Our Year Two Vegetable Garden posted by Nikos

 Year Two – Vegetable Gardens in July

 By Janet Nanos

With the new raised bed in a sunny location we could plant a larger variety of vegetables this summer. The shady front yard patch from last year is still excellent for lettuce, arugula, spinach and green onions, but other leafy greens which I thought might do well are not thriving there. Swiss chard, for example, is doing much better in a pot in the sun. Beets are producing tops but very little root. Cilantro is also very slow and needs more sun. Vegetables in the sun are zucchini, squash, tomatoes, parsnips, carrots, Swiss chard, beans, peas and leeks. We started a number of plants indoors from seed this year which have been quite successful. Most of these plants are thriving but probably should have been thinned more – that’s hard to do!

Nick in the shady front yard patch. It does get dappled sun which is fine for some leafy greens but not enough sun for most vegetables. Next year we’ll only plant lettuce, spinach, arugula and the perennial green onions which are the first to come up in the spring.

Lettuce grown in the shady front yard patch is very successful. We’ve been picking leaves off for salads every day since early June. I bought the romaine lettuce seedlings from a nursery. It’s much easier to tell the seedlings from weeds than it is to tell newly sprouting seeds from weeds.

This is the raised bed. Parsnips are on the left – they probably should have been thinned more – and tiny leeks on right. The marigolds attract pollinators and keep pests away. That seems to be working in the raised bed but there’s still lots to be learned about bugs, especially the ones eating the spinach leaves and that decimated the bok choy.

 

Zucchini, squash and tomatoes need lots of space so they have their own big pots. 

We keep spacing the pots out as the  plants are growing quite huge…that’s the squash on the right.

Harvest

So far harvest has definitely been better than last year. We have small, but great tasting, harvests. Probably we need to learn more about soil nutrients and fertilizers. Gardening takes lots of experience and talking to other gardeners or reading question and answer blogs. Learning is on-going.

Radishes are very easy to grow. Here is the first early harvest in May. Very tasty and the young leaves are good in salads.

Cucumbers are coming along, though something has chewed some flowers off.

According to an 8 year old peas are “unplugged”, not picked!

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The beets needed to be thinned so we ate the tops sautéed with ginger!

  Beets ready to harvest.

Purple beans – best tasting ever! So buttery and no strings. Just steam them!

 

Early July harvest of peas, radishes, lettuce and cilantro.

 

This zucchini was fried in butter! We’re hoping for lots more, though something is eating some of these flowers too.

I think it’s the male flowers that get eaten. I read in the local gardening blog that it could be ground hogs. The plants now have better fencing around them!

Swiss chard in a pot in a sunny location. It’s doing much better here than in the shady front yard patch.

Tomatoes are in their own large pots. These are Rapunzel variety; the seeds came from a neighbour. Some are being traded for electrical work from another neighbour. 

I’m hoping to have enough fresh vegetables to donate to the Scarborough Food Securities Initiative Food Bank…probably tomatoes since they seem to be doing very well this year.

 

Tell us about your garden and trees!

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