Tuesday, June 19, 2012

June garden pics

Some pictures of my 3 garden beds. Each one is 4'x8'. Middle one is 8" high and others are 6".

Chinese Five Color Pepper

It is a heirloom pepper that I grew from seed. Two of them survived the move. The peppers are supposed to change to five different colors as they ripen. The package didn't say that it had purple flowers. So far, it's the only pepper I've grown that doesn't have white blooms.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

We've moved!

We have moved into a home built in 1913 that now sits on a decent sized lot. While working on the house and moving, I lost about half of my seed starts. There just wasn't enough time in the day to do it all. The good news is that I can try again next year. I have big plans on expanding the new garden which is already larger than last years. This is a picture of my new layout and land. Three raised beds that were double dug. Each bed is 4 x 8 feet.

Japanese Long Cucumber

I read today that these should be harvested at 1" thick, and not by length . I will update this post after I eat it tonight or tomorrow.

Back at it, my first cucumber this year

White Wonder cucumber from my garden. I wasn't sure when to pick it, I just went for it because it seems that it is better to error on the side of underripe. I have let some cukes get too ripe on the vine and they get bitter. I did some research and people say that once the plant produces bitter cucumbers you should just pull/cut the entire plant out because that will be all you get from then on. This was true with my plant. I tried to wait it out but it produced loads of inedible cukes. Well this one was a little further along than I like and I did spoon out the seeds but the flavor was great. I was waiting for it to turn white, but it was still light green when I picked it. Skin is too tuff for me so I peeled it.