Xiaoniu 小妞

Despite the odd weather and run in with local fauna the garden has been doing well for us this year. We’ve learned our limitations and learned some other valuable lessons. If we’re smart we’ll plan things out better for next year.

This is the first year we’ve had issues with animals. During one night rabbits ate up two of my kohlrabi plants, right down to the ground. We finished putting the fence up immediately afterwards. A couple weeks later deer got into the garden. They ate up another kohlrabi plant, this one already big enough to harvest, and they ate the tops of a good portion of the strawberry plants. That night I bought some deer and rabbit repellent and sprayed everything down. What a stink. The repellent is a concentrate made up of 25% putrescent egg solids. Blah. Just opening up the bottle was enough to make you want to vomit. Thankfully, the smell goes away after it dries. I’ve put it down twice and haven’t seen any sign of deer since.

A lesson we learned is that mulching is a must. We slacked off on keeping the garden mulched with grass clippings this year and we are still paying the price. Keeping up with weeding takes a lot of time. Keeping up with weeding when you have two kids and far more weeds than usual makes for stressful gardening time. Thankfully, Sue has put in hours of time weeding by hand and I’ve been mulching like crazy to keep the weeds to a minimum.

We’ve also learned a lesson about bolting and growing spinach. Spinach is a cold weather plant, so you put it down very early in spring. Once the temperature rises to around 70 degrees the spinach plants will bolt, or go directly to flower an seed. This happened with Sue’s Chinese spinach. It’s too bad, I was looking forward to having some this year since last year’s spinach harvest was dismal. Lesson learned; plant spinach very early next year.

Despite learning about overcrowding the garden last year we still have ended up with a very full garden. The egg plants are doing well, but the tomatoes are just growing wild. I’ve been staking them like crazy, but the plants we got this year are wild. Once the tomatoes start growing we’ll probably be up to our ears in them. The weather hasn’t been that great lately, so the tomatoes haven’t taken off yet. We’ve only gotten a few small ones out of the patio tomato plans.

As for the other plants the summer squash (zucchini) is like mad. We’ve been eating them nearly daily and are just keeping up with what the plant(s) grows. We’ve had a good crop of cucumbers so far too. Five plants are growing well and we’ve gotten plenty of cukes out of the garden so far. We’ve also gotten quite a few egg plants. And what kohlrabit we had left has been eaten up. Chives are growing strong as ever.

We have fresh leeks and big tomatoes to look forward to in the coming weeks. The leeks are close to the size we want and the tomato plants are producing a batch of green tomatoes. They should be ripe soon. The cukes, squash and egg plants are likely to continue unabated as well.

The si gua is not likely to be good this year. We started them too late so the plants will not be big enough to bear fruit any time soon. The canteloupe plants are doing well and flowering, but I’m not sure when they’ll start producing fruit. I hope they start soon as there is only so much warm weather left.

Some time soon I’m going to start planning out our fall crops. I’m thinking of butternut squash and cabbage. Maybe a few other small things that grow well as the temps drop off after summer. We’ll just have to see what is available and what will grow best. Nothing beats fresh veggies from your own garden.