Globe zucchinis and butternut squash.
Categories: Garden News
Posts from the “Sustainable Life” Category
We’re picking up steam in the garden. Seth and I gathered another quart-sized jar worth of sweet peas, which are starting to die out in all this heat. They’re tangled up with the bean vines, so I am careful with the clippers as I clear out the bed to give the beans room to grow. Problem is it looks as though someone is tatting lace with my bean leaves. It would be nice if I knew which bug to blame. There’s got to be a book out there called 1001 Garden Pests and How to Murder Them All or something. When we started this garden, Seth insisted we should let the pests be because they’re just doing what they do. But now that 80…
Categories: Garden News, Harvest Time
I never thought we’d get here, but here we are at the night of the first tomato. I picked this baby yesterday, that nice red jewel in yesterday’s post. Of course, one cannot say that one grew this tomato entirely herself as it was the size of a marble when we purchased this plant. This does not deter me from crowing. It is a Sioux by breed, though I’m not sure that matters at this point, what with the tomatoes growing so closely together. It was red, warm, hitting its peak, and delicious. We toasted each other and gulped it down.
Categories: Garden News, Milestones
Perhaps it was optimistic to plant so many tomato plants when all the community garden old-timers were predicting another hard year of blight. No one harvested a single tomato last year they all said. Blight wiped out everyone’s crops. They say luck favors the bold. Or is it that you make your own luck? Whatever the case, we have 35 tomato plants and more than half of them have set forth green globes. I want tomatoes clear through to next summer, and I’ll do whatever it takes to make my babies as healthy as possible. If you swung by the gardens this morning, you might have seen me — er, scratch that — you might not have seen me crouched among my tomato plants,…
Categories: Garden Tips
Tagged: community garden, garden, tomato, tomato plants, tomatoes
The nice part about working in a garden plot on a piece of conservation land is that there are lots of buzzing, happy hungry bees. There are wild bumblebees and domesticated honeybees from the bee boxes in the corner, and other flying creatures that are doing something right because my 3/4 of my tomato plants have tomatoes on them. I just never seem to catch them in my garden.
Categories: Garden News
Want to know something awesome? Squash vines root themselves periodically along the length of their growing vine. This is handy in case some heartless insect desiccates the initial stem of the vine, making you worry that maybe your two lonesome squash vines are not going to make it. They will! They root themselves elsewhere! Want to know how I found this out? I accidentally pulled up the roots.
Categories: Garden News, Oops
Tagged: butternut squash, garden, squash
It still amazes me that I have a garden and it is growing. Tomato plants! Peas! Zucchini and basil and squash. Two months ago it was a square of dirt and now we have a jungle of tangled vines that might produce produce. Is anyone else amazed by this? It would help if I kept things in better shape, I’m sure. I pulled five five-gallon buckets’ worth of weeds out of five raised beds. That seems like an awful lot for one 16’x25′ piece of land. Still. My little patch of earth is producing sugar peas and wee baby cucumbers and wee baby eggplants. I pulled carrots and chives and dug up some garlic this week. I transplanted a few Thai basil plants so…
Categories: Garden News
Tagged: basil, community garden, cucumber, eggplant, garden, massachusetts, victory garden
It’s late, but I put in two varieties of spinach and some arugula today. I also planted basil, parsley, and marigold seeds, but it might be too early for those. Two days ago, I convinced a man with a lawn mower to dump two loads of weed-free cut grass in my garden. He kept saying he probably wouldn’t have time, or he might have time, or maybe he wouldn’t have time, but he might do it. He even flagged me and Lily down to say he was still considering dumping the grass in my plot, but maybe he wouldn’t get to it. Well, he did. And now my garden has that sweetish, rotting smell of grass digesting itself. I don’t even know if it’s…
Categories: Garden News
Earth Morning: an ever-growing tiny adventure 