Dan's Gardening and Birding Blog: Gardening Time

Welcome back. It's been awhile since my last post. To be honest, I've been busy planting. And planting. And planting. Every year I say I am going to cut back, however, this year the gardens are once again full. For those of you who follow my blog, you know I have 2 main gardens, the "Lower" and "Upper'. I also have the "Auxiliary" garden, a small plot out behind the pond. This year, I even expanded that.

This post will focus on the Lower garden. As you know, I have the lettuce and greens box in this garden which I built last year and modified this spring to make into a cold frame. It was put to the test in April and even as late as Mother's Day as we were still getting snow and cold temperatures. Once the temperatures warmed, I removed the windows (lids), and still use the greens box with netting to protect them from birds, and woodchucks.
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In late April and early May, I planted lettuce and kale in the cold frame as you saw n a previous post The plants are now flourishing and I have begun to harvest lettuce and kale. I replaced the normal netting with shade cloth, which decreases the amount of sun that reaches the plants, which prevents the lettuce and kale from growing too quickly (bolt) in hot temperatures.

In the photo below is lettuce, both romaine and butter head, kale, and even some mesculun.

Around May 17th, I started the main portion of the Lower garden starting with onions, As you can see, I am using planting paper to hopefully reduce weeds and possibly even watering as the summer progresses. After securing the paper using plastic pins (reusable), I used a box cutter (carefully) to cut slits wide enough to plant the onion sets.

I planted 2 types of onion sets. Snowball, a sweet white onion, is shown above. Also, I chose Stuttgart, a yellow type that stores very well.

In addition, I planted some of my Sweet Spanish onion plants that I stated from seed. I covered this in a previous post. This is a go to variety for me, and is generally not available as sets. At times they can be found as plants, but not always. therefore, I normally start them from seed.

You can see in this photo the 4 rows of onions on the right. The cold frame at this point still had the windows, before being removed and replaced with netting. This also shows my use of the garden paper,which I am optimistic about so far. It is easy to work with and seems to be fairly durable.

Along the left edge is cucumbers, pickling and burpless, and yellow and Zucchini squash. At the bottom of the photo is a hill of miniature pumpkins.

Pickling Cucumbers

When planting the cukes and squash, I cut a circle instead of individual holes for plants. I tried to leave as much paper as possible to suppress weeds, within reason.

The jewel of the Lower garden of course is the tomatoes. In my post on 4/22/20, I describe starting heirloom tomatoes from seed and background information about heirlooms, why they are so desired the last 4 or 5 years. By the time I planted the tomatoes on May 23rd, the plants were decent size and healthy.

Tomatoes on June 15th

To complete the Lower garden, I added peppers. This year I planted Bell, Jalapeno, Hungarian Wax and Sweet Banana varieties. As you can see I utilized the planting paper, I am getting used to it.