The Spring Garden is the Best? For Texas

In the last week or two the garden has just exploded. It's like someone hit a spring switch.

In addition to the lettuce and spinach continuing like mad (we keep eating salad like crazy and finding new recipes for the spinach), the chard is starting to take off and the leeks actually look like leeks now (as opposed to sad chives).

The sugar snap peas and potatoes are growing like gangbusters. Some of each are about a foot tall, I hope some of the peas start flowering soon!

Charlie made new trellises for the tomato plants. We have lots of tomato plants, I am hoping this is an insurance policy on us getting something! We are still garden amateurs, since we started last fall this is the our first round of warm weather plants. We are also practicing square foot gardening and tried to get only space saving varieties (with the exception of the celebrity tomato, which we potted). We will have to keep on top of the pruning.

I was amazed that the tomatoes started flowering only 2 weeks after transplanting! This is a sweet million cherry tomato, and if you look closely at the tip of my finger you can see a blurry image of the first tomato starting to form. Five of our tomato plants already have flowers. Yay!

We have potted zucchini and squash so that we don't have to worry about them spreading over the garden. So far, so good. We are trying to keep an eye out as we heard the squash borers can be quite a problem here.

Finally, ahh sweet sweet strawberries. We have about 20 strawberry plants, and I'd hoped this mean we'd get something from them. This week the strawberries went from just leaves to having 10 flowers. You can see the start of a strawberry here! We will need to find some bird netting stat. I hope they keep coming. I think strawberries are one of the few fruits that you can plant and harvest the same year (melons and possibly transplanted figs are the others I can think of). I would looove fresh fruit.

The oregano is also looking great! I'm glad I gave up on the seeds and bought the transplant. The rosemary, however, doesn't look any difference since the transplant.

 

Mac says he protects the garden from birds and squirrels. Extra treats please!

Garden harvest for the last 2 1/2 weeks: 
 15 cups romaine (we've mostly stopped harvesting whole heads and just harvest the outer leaves, we're concerned it will be too warm to start new plants)
20 cups mesclum salad mix
20 cups spinach
2 cups swiss chard
1 carrot (sad looking though)
2 Tbsp parsley (sounds sad, but I'm excited it finally grew some!)

In addition to these totals there is much more lettuce and spinach ready to harvest but we can't eat it all that fast. As is, we've had salad pretty almost every day we've eaten at home.


Most of the plants are in transition and not quite to bearing food yet. The tomatoes and strawberries are setting fruit, the peas haven't flowered yet, the carrots and basil appear are on their way.

A Late Garden Update

I wrote this post two weeks ago and forgot to hit publish. Oops! Much has changed since then so I will need to update again soon.

Lots has changed since the last garden update over a month ago. I apologize for the pictures, the light was not making it easy to take pictures.

We had a huge freeze and ended up losing the sugar snap peas since we could not cover them on the trellis, so we have replanted these. We also had damage to lots of plants and had to cut off leaves, but didn't actually lose anything else. The broccoli and cauliflower survived and we harvested those heads, but they did not grow as large as the first heads that we'd obtained before the freeze.


Small bed: romaine, spinach, mesclum, chard, leeks, garlic, strawberries and snow peas.

The lettuce and spinach are still growing great! Since we are at the end of the planting time for lettuce here, we are starting to harvest the outside leaves of romaine rather than harvesting whole heads. One of our heads is starting to grow really tall, going to seed maybe? Hopefully the others don't follow. It's not that warm yet!


Large bed: onions (white bermuda), carrots, tomatoes (several varieties), romaine (parris island), shallots, snow peas (oregon) and potatoes (red pontiac and yukon gold).  Not up yet: purple top turnips, armenian cucumber, green beans.

This weekend we planted warm weather crops: tomatoes, squash, cucumber, chard, and green beans. I've been trying to grow turnips, but something keeps eating them so this time we planted tons of seeds, hoping some seedlings survive. I also planted potatoes and onions in early February and the potatoes are starting to pop up.

Our desires for plants have overshot the space in our garden, so we are container gardening some. We have squash in huge containers, herbs of course, and I even found a small container variety of cucumber that is supposed to mature in 53 days. Here's hoping!



Garden harvest in last 6 weeks (ballpark):
2 heads romaine plus 5 cups (parris island)
20 cups mesclum salad mix
30 cups spinach (japanese giant and tyee)
1 cup chard
1/2 cup sugar snap and snow peas
1/2 cup green onion
2 heads cauliflower
2 heads broccoli
20 cups broccoli and cauliflower leaves (we souped these)
2 somewhat small carrots (we are kind of giving up on these guys)

This is our all local salad beets, carrots and tomatoes from the farmers market, lettuce and green onion from our garden.The lettuce and spinach have been producing like crazy and will definitely plant again. The cauliflower and broccoli take up a lot of room and in my opinion, not worth the room. I would be interested to try carrots again when they are not in the shade, but we haven't gotten much from those either.