It’s been just over a month since we first planted the garden and I figured it was time to give all the readers an update. First, we might have planted things a little too early as there was some rainy/frosty days in April that took a toll on the plants. The eggplants seem permanently stunted as do the peppers. Second, slugs really like to eat tender plants and eat them they will! We’re giving the eggplants and peppers another week or two before we pull them and put something else in. The nice thing about growing things here in this part of northern California is that you can get in two or three “crops” per season! One of the small perks, I suppose. The slugs were a different matter and we lost several of our pole beans, cucumbers, and soy beans to the little suckers before we looked up how to deal with them: beer traps. The traps worked great, though just to be careful we spread used coffee ground around the younger sprouts to keep the slugs away, these two measures appear to have worked.
The plants that look best right now are the tomatoes and zucchinis which are growing at a great clip. I already mentioned which ones looked the worst. The cantaloupe never came in. We replaced the cucumbers that were eaten with some cucumber and bean sprouts we picked up at a local nursery store and put them in. Our chard is just about ready to be harvested and we’re hoping to have tomatoes and zucchinis by the end of the month.
Sadly, the vegetables that we planted in the front of the house (tomatoes, onions, beans, and peppers) were all either devoured or simply failed to thrive in the front yard. The beans sprouted and then were promptly eaten, the tomatoes grew a little, turned a sickly green color and then immediately bloomed, the peppers and onions seemed to simply wilt away. I don’t know if the plants weren’t getting enough nutrients, they did have to compete with a tree and several large hearty hedges, or if we didn’t transplant them with enough compost and fertilizer. In the end, we ended up pulling out all of the vegetables in the front and planting annuals. We won’t be able to eat anything growing in the front but at least the yard will have a little more color in it.
I also discovered that wild strawberries are growing in the backyard but they’re competing with the lawn grass and a fruit tree. I don’t know whether to pull the plant up or try to clear the ground around it and see if it thrives. Are wild strawberries any good?
I know that one makes new goals on New year’s day but, for me, that only insured that I didn’t spend any amount of time actually thing about what I wanted to accomplish in that year and, worse, not following through. Last year at the end of July I wrote out a large list of goals. I gave myself a year to accomplish some of them, others I gave myself more time (five or ten years.) That year recently came to an end and I wrote about how I did