Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Our Garden Harvest for May 29th, 2012.


Our garden is coming along very well in it's vegetable and berry growth. The raspberry canes are loaded with berries in various stages of maturity. I anticipate a much better raspberry harvest than the one we had last year, although it wasn't bad. The blueberries have almost all turned from green to a reddish blue hue. It's time to get the bird netting in place in order to protect the berries.






We picked another three tomatoberries this week. Soon there will be more since many of the small tomatoes are already greenish orange and will soon be red.








We picked our first sweet banana peppers this week. These three weighed two and a quarter ounces.








Now we come to one of my favorites, the Fortex green beans. This was the first picking for this year and we were fortunate enough to get five pounds of them! We'll cook some of these and also make some pickled dilly beans.

This week I'll be planting some bouregard sweet potatoes as an experiment. Currently I have them suspended in jars of water so the slips will grow, but they aren't doing as well as I had hoped. While there is no dramatic growth of the slips, seven of the eight potato halves have wonderfully healthy roots growing into the water. The one that isn't doing well is in the one jar that when I was changing the water using bottled spring water, I ran out, so I used tap water in that last jar. Now that potato is very soft and appears to be rotting. I also noted that the water in all the other jars is crystal clear, and the bad jar's water is so murky that you cannot see through it at all. Kind of makes you wonder about the tap water. Anyway, I'm going to plant the seven good halves of sweet potato right into the garden soil, and not just the slips alone. We'll see how they do.

As I walk through the garden, I can see what appears to be dozens and dozens of beautiful rich green tomatoes. However, in with these beautiful plants are four or five that are having some problems. Surprisingly, three of those plants are Celebrities.  I chose Celebrity because of their disease resistance. Three plants being stricken by disease isn't a good ratio seeing that I only have fourteen of the Celebrity variety. I don't know that I'll select that as one of my favorites for next year's planting.

The miniature yellow pear tomato plants in the half-barrel are loaded with blossoms. I can hardly wait until we can start picking those tasty treats!

That takes care of this week's gardening information from our back yard organic vegetable garden.

I hope everyone is doing well with their gardens!

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

8 comments:

  1. What exciting stuff going on in your garden!

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  2. Gorgeous green beans. Mine have their first true leaves but haven't started to vine yet.

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    1. Thanks! It's always inspiring to me to see the small plants with their new growth showing. I like to think that while the tops may be growing somewhat slower, the root system is growing much faster to sustain the plants for many great harvests to come.
      Almost all of the beans I picked were from plants that grew from the seeds that I planted in March during the warm weather we had. Even though I had to resow a lot of seed because of chilly weather afterwards, I don't regret planting during that time. I would absolutely do it again.

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  3. Very nice. We've just started harvesting the first of our corn, and our beans are doing great too! Most of our tomatoes are small and green, but we do have a couple of plants that made it through the winter and have been giving us fruit all year.

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    1. Thanks! Mmmm! Home grown corn! Isn't it great when we can coax some of our plants to make it through all year? I love when that happens.

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  4. Hi! I tried to get some slips growing from a sweet potato and I had quite few roots in the water but no greenery ever came out of the top. It started getting funny looking around where the water line was so I threw it out! I used regular tap water. Maybe I should try it with my filtered Berky water except it has flouride in it. Your beams are really growing. My beans are only about two or three inches tall. Great garden you have! Nancy at Cozy Thyme Cottage

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    1. Since I planted the seven remaining pieces of sweet potato, they are all growing! I don't know what they'll produce, but I'm giving it a try! I used single 16 oz. servings of bottled water that was a store brand. It worked well!
      The beans are doing great! I kept them watered when they were young and that seemd to be a big help.

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