My Square Foot Garden

I got a few more tomatoes. They’re slowing a bit – maybe they need some miracle grow? The beans are producing again so I picked some but I’m not sure how good they’ll be. I picked the last of the carrots but they’ve been in the ground too long. The strawberries are multiplying like mad! I need to add one more anchor to the tomatoes as they are all leaning toward the south now.

We had a huge harvest of tomatoes over the weekend along with some small white onions (too much shade from the tomatoes?) and big green onions, lots of red peppers and jalepenos, 3 really nice but slightly small garlic bulbs.  I made a huge batch of salsa on Sunday and gave almost all of it to the neighbors since we still had a good amount left over from our last batch last week.  I have photos of much of this so I’ll post them under the appropriate date in a while.

Over the weekend, I harvested about 15 tomatoes, about 10 carrots, about 5 jalepenos, 4 red hot peppers, an anaheim or two, 4 green onions, some beans (which are getting too old now), and that’s about it.  We made some great salsa last night and even added some ground chia seeds to thicken it up a little.  The chia didn’t affect the flavor and the texture actually didn’t change much either.

Harvested tons of green beans, a few more carrots, 3 more tomatoes (for a season total of about 6), 3 anaheim peppers, and one green onion. I trimmed the tops of the tomatoes to help them focus more on making tomatoes instead of getting taller. One or two of the red hot peppers are turning red with dozens still yellow/green. There are a few jalepeños ready but we have some from the store we’ll use first. So we’re getting probably half or a bit more of the salsa from ingredients from the garden. Once the tomatoes crank up we’ll be getting the majority of our salsa ingredients from the garden. There were a few tomato limbs sticking out the bottom of the tomato cages to the sides, so I cut them off. I also had to trim a lot of strawberry runners off. Good times in the garden.

I picked 3 ripe tomatoes last night.  The salsa machine is almost ready to start cranking.  I need to tie some stray tomato limbs that escaped the tomato cages.  I think I also need to chop off the tops to stop them from getting taller and let them focus their energy on cranking out tomatoes.  We have some pretty big anaheim peppers, some jalepenos, gree onions, and cilantro.  The yellow onions, garlic, and red peppers aren’t quite ready so we might still have to buy some things to make salsa, but at some point, I’d really like to make an entire batch of salsa from ingredients solely from the garden (except for the salt and vinegar, I guess).

We got a single strawberry too, which is a good thing.  These are June bearing strawberries and so we should only get them in June, but a few pop out later and they’re not being eaten by birds – hopefully because of our killer plastic owl.

I harvested a lot of green beans, cilantro, basil, carrots, and lettuce today. I also cut down the peas since they were all turning yellow and the peas were either green but shrunken or yellow and bulging and hard and bitter. Oh well.  Lots of green tomatoes – one of them slightly red!

Yesterday, I harvested a lot of oregano, basil, cilantro, lettuce, and peas. The cilantro seems to be turning from the solid leaves to more fingery looking – maybe I’m letting it get too tall before cutting the top third off? The lettuce was just from around the outsides of all four plants. The pea plants have turned yellowish and the peas are getting bitter. I’m not sure if it needs more water or more nutrients so I miracle grew it (along with everything else) and changed watering from every 3 days to every other day. It has been in the upper 80′s-lower 90′s lately so the heat might be a part of it. The spinach is still bolting so I’m not sure why it never really grew well this year.

Last night I harvested a little more oregano, basil, cilantro, and some peas.  The pea pods I picked (about 10-15 pods) looked big on the outside but the peas were still a bit on the small side.  The twins enjoyed pulling them apart and getting the peas out though.  I put some more miracle grow on the salsa garden as well.  I also removed more mushrooms.  My spinach seems to be bolting for some reason – and it hasn’t been hot at all this summer so far.  We’ve had a lot of water though.  I wonder if bolting is triggered under any type of stress rather than just heat.  I cut off the bolting center of one spinach plant to see what happens.  If it seems to stop it from bolting, I’ll do it to the others.

I have included a bunch of photos from last night below.

I am getting to the point where I need to understand how to harvest my crops without killing them.  I already know about peas, beans, tomatoes, etc. since I planted them all last year.  New this year are the garlic, oregano, basil, cilantro, and peppers.  I think the peppers will be pretty easy to figure out.  I remember a previous post here having some information about harvesting garlic where I must wait for the leaves to turn brown or something and then I have to hang them to dry or something, so I better go re-read that.

So, I’ll focus on the spices since I’m basically plucking leaves off them and I don’t want to kill anything.  My oregano says that it’s perrenial (that means it’s going to come back alive all by itself next spring for free – pretty cool huh?).  I looked around to find out about how to harvest it and found this page about that.  Here are a few highlights about oregano: (more…)

Got two more strawberries yesterday and they’re sweet and good, which is probably why birds or some other lothesome creature is eating all of them.  I’m thinking about getting a plastic owl to scare them away.  I’m not sure if there are many more strawberries to come out though… (more…)