Garden Pictures, April 2021

After leaving my beautiful gardens in the tropics, I felt somewhat down. Instead of letting myself stay beat, I resolved to build an even bigger and better garden at our new homestead.

Here are some pictures I took yesterday in the late afternoon sunshine.

First, let’s take a look at the grocery row gardens:

The Grocery Row Gardens are the method I’m working on which contains a mix of annuals and perennials, planted in 4′ wide beds with 3′ wide paths in between. They are just starting to come into their own right now.

We have been harvesting mostly potatoes so far, as well as some greens.

Kohlrabi are coming soon, as well as purple cabbages:

And blueberries and blackberries:

In between the fruit trees and berries and the perennial and annual vegetables, Rachel and I also planted some flowers:

The clover is just a leftover from our early cover crop, but I love the little blooms.

In the single-row gardens, we have some corn:

Quite a few of my stalks got taken out by various critters, but we still have a chunk left. The cabbage are doing well too:

We’ll have potato salad and coleslaw this evening, all from our garden. The four rows of potatoes in the single-row gardens are also looking decent:

It seems the white and the Yukon gold potatoes did better with all the rain than the red potato varieties. There are red potatoes on the two outer rows and they have some yellow leaves after the massive rainfall of a week ago.

In the multiplier onion bed, there are lots of blooms:

I was told that I should take the blooms off for bigger onions but I think it’s too late now. I like the way they look, though.

My second-born son put in some trellises on the smaller gardens for me this last week:

I had all this area covered with cover crops and have been chopping and dropping that around the tomatoes and brassicas. For some reason, all the pak choi went to seed almost immediately after transplanting:

I’ll probably feed them all to the tomato plants this afternoon.

And speaking of feeding, my gardens wouldn’t be complete without some volunteer pumpkins from the old compost pile:

That will probably be the most productive plant we get this year!