I visited the G.W. community garden yesterday morning with Elin, my neighbor and fellow gardener. We hadn’t been to the garden in a couple of weeks and were excited to see how things looked at this point in the early summer. The second wave of planting has taken off and everything looks luscious, but most veggies are not quite ready to pick. I give them a few more weeks maybe? Our official garden plan is so handy for seeing what will be ready to harvest and when. For example, the cucumbers should be ready in July. Can’t wait!
What you see here are red cabbage that needs some time. The garden plan says it should be ready in mid-July. In between is the kale that’s pretty much over its peak ripeness. In the far bed, you can see the carrot tops looking healthy. I picked one and they’re pretty small yet. The plan says they should be ready now, but they seem to be running a bit behind schedule.
The squash blossoms look stunning and I even saw the start of a yellow squash on the vine. These guys should be ready in a few weeks.
The beans are dutifully climbing up their bamboo tent poles. We need to give them a few more weeks and then can expect to harvest them for most of the summer.
We harvested some red chard and lettuce and later enjoyed a vitamin-packed salad for lunch.
Unfortunately, a few of the climbing peas didn’t weather the recent spike in temperatures.
But the new round of carrot starts are doing fine. Elin took some time thinning the several rows so that the carrots have room to expand under the soil. (We had sprinkled the seeds liberally. They emerge too crammed together and need to be thinned.) Next, we gave the entire garden a thorough watering. (We first started the soaker hoses in the potato patch while we weeded and harvested the greens.)
After about an hour and change in the early Sunday sunshine, we finished another community garden work session, although there was nothing chore-like about it. Hot, sweaty, and grubby, with our bellies full of freshly picked lettuce and sugar snap peas straight from the vine, we happily carried the rest of our bounty home to share with our families.
How are your gardens doing?
