Sunday Harvest/Garden and Yard - June 6th

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men,Gang aft a-gley"  - Robert Burns.

For those non-geeks, or those not of the Scottish persuasion 'Gang aft a-gley' roughly translates to 'go often awry' -  back in the 90's you could use it to 'out' all the wannabe Scots that came out of the woodwork after BraveHeart hit the cinemas.

Anyone who's followed recent posts (both of you), know I'm up for a busy few weeks - between the upsurge or people needing work done on their properties, and the blueberry harvest, this time of year whizzes on by at a fast clip.  Lucky for me it's also the time when there really isn't very much you can do until July; Summer planting for Autumn.
At this time there's a lot of things that get a little behind and need to be caught up on, and Sunday seemed like a good day to play catch up.  Pool maintenance, mowing, composting, cleaning up the yard.  The plan was to then unleash the kids in the pool for a few hours and weed/fertilize (yep STILL haven't fertilized)/harvest then let them inside. They'd crash out - I could catch up the laundry and a few other bits, and we could eat dinner and watch Game of Thrones.... bliss.

Well it seems the weather had other plans.  The kids got about 30 mins in the pool, and everything past that point went out the window.   Wow! yes! My path is underwater!
This was about 10 mins after it started to come down, so as you imagine it was pretty heavy.  It's since past, but it's too dark to take any decent pics of anything.
I'm just hoping it stays clear so I don't have to reshuffle my work schedule.

That's a pretty big bean!

I did brave the thunder for 5 minutes to grab the full grown beans. We won't be eating them tonight, but I wouldn't want to leave them on the vine too much longer. Again, consistently getting bigger and in greater quantities.
This was a single weeks growth, and all the plants still continue to bud and flower.
I also grabbed some kale, trimmed from the lower leaves of the 3 sizable plants.  My bowl was overflowing with a goodly amount (enough to stuff a gallon sized ziploc bag - wilted down it was a dinner side dish for 3)
To look at the plants you'd never know they were trimmed, so this will be a regular on the plate for a little while.



The propagation containers have overflowed with water several times.  With all the rain the blend of soil that was turned over and mixed has nearly self sorted back into it's respective groups.  I was going to write it off and start again when I noticed that the kale I'd put in there on the 5th had already sprouted.  Blew my mind since it's planting window by hardiness zone was passing (May being the last month) - so a few bonus plants that may find their way into the main garden!
With the way things went this Spring, I've got a little ways before the Summer yielding plants kick in, so I'm sorry to say this may be the 'beans and kale show' for another week.

My 'holdover pepper' from last year, the last of the Garden #2 peppers, is putting forward some nice lil green fruit.  The other new plants are doing fairly well - some get more sun than others, and the ones that get more shade seem to be doing much better.  Either way the shaded plants are still getting PLENTY of sunshine throughout the day.  I'll be trying to narrow down what squares will keep them best over winter if I can.  I'd gladly forfeit some of the shadier ones near the house for near permanent plants as I'm planning to expand the garden (funds permitting) by another 16 square feet over Summer in time for Autumn, but I'll leave the exact plans on that for another post.

Queen of Hearts are continuing to put out more green tomatoes. They'll ripen up when the heat of Summer starts to hit them - These are not a 'sure thing' even though I've had no critters thus far trying to nom them.  But either way I'll be taking seed from these plants.  They grew to a nice size in a container, haven't branched out all over the place, and seem to put out a nice sized fruit for what I want. If I could get another 5 of these planted I'd be making pasta sauce all Summer long.

Ok a crap blurry photo, but the sun had gone and the rain looked like it was coming back. The butternut squash is meandering across the concrete slab at the end of the driveway (where I currently store a bunch of junk) and has put out this nice sized lil squash. With the rain and the sun I'm hoping this keeps growing.  If I only get a single squash off this plant I'll consider the experiment a success.  The regular summer squash are producing, but it's small early squash that hits the dirt and rots out before gaining any size - I'm hoping this will change in the very near future. All things considered, squash in containers is going along AOK, the only thing I'd change is perhaps trying to buy or build larger self watering pots.

Potatoes are starting to yellow up, and in the 'tater pot' one of the plants has already died off. This isn't a bad thing! At this point all the remaining energy is going into the tubers that are formed to finish them off. I could harvest lots of baby potatoes at this point if I wanted to (oh and how I am tempted!) but I'm still in the process of testing the 2 systems in my somewhat unscientific comparison (the next test will be a LOT more objective - this one was very ad-hoc and had several things out of my control).
Potato-wise in Georgia the weather and seasons are such that we are supposed to be able to do 3 crops of potatoes in a year - A Spring planting, a late Summer planting, and an Autumn planting that although won't put out full sized spuds, should be able to give you new potatoes at Christmas - something I'm certainly going to be trying.
In my next planting I'm going to be adding a couple more crates to continue what looks like a good method for me, while the original and the tater pot go head to head once again.  I really want to get more going in the 'tater department as I plan to have this as the 'entrance point' of new soils into the system. I'll rotate the soil out after a potato harvest to be used to top up or fill new containers and squares.

One thing I want to try  that is still within my time-frame deals with corn and polyculture.  I'm all about getting as much as I can from every square foot, and if I can get it to take on part of the garden maintenance, then I'm there!  When I planted corn this Spring, it was something I'd  had on my mind since last Autumn. I'd planted beans and peas there in order to rotate the corn in. The beans/peas put nitrogen into the soil which the corn needs and takes up in the next planting.  The Native American Indians had been doing this one better for centuries - the '3 sisters', planting corn, beans, and squash together was an absolutely brilliant example of plants looking after each other in several ways, and sharing the work of the farmer.  The beans climb the corn, the squash leaves shade the roots and prevent weeds, the beans give back nitrogen.
Now I can't put my squash with my corn (for spatial reasons), and I use bush beans rather than pole (climbing) beans,  but I can still use part of the principle - increasing the bean harvest while at the same time giving much needed nitrogen to the corn.  This is something I overlooked when I planted and had since brushed it off as 'too late' - but reviewing my seeds today I found the variety I'd bought as a replacement actually should be planted right now.... so this is one experiment I can still try this season... I'll be going more in depth on this 'happy mistake' in a future post on seeds and planning.

Anyways that's the weekly Garden update.

Cheers!