Harvest Monday - 1 June 2020

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm! In these posts, I like to lead off with the first harvest of vegetables I am growing this year. This week, I got a first harvest of spring onions, AKA scallions. It's actually the first ever time I've grown spring onions, for some reason. So here are thinnings from the crop of White Lisbon.

Another first harvest is radishes. This was mostly to see how they are doing. Here we have "French Dressing," a French Breakfast type, and the familiar Cherry Belle. The seed packets always claim radishes mature much faster than they do for me, as these were planted April 19.

Another first harvest is Toy Choi, on the left below, with another picking of Asian Delight that I showed last week.

We continue to get small harvests of asparagus, every other day or so.

Now I'll show progress made this past week. I transplanted 18 indeterminate tomato plants, in two 3x10 beds.

Indeterminate tomatoes

I also transplanted 16 determinates, into one and one-half 4x12 beds. The remaining half bed was planted with 8 eggplants/aubergines.

Determinate tomatoes

I also transplanted 12 winter squash, in the "row garden" area of the fenced garden. I gave them plenty of space.

Winter squash

Last year I experimented with growing peppers directly in 10 straw bales. They did well, but you only get one season out of the bales, and it takes a lot of fertilizer to condition them for planting. So I'm not going to repeat the experiment. The partially rotted bales were perfect for spreading out for mulch across the squash and the solanacea beds.

In the two galvanized stock tanks, I planted hills of two melons, two summer squash, and four cucumbers.

Melons and cucumbers

A day later I set out 22 pepper plants, over two beds. In addition 4 peppers went into containers off the kitchen herb garden.

Peppers

I also planted bush beans, scarlet runner beans, and yelloweye dry beans.

Whew! So that emptied out the big plant-starting rack in the sunroom. All that's left is three six packs on a side table, with seedling kale, Chinese cabbage, and more Asian Delight. The end of May is really the hard push, and it feels good to have it accomplished.

One of my post-retirement hobbies is drone flying. I bought a DJI Mavic Mini, and have had a lot of fun learning to fly it. I'm very pleased with the photo and video quality for such an inexpensive drone. A project is to take aerial photos of the gardens over the season and document their growth. So here are some shots taken May 31.

The Field Garden. It's fully planted but all you can see from altitude is the garlic on the left, and the two rows of potatoes.

The Field Garden

The Stock Tank Garden:

Stock tank planters

The Fenced Garden:

Fenced Garden

We had a cold front come through yesterday, and this morning the temperature is 39F (3.8C). We'll have another cold night tonight, but that should be it. I will plant the last batch of sweet corn after it is over. Then virtually all the planting will be done. Thanks for reading my [long] post, and thanks to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.