Weekly Veggie Patch Update 6/23/08

I have off all week, so I'm hoping to catch up with some of the things that are going on. We had a LOT of work done around the property on Saturday and I'll be posting pictures, you won't want to miss it.

Active week, we put up the tomato cage structures. They were heavy wire and a little big so we trimmed them. I do have little cherry tomatoes and another on the Mortgage Lifter plant. No peppers yet, but they’re getting ready to flower.

Matt started working on the fencing around the blueberry bush (what will eventually be the blueberry patch). All we needed to do is put a net over the bush to keep the birds out. He makes a split-rail fence. *sigh* Over-engineer much? Ya think?

I also got the layering cups on the blueberry bush, so hopefully in 2-3 months we’ll have 3 little blueberries to plant in our newly fenced plot.

I picked a lot of snap peas this week, maybe 5lb. They will have to be picked about every other day, but they’re not. A lot of what I picked was past prime and we’ll need to shell them, but no big deal as we’ll then have shelled petit pois to freeze as well as pods. Some of the vines must be approaching 7 feet tall! I’m not sure if I should attribute that to all the rain or the very rich lasagna garden I created.

I also harvested the kale and broccoli. The broccoli plants did something strange. I have 4 plants: two produced nice broccoli and the other two buttoned. I don’t know why that happened. I pulled the two that buttoned and put in another cucumber trellis.

The onions are all starting to bulb, some of them are getting pretty big. I’m guesstimating that I’ll be harvesting them the middle to end of July. I’m planning on leaving that bed empty for the rest of the summer, amending it with some compost and/or well-rotted manure stuff and then planting spinach in it for the fall. I’ll probably let the spinach winter over so I don’t have to plant any for the spring.

We also finished the 2nd asparagus bed and planted it. Everything came up in the first bed, so in a few years we’ll have some nice asparagus to harvest. Woo-hoo!