Category: gardening

Time to interrupt the music posts with a check-in on this year’s garden. Now that the beds are freshly weeded and mulched, I can look at it without wincing. This year I did tomatoes: Black Krim, San Marzano (new); peppers: sweet, jalapeno, habanero; corn (new); Kirby cucumbers; garlic; gai lan; kale; carrots; potatoes; snap peas; pole beans; arugula; raspberries (new); strawberries (new); herbs: thai and sweet basil, thyme, chocolate mint, rosemary; flowers: marigolds and nasturtiums. I also just tossed a few brussels sprouts seeds in a pot to see if I can get anything with those in the fall.

Right now a few tomatoes have come in but most are still green. The corn just got its first set of silks. The berries aren’t doing anything at all. Last year’s A-frame trellis is holding up for the tomatoes and I made a small 3-post trellis for the cucumbers, which seem to be doing well (2 jars of refrigerator pickles so far). Loving straw as a mulch compared to grass clippings (weedy) and wood chips (doesn’t break down enough) that I’d used before.

It’s once again that time of year where I have enough growing out in the garden that I can share a couple of photos. Pictured below: some marigolds, gai lan, sugar snap peas, and unripe tomatoes. Last week I made some garlic mayo from harvested garlic scapes — a delicious addition to grilled burgers.

This weekend I finished up an A-frame trellis for this year’s garden that I’m hoping will make it easier to grow tomatoes up a string and some pole beans or peas on a mesh on the outside. Last year’s better boys that I’d clipped along a piece of twine were by far the lowest maintenance tomatoes ever, so doubling down on that.

I rigorously planned this trellis as you can see from the blueprint. Still, I made some last minute changes, like anchoring it to rebar with zip-ties instead of driving the posts in directly — since I used the cheapest 1x2s ever made, it was highly likely that tapping them with a hammer would’ve resulted in catastrophic failure. Zip ties will likely be upgraded to a more permanent clamp at some point.

I “built” a cold frame this weekend to start hardening off the several gai lan plants I have under grow lights in the basement. I knew I was saving all of those furnace filters for a reason.