It’s been a while!
It’s been a while since I wrote a post. Summer time got very busy and while the garden kept growing, I didn’t get to update as much as I had hoped. Here’s a run down of how things went:
The sugar peas grew really well in the hanging basket and gave us several harvests – it seemed to just keep growing more and more pea pods! However, we have to make sure we’re at home when they’re ready to be picked!
The Swiss chard grew well as cut-and-come-again baby salad greens, but I had a mid-summer infestation of leaf miners. These little pests bore tunnels between the top and bottom layers of the leaf, and cause a fair bit of damage! I had to keep cutting and throwing out the leaves with the leaf miners to get rid of them to prevent them from turning into moths which would then lay more eggs in the soil. I broke the cycle by the end of August, but by then some of the plants had bolted. Next year I’ll plant fewer plants and let them grow larger. I’ll also use a row cover to keep the moths away!
I only ended up with one (small) butternut squash – barely 6 inches in length. The photo above is a picture of a female fruit-bearing blossom. I had to hand-pollinate the blossoms with the male blossoms because I only had one plant and the flowers opened one at a time. Next year, I don’t think I will grow squash again.
I had also planted some kale and gai lan seedlings in mid-July for winter gardening, and set them out in August to get acclimated to the outdoors. However, they got decimated by cabbage moth larvae – big fat green caterpillars!
So I wound up direct seeding my pots on September 10th with kale, radishes, gai lan, Swiss chard, and beets. We had an amazingly warm and dry September, so luckily most of the seedlings had a great start! More on that next time!
Also, I’m hoping to get into a community garden plot next year, so I’ll be able to have a proper garden! I’ll still grow in the containers on my patio, but having a garden plot will allow me to grow a bigger range of veggies!
