Tuesday, June 1, 2010

The May Garden

Our garden has been growing leaps and bounds this month.  May has had its share of warm sunny days and cool rainy days, but overall the temperatures are getting warmer.  Traditionally, Memorial Day weekend signals that it is safe to plant warm-season crops.  If the sun comes back out, we'll be ready.


The Good...
Growing fast out in the garden now are peas, cabbage, potatoes, garlic, bulb onions, spinach and turnips.  Our recently planted corn is coming up.  We also recently transplanted our Winter squash starts.  We had started them in the house and they were getting too big for their cups, so we moved them into the greenhouse to harden off for several days.  We waited for a warm sunny day and planted them into the garden.    

Growing in our house are basil, cucumber, summer squash, okra and watermelon starts.


Growing in our greenhouse are tomatoes, eggplant, okra, peppers, and some flowers.  

The Bad...
The beets have bolted.  This means that they have gone to flower and won't make much of a beet.  This can happen from planting too early and from the weather swinging too much between warm and cool.

Beet leaf miners are out in force.  I found lots of white egg clusters on the backs of my beet leaves.  I did some research and bought some blue sticky traps to capture the adult flies.  I've caught about twenty so far.  But now that the beets have bolted, I'm going to rip them out and try planting new seeds.  

Cabbage moths are also out on sunny days.  We've been using white egg shells to deter them from laying eggs on our brassicas.  It's working really well.  We don't have nearly the amount the eggs and caterpillars as we did last year.  Apparently the moths are territorial.  We have observed them chasing each other.  If they see a lot of white shells around they think they are other moths and will fly away.  I was skeptical at first, but now have seen many a moth swoop down towards our cabbages and then flutter away without landing and laying eggs.  Where we haven't scattered shells around our brassicas, we have found eggs.  


... and The Harvest
We've been harvesting cool-season crops like lettuce, broccoli, garlic scapes, green onions, kale, bok choy and radishes.  Our menu is consisting of a lot of salads and stir fry.  Yum!