First Garlic Shoot

First garlic sprout, a true harbinger of winter in the Bay Area! This is one of those husky Russian cloves coming up to the light of the November sun in the garlic bed. The other two varieties are lagging somewhat but a couple of them are making their appearance just prior to the wet weather predicted for tonight and on Thanksgiving later this week.

Brussels Sprouts

I planted these Brussels sprouts last month from seedlings I'd started in August. I think that may have been a little late as the advice I see from Pam Peirce is to start them in July but nonetheless they seem to be doing pretty well. I had previously used this bed to grow the garlic last winter and then fingerling potatoes the summer prior to that. Although I thought I was pretty thorough in ridding any remaining potatoes there are still occasional volunteers that I've been pulling out.

We've had a couple of significant rains in the past few weeks so that hasn't hurt at all.

I finally got around to pulling the last of the baby carrots and beets from one of the beds yesterday. Laura's going to roast the beets over the next couple of weeks and pickle the carrots. Both should come in handy for Thanksgiving dinner next week.

Here is the seed garlic I purchased online and planted last Sunday, Nov 6. In the 4'x8' bed I have two rows of each of the 3 varieties 18" apart, 6 in all, with the cloves planted about 4" apart at depth of 1-2". In addition to the steer manure I worked into the entire bed I also added blood meal and bone meal to each row just prior to planting. I then fenced in the bed but the next morning found that something had worked its way into it. I'm not sure but I think whoever it was had themself a meal of a few of the Russian cloves as they are huge. I didn't want to dig everything up so I'll wait a couple of weeks to see what comes up before I make an effort to replace them as I've only used about half of what I purchased.

Planted left to right

Back to the Gardening Blog

Apologies for not keeping this up the past few months but I've been paying more attention to the cooking blog, still working the 9-5 gig (but only until Feb 2012!), and the past summer here was probably even colder than Mark Twain's summer in SF - I think it only reached 70 degrees once during all of August!
As a result the summer veggies didn't do so well, even with all of the promise they showed in July. We finally got some tomatoes but they were extremely reticent to come out and I can't blame them. And we got enough basil to make pesto a couple of times.

However...
I just planted some Brussels sprouts that I started from seed and planted the garlic for the winter. I'll post photos when they start to show. I also hope to get some salad greens started, we'll see how that goes.

Summer Vegetables progression

The latest photos:

Tomatoes. Some are almost ready for harvesting

Beans:

Fennel, beets, carrots and squash

Here's the first harvest: some beans and tomatoes:

Green Beans, Tomatoes, Harvested Garlic

Latest photos:

Beans flowering now, should be getting some pods soon.

Squashes starting to flower now too.

Carrots, beets and fennel.

Tomatoes. Lots of fruiting but nothing edible yet.

Finally the harvested garlic. Letting these 'ripen' on the porch before we braid them and start using them.

These are sorted to the 3 types of cloves I planted back last November.

L to R: Organic Purple Glazer, Organic Music, and Organic Georgian Fire.

Spring, Summer Vegetables, seedlings

Parsley getting there, I should be able to offload the seedlings to their own pots soon.

Beans progressing, I just planted a second batch of seeds in the open area of the box.

Closeups of the squash plants.

 Fennel, beets, carrots. (and plenty of purslane volunteers)

And here are how the tomatoes are looking now. The high temperatures of the early part of the week seemed to have kicked the fruiting into gear now.

The arugula is about to seed but some good lettuce heads still available for picking. Time to start harvesting the kale and chard.

Garden Status

I just took these.
Here are the beans.

From bottom: fennel, beets, carrots.

From top, greens, kale, chard and basil.

The tomatoes. Although not a normal year, it's still considerably better than last year. We've had a lot of rain this spring, but not nearly as much cold weather as in 2010.

Finally the garlic. Some the ones in the back may have rotted from the rains but most of them in the front seem to be fine, should be pulling them out within the next 3 weeks or so.