grow potatoes?
This is the best potato crop I've ever had.

Everything else in the garden is about average this year.
Except the brussels which got ravaged by cabbage moths and haven't rallied back very well.