![\"Garden,](\"https:\/\/kristinjanz.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/IMG_5531.jpg\")
<\/a>May 5th<\/p><\/div>\n
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A month later, on June 2nd (scroll down), a lot has changed. The fava beans in the lower left corner have gotten much taller, and the wooden poles show where I’ve added tomatoes and pole beans. The pole beans (lower right corner)\u00c2\u00a0either haven’t come up or are too small to see from the balcony. The radishes and spinach in the lower half of the long box have come and gone, although few of them got to the size I’d hoped for before I had to pull them out to make room for other crops I wanted more.\u00c2\u00a0 Although this is the sunniest spot in my yard, it gets maybe 6 hours of full sunlight, at best, and a lot of experts will tell you that you need a minimum of 6-8.\u00c2\u00a0 I find this is not strictly true, especially with raised beds, but less sunlight does mean that crops take longer to mature.\u00c2\u00a0 Remember, their only energy source, which they use to convert carbon dioxide and water into plant material, is sunlight.\u00c2\u00a0 The less sunlight they get, the less rapidly they’ll be able to do it.<\/p>\n
The komatsuna in the upper left corner, which was so small a month ago, got nice and big in the interim between these two photos.\u00c2\u00a0 I ate it all.\u00c2\u00a0 You can see that the red mustard greens a couple squares down are quite large now, as is the chervil below that.\u00c2\u00a0 Moving right, you’ll see three squares of beets with lush, abundant greens, and an empty square.\u00c2\u00a0 The empty square had baby bok choy that grew to maturity and was eaten over the course of the previous month.\u00c2\u00a0 Last month, the beets were just barely coming up.<\/p>\n
A note on greens.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re doing square foot gardening, one square isn’t enough.\u00c2\u00a0 Once you’ve cooked down a big handful of leaves picked from a single square, even if you use every leaf from every plant, you barely have enough for one serving.<\/p>\n
Red mustard greens did really well.\u00c2\u00a0 They grew quickly, and they didn’t bolt (i.e., send up a flower stalk instead of producing more tasty leaves) when it started to get warm, so I could just cut off leaves as I wanted to eat them and leave the rest of the plant to grow new ones.\u00c2\u00a0 The komatsuna was already starting to bolt by late May.\u00c2\u00a0 The mizuna didn’t even produce many leaves before bolting.\u00c2\u00a0 Springtime in New England is tough on cool weather crops.\u00c2\u00a0 The ground doesn’t thaw out until late March or April, but it’s already getting too hot for a lot of vegetables in late May or early June, and that’s just not enough time for a lot of vegetables to mature.<\/p>\n
Moving over from the beets, you’ll see a square of Swiss chard and one of carrots below that.\u00c2\u00a0 The marjoram under the carrots is too small to be visible, and you can just barely see the four cilantro plants in the square under the marjoram.\u00c2\u00a0 The four squares on the upper right edge of the box have just been planted with more Swiss chard, yellow bush beans, and nasturtiums.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>June 2nd<\/p><\/div>\n
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Scroll down again to see the garden\u00c2\u00a0on the 4th of July.\u00c2\u00a0 What a difference a month makes!\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The fava beans are even taller, the tomatoes have shot up behind them like weeds, and you can see the small pole bean plants starting to climb up their wooden stakes.\u00c2\u00a0 Chervil is overflowing its square, the beets and Swiss chard are huge, and you can see the bush bean plants in the upper right corner spilling over the side of the box.\u00c2\u00a0 I pulled the mustard greens, because I was tired of only getting a few leaves at a time and because they were shading out the beets next to them, and replanted\u00c2\u00a0with leaf lettuce (you can’t see the lettuce yet).\u00c2\u00a0 I was eating the beets and Swiss chard by now.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d eaten some fava beans, too.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t get many fava beans, possibly because the tomatoes blocked too much of their light (more on this\u00c2\u00a0below).\u00c2\u00a0 They also had a serious aphid problem.\u00c2\u00a0 So did the chervil.\u00c2\u00a0 I tried a folk remedy of crushed garlic in diluted dish soap, but I don’t think it worked.\u00c2\u00a0 Next year I’m hauling out the neem oil spray the moment I see aphids.<\/p>\n
Speaking of insect pests, this was also the summer I learned about leafminers.\u00c2\u00a0 I went away for a week and a half just after the June picture was taken.\u00c2\u00a0 I noticed some brown, dried-out blotchy patches on some of the beet leaves and some white eggs on the undersides of the leaves, but didn’t think too much about it.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not all that squeamish about insects in my vegetables, and Donald tries not to look too closely.\u00c2\u00a0 While I was gone, Donald noticed that the problem was getting worse.\u00c2\u00a0 (Donald tries to pay as little attention as possible to my garden, but he was watering it for me, and all the dead brown leaves made him wonder if he was doing something wrong and killing my plants.)\u00c2\u00a0 I got back, and found that all the beets and the Swiss chard had been infested.<\/p>\n
A bit of Internet research revealed that I had spinach leafminers<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Spinach, beets, and Swiss chard are all in the same family (beets and Swiss chard are actually the same species), and the leafminer larvae enjoy all of them.\u00c2\u00a0 Spraying apparently doesn’t do much good (especially if you’re trying to stick to organic pesticides), because the larvae are protected inside the leaf.\u00c2\u00a0 (I tried the organic neem oil spray, but it didn’t really help.)\u00c2\u00a0 The only way to deal with a leafminer infestation is to inspect the underside of each leaf every day or two and pick off and squish any eggs.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ll invariably miss some, so you also have to watch for signs of larvae inside the leaves.\u00c2\u00a0 Some sources say to pick off and discard any infested leaves.\u00c2\u00a0 Depending on how bad the leafminer problem has gotten before you noticed it, this may not leave the plant with enough leaves to thrive.\u00c2\u00a0 I just tore off the part of the leaf surrounding where I could see the larvae tunneling around, and made sure to squish the little maggots.\u00c2\u00a0 I also made sure to throw any infested leaf parts out in the regular trash instead of the compost, since I put the compost back into the garden as fertilizer.<\/p>\n Once I started picking off eggs, the beets and Swiss chard began to recover, and you can see that they look pretty healthy in the photograph below.\u00c2\u00a0 The leafminers do stop laying eggs in September, fortunately, so there is an end to the egg-picking.\u00c2\u00a0 Some people recommend row covers to keep the adult leafminer flies away from the target plants, but that doesn’t work in a mixed bed like the one I had, where you’ve also planted vegetables that require pollination by insects (like\u00c2\u00a0beans).<\/p>\n A note on tomatoes in square foot gardening.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s some debate online as to whether you can actually grow a full-sized indeterminate tomato plant in a single square foot of a raised bed.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, you can.\u00c2\u00a0 I had three tomato plants in the raised bed (Cherokee Purple (a full-sized heirloom tomato), and\u00c2\u00a0Supersweet 100 and Sungold (both cherry tomatoes)).\u00c2\u00a0 Each had a single square, and I didn’t prune them at all, I just tied the side shoots into the stake every few inches.\u00c2\u00a0 Remember, I don’t even get the 8 hours of sunlight that some experts will tell you that you can’t possibly grow tomatoes without.\u00c2\u00a0 I also had three tomato plants in 16″ pots, on the sunniest part of the yard edge (Pineapple, Brandywine, and something that was supposed to be Green Zebra but produced purplish-brown tomatoes instead).\u00c2\u00a0 The tomatoes in the bed grew taller, were at least as productive as the container plants, and had fewer problems with blossom end rot (usually caused by underwatering; it’s hard to give a potted tomato enough water during the heat of summer).\u00c2\u00a0 I do fertilize my tomatoes regularly with an organic tomato fertilizer, which I also mixed into the soil along with a lot of compost and some kelp meal, and I mulched the soil surface around the plants when I put them in with dried leaves and additional compost.<\/p>\n The caveat is that a tomato plant in a single one-foot square will block the sunlight from everything around it.\u00c2\u00a0 This started to become a huge problem for the fava beans, which are on the north side of the tomatoes, and shaded by them.\u00c2\u00a0 But, as the summer went on, it became an issue for everything else in that lower half of the bed.\u00c2\u00a0 It would have been even more of an issue if I’d tried to put in sun-loving plants like peppers.<\/p>\n Also, a 1″-diameter wooden stake is not strong enough for a large, healthy tomato plant with plenty of room to grow an extensive root system.\u00c2\u00a0 They worked well enough for the tomato plants in the containers, but the stakes supporting the two cherry tomato plants eventually snapped under the stress of trying to support all that weight.\u00c2\u00a0 (Fortunately, this didn’t happen until October, when the cherry tomato harvest was tapering off.)\u00c2\u00a0 In 2015, I made sure each tomato plant was tied to three different stakes surrounding it (although some stakes were shared between plants), and this seemed to\u00c2\u00a0distribute the weight better.<\/p>\n This\u00c2\u00a0was the second year I bought tomato plants from a garden center and got a mislabeled one.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I was\u00c2\u00a0sufficiently annoyed by this that\u00c2\u00a0I\u00c2\u00a0started my own from seeds in 2015.\u00c2\u00a0 I had to buy a grow light set-up for this,\u00c2\u00a0but that\u00c2\u00a0also allowed me to start okra inside instead of direct seeding it.\u00c2\u00a0 During the 2014 season, I tried planting okra directly in large containers\u00c2\u00a0in the yard and\u00c2\u00a0hardly got any, because you have to wait until mid-June here in Boston to plant okra outside.\u00c2\u00a0 It takes at least 2 months for it\u00c2\u00a0to start producing in my less-than-optimally-lit yard, and then by mid-September the nights are too cold for it again.\u00c2\u00a0 I also need more than 2 plants (I planted three, but some insect larvae or worms ate through the stem of the weakest one).\u00c2\u00a0 I was lucky if I got 2 or 3 okra pods per week from each plant,\u00c2\u00a0and that\u00c2\u00a0doesn’t go too far.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately, a couple of vendors at the Lexington Farmers Market sell it, so I was able to supplement my harvest when I wanted okra for dinner.\u00c2\u00a0 (In 2015, the okra that I started inside and transplanted did much better.)<\/p>\n You can also see that I put in a second raised bed, to the right of the first.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n July 4th<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Scroll down to\u00c2\u00a0a month later, and the beans and tomatoes have really taken off.\u00c2\u00a0 The tomatoes have overtopped their stakes, and the pole beans aren’t far behind.\u00c2\u00a0 I pulled the fava beans, since they weren’t producing much anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 I never got a lot of fava beans.\u00c2\u00a0 Two one-foot squares aren’t enough, apparently.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe if I’d waited longer, they would have picked up again.\u00c2\u00a0 This often happens with beans.\u00c2\u00a0 They produce a crop, then the harvest tapers off and you think you aren’t going to get much more; but a month later, the plants start producing again.\u00c2\u00a0 It happened with the green pole beans and with the yellow bush beans.\u00c2\u00a0 But I didn’t give the poor favas a chance to prove themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 The tomatoes were blocking most of their sunlight, though, and they also prefer cooler weather.<\/p>\n I’ve harvested a lot of the beets.\u00c2\u00a0 You can see the carrots that replaced the komatsuna in the top left corner, and lettuce a couple squares down from that.<\/p>\n You can’t see much else, because the crazy tomatoes and beans are blocking the view.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n August 2nd<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n If you scroll down again, you’ll see\u00c2\u00a0a view from the ground, also taken on August 2nd.\u00c2\u00a0 You can see even better here how the beans and tomatoes have tangled themselves together.\u00c2\u00a0 You can see the yellow bush beans hanging over the edge of the box, to the right.\u00c2\u00a0 And you can also see the second garden box, and some of the containers (with additional tomatoes, okra, and some edamame right at the edge).\u00c2\u00a0 The garden box in front has two squares of fennel in the upper left corner, and then the lush and abundant foliage of some green bush beans (the skinny French-style haricots verts<\/em>).<\/p>\n It was a huge\u00c2\u00a0mistake to plant those green bush beans as early as I did, in the middle of the box.\u00c2\u00a0 Bush beans are very bushy, so they shaded too much of what I planted later on in the surrounding squares.<\/p>\n In the rear box, to the right of the bean-tomato thicket, a few small squash plants have come up.\u00c2\u00a0 These are an Asian squash.\u00c2\u00a0 I have an elderly Sikh neighbor who stops by every now and then to look at my garden.\u00c2\u00a0 He can’t speak much English, and I speak even less of his language (which I think he once tried to tell me\u00c2\u00a0was Punjabi, but all the words I actually recognize seem to be the same as Hindi words I’ve learned).\u00c2\u00a0 But one day (June 27th, to be precise), he brought over four squash seeds and planted them in my garden.\u00c2\u00a0 He told me they were “lauki”.\u00c2\u00a0 I looked this up in the glossary of one of my Indian cookbooks and found that it’s also called opo squash.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’ve seen it at the farmers markets and at H-Mart (a Korean grocery store) labeled “Chinese long squash”.\u00c2\u00a0 Anyway, it’s not one of those New World summer squashes or winter squashes.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The lauki have\u00c2\u00a0come up in the photograph below, but I think my neighbor planted them too late.\u00c2\u00a0 End of June is a bit late to be planting squash, in New England.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Of course, it isn’t\u00c2\u00a0warm enough to plant them a whole lot earlier.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n August 2nd, side-view<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n It makes more sense to show only the side-view from now on, since you can’t see anything past the tomatoes and pole beans anymore in balcony shots.<\/p>\n In the next shot, you can see that the pole beans and tomatoes have gotten into even more of a tangle, and the lauki squash plants are spilling out over the edge of the box.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve pulled the bush beans, so now you can see the nasturtiums that were hiding behind them in the rear box.\u00c2\u00a0 In the front box, with those bush beans gone, the cauliflower and broccoli on the left have started to grow, and there are some small lettuce plants here and there.\u00c2\u00a0 The fennel in the upper left-hand corner of the front box is getting a lot taller, too.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n September 8th<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n The next shot, taken on October 7th, is a good illustration of how Massachusetts has a considerably longer fall growing season than many people (including Massachusetts residents) realize.\u00c2\u00a0 I still have the Great Pole Bean and Tomato Forest, nasturtiums continue to overflow the box, and the lettuce, arugula, and mustard greens in the front box–planted in late summer–are just reaching peak productivity.\u00c2\u00a0 The broccoli and cauliflower plants are pretty big too, but apparently not big enough for this time of year, due to the excessive shade they got early on from those bush beans.\u00c2\u00a0 Still just leaves on them, no heads.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n October 7th<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n It isn’t until November that things have started to wind down.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve had a few light frosts at this point, so I’ve pulled all the beans, tomatoes, and okra.\u00c2\u00a0 I also pulled the broccoli and cauliflower.\u00c2\u00a0 Not because it was too cold for them, but because I’d given up on ever getting heads, and they were shading the kale and collards around them.\u00c2\u00a0 I just cooked and ate the broccoli and cauliflower leaves as if they were collards.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re all the same species, after all:\u00c2\u00a0 cabbage, kale, collards, kohlrabi, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts.<\/p>\n Kale, radishes, and lettuce are all doing just fine in November, though.\u00c2\u00a0 And nasturtiums, which are still flowering.\u00c2\u00a0 I pulled one of the two squares of fennel because I wanted to eat it, but the other one is still there.\u00c2\u00a0 Apparently you shouldn’t plant fennel next to anything, which I didn’t know at the time.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s supposed to stunt the growth of other plants.\u00c2\u00a0 It didn’t seem to hurt the lettuce in the square next to it, though.\u00c2\u00a0 The\u00c2\u00a0collards, also in a square next to fennel, never got that big, but they were also shaded by a large cauliflower plant for the first couple of months, so I’m hesitant to blame the fennel.\u00c2\u00a0 I guess you to have to be careful with fennel if you live some place with mild winters, because it can become an invasive weed.\u00c2\u00a0 But we don’t have to worry too much about mild winters in New England.\u00c2\u00a0 We especially didn’t have to worry about that in 2014, known popularly by locals as “Snowmaggedon” or something along those lines.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n November 4th<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Here’s another picture taken on the same day.\u00c2\u00a0 Another shot from the 2nd floor porch, looking down, since the pole beans and tomatoes are no longer blocking the view of everything else.\u00c2\u00a0 You can see the remaining fennel now (the bushy fern things in the lower left corner of the box on the right).\u00c2\u00a0 In the left-hand box, you can see daikon (left-hand edge, 3rd square down), and parsley (left-hand edge, 3rd square up).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n November 4th again, now looking down from above<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n And, finally, on December 5th, almost everything has been pulled up for the winter.\u00c2\u00a0 Most of the squares have been covered with the contents of my compost bin, a mixture of compost, leaves, and partially decomposed kitchen scraps.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course, it’s\u00c2\u00a0better to put fully decomposed compost on one’s garden, but I didn’t have enough, and I figured things would decompose just as well spread out on top of dirt, exposed to sunlight and the elements, as they would inside a covered bin.\u00c2\u00a0 And it seemed to work fairly well.\u00c2\u00a0 In the spring, when I was ready to plant again, I mixed it all into the top few inches of soil, pulling out any large pieces of obviously undecomposed material and throwing them back into the compost bin to continue breaking down.\u00c2\u00a0 In this photo, I haven’t gotten around to covering all the squares, so you can still see some where the white of the perlite in the raised bed soil is quite visible.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n December 5th–all done for the year!<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Some gardening resources claim that parsley, spinach, collards,\u00c2\u00a0and kale are all hardy enough to survive a New England winter.\u00c2\u00a0 My parsley, collards, Red Siberian kale, and Tuscan kale were all quite dead come spring, even though I mulched all the plants with compost.\u00c2\u00a0 But the spinach and curly kale did come back once the snow had melted, and I was able to enjoy a home-grown salad of fresh baby greens in early April before pulling those plants up for the new planting season.<\/p>\n I won’t say too much about the 2015 garden, since this post is already longer than some short stories.\u00c2\u00a0 But I will say that I planted most of the shorter raised bed, the one on the right, with asparagus crowns last spring.\u00c2\u00a0 Asparagus is a perennial crop that takes a few years to really get going.\u00c2\u00a0 I should be able to pick a few spears in 2016, more in 2017, and enjoy a full harvest in 2018.\u00c2\u00a0 Donald asked, “Will we still be living here in 2018?”\u00c2\u00a0 Well, who knows?\u00c2\u00a0 Asparagus is my favorite vegetable, though, so I was willing to take that chance.<\/p>\n Gardening is easier than writing, in many ways.\u00c2\u00a0 Success is less dependent on factors outside your control.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, there are overcast and rainy summers, and there are excessively dry summers.\u00c2\u00a0 Squirrels dig up newly seeded beds looking for nuts they think they might have buried once.\u00c2\u00a0 Mice climb up the tomato vines and nibble the fruit (really, I’ve seen it!).\u00c2\u00a0 Insects can destroy an entire crop of some vegetable (I haven’t even mentioned cabbage butterflies, and in 2015 I learned about the dreaded squash vine borer).\u00c2\u00a0 But, for the most part, if you do some minimal amount of research to learn how to get started, if you use the Internet to troubleshoot problems and put in the time required to water your plants and harvest the vegetables as they mature–you will end up with vegetables that you can eat.\u00c2\u00a0 Success doesn’t depend on the whims and\/or budget of some person other than yourself.\u00c2\u00a0 And that can be very satisfying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last year, I posted some pictures of my vegetable garden at one-week intervals,\u00c2\u00a0from when I started planting at the beginning of April, to early May.\u00c2\u00a0 Originally, I was going to do a monthly garden post of weekly pictures.\u00c2\u00a0 But that … Continue reading <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>