With the onset of summer - and attention moving from spring to summer harvests - it's a good time to reflect on successes and failures or disappointments to date...


Main garden preparation - I wish I had dug up and prepared the back (lettuce/greens) rows earlier, to get more harvest in before the heat and inevitable bolting.  


Early garden layout - mixing beets, greens and lettuce in wide rows worked great.  As usual, weeds come in quickly and I am not disciplined enough to keep up with them.  Slugs were a bit of a problem as well.



Lettuce - I should have started the seeds earlier, but it was a good lettuce harvest, and I liked the mix of different varieties.  


Beets - starting them inside then transplanting into plug flats worked spectacularly!  We were delighted with an excellent harvest, and in fact, enjoyed the beet greens just as much as the beets themselves. I think I will skip Chioggia next year.


Red Russian Kale - it is easy and productive, but we just don't eat much of it, so this will be a pass for next year.


Swiss Chard Bright Lights - we ended up with 9 plants, which is about right - but it got a late start, so I will grow it in containers in the back yard next year.  We love that first Chart Tart of the spring!


Radishes - spectacular failure for the second year.  We end up with lovely tops, but only about 10% actually form decent radishes.  I give up!


Asian Greens - just wonderful, but I over-planted.  Broccoli Rabe (Italian, not Asian, of course) was a winner and I will plant more next year.  Red Choi, Kotsume, Savoy and the Red and Purple Mustards worked great, and transplanted well.  We ate lots of great sauteed greens.  The only one I would skip is Magenta Spreen - took a long time to germinate and grew very slowly - and Upland Cress, which we didn't care that much for.  


Garlic - planting it in the late fall and harvesting it in late spring/early summer the following year worked great - it was an easy, productive and trouble free crop.  Ajo Rojo wasn't as vigorous, and the bulbs not quite as big, as German White....which we will focus on next year.  A winner of a crop!  Here it is in late June and we have lots of the German one to dig yet - they are nice and tall with great looking scapes.


Potatoes - They were easy to plant, and since they are just blossoming and still in vigorous top growth, I have no idea how they will turn out.


The next update will involve Summer Squash, Cucumbers, Basil, Bush Beans, and Tomatoes.....

This is proving to be a really interesting, productive and enjoyable gardening season so far.  Interesting in the wide variations (some unexpected) in temperature and precipitation.  Productive in relation to the excellent lettuce, greens, beet and radish harvest.  And,enjoyable in being able to find the time to take it at a reasonable pace.

Some of those early season lessons:

• It seems as though anything can be planted thickly in plug flats (my dense planting method), and 

• Anything can be transplanted successfully.  

More specifically, some crops that either seemed to provide a challenge (beets), or warnings on the seed packet (Asian greens) are doing just great.  We are having our best beet crop ever due to the ability to use beet transplants and, thus, good spacing.  And if we realized how easy the Asian Greens, Radiccio and Broccoli Rabe were to grow, we'd have tried them out far earlier than this year (our first attempt with many of them).


So on to today....the experimental hot peppers in small pots were completed (it's going to be another complicated year of record keeping on these!), so I moved on to the first 40 grow bags of tomatoes from the Dwarf project.  I will provide a more complete update, but today I focused on the F2 generation growouts, and a few of the F4s.  I worked until I ran out of potting material, so another trip to Home Depot is needed before I can continue.  Another 40 grow bags are on the way, meaning there will be potential for 120 Dwarfs in my driveway, and another dozen in my garden.  Yikes!  Talk about a massive documentation, tasting, photographing and seed saving effort....but it is going to be loads of fun!