Mason st. Update. July 2012

Not all bad news from my home garden. After the slug infested failures of the spring passed, my chard is growing, I just harvested the first broccoli, and my cucumber-sunflower-pole bean guild working well. See below for details!

Side-bed. Beets, Sunflower, Cucumber, Beans, Garlic, Artichoke, Chard, Broccoli, Rhubarb, Raspberries and Arugula currently growing.

Pole Beans growing up sunflower. Cucumber growing behind the beans

Artichoke in nutrient-debrived front bed. This bed previously had a conifer in it that depleted it. I have slowly been recovering it for a couple years. Clearly, it still needs some mending!

Artichoke in not-as-nutrient-deprived side-bed. Notice how much bigger it is compared to the artichoke in the front bed.

Beets in the side bed are surprising big and healthy! I am excited to have some beet and chard salad!

My perennial front bed is coming along nicely. I have decided to transition the front bed to a perennial bed because the soil is not good enough for vegetable growth. I am not going to live here forever, so might as well work on turning it into a beautiful, productive, low-maintenence garden for the next residents as well! I already have Lavender, blueberries, pine-apple mint, thyme, nasturtium, fennel, lamb's ear, strawberries, rosemary, and garden chives growing in this small area.

Whiskerton Garden in July

The garden is on the brink of complete chaos! This is a good thing, of course, because it means something is actually growing. I always worry every spring that nothing will grow. With delayed summers in the NW, there is always a week or two where I completely panic that nothing will ever grow. Then finally the sun comes out, warms up the earth, and everything grows like crazy. Fueled by months of rain, plants are just waiting to explode. And my cucurbits sure have!

The trellis I built for the pumpkins is working well. It's getting taken over quickly. I should have built a couple more structures, but I don't really mind the chaos either. It's amazing what a month of warm weather will do to a garden.

We planted sunflower with our cucurbits this year - so they would have something to climb up, provide us with an additional harvest (sunflower seeds), attract insects, and look beautiful in the garden. I just have to make sure that the sunflowers aren't so thick that they shade out the cucurbits below them! The pole beans are climbing up the sunflower and winding around the cucurbits as well. The guild is working well - just a bit out of control! We are starting to get the first signs of summer squash forming!

The melons are unhappy - need more care to be grown in the cooler NW conditions than I gave them. Definitely need some sort of protection from the cold and a suntrap.

The leeks, onions and other alliums look great! We are starting to harvest scallions and will hopefully be providing onions and leeks in increasing amounts over the next couple of weeks and into August.

Marrionberries, raspberries and strawberries, while delicious, provide many challenges for market. They don't travel well - usually ending up as liquid by the time they get to market. So we have been trying to eat as many as possible right off of the vine. I recommend work parties at Whiskerton garden because you get yummy berry snacks throughout the day! Blueberries are the only ones that make it to market looking tasty - and they sure are. I can't get enough of them!

My plan for the next month is 1) to continue to try and contain the wild beds and 2) get a more comprehensive irrigation system in place. The one now only covers half of the garden and is therefore pretty useless. We have a plan set and will move forward in the weeks to come - work parties pending!

I am thrilled to see Whiskerton garden flourishing as well as the UFC market growing every Monday. It just gets better and better. It's great to see everyone each week showing off the latest goodies from their little patches of earth. What a wonderful city we live in!