August 4, 2016 - mid-summer

Here we are in mid-summer and most everything is busting out pretty well. The weather this year, unlike the past couple of years, has been very consistent - very mild days in the low 70's and evenings bottoming out mid to high-50's. However the peppers and tomatoes have been doing very well although there still hasn't been a whole lot of either to pick yet. The beans are just starting to come consistently. And although we had quite a bit of the crookneck summer squash, it seems for some reason that it's already starting to stall. I expected it to last at through September so not sure what's up with it.

Box 1

The beans are really coming out now but it's pretty obvious to me that I planted way too many. I tried setting space for four separate plantings but could only get in two. I staggered two rows and kept the poles about a foot apart and put 8 seeds per planting. Next year I should go with four at most and add better support for the poles. As for the squash, although we're still getting fruit, they are not growing quite as quickly and the plant itself seems to succumbing to severe mildew and growth is slowing down considerably.

Box 2

The tomatoes have grown so much better this year but it's just now that the fruit is starting to ripen. Again I think that a healthier plant will take its time to set out fruit as long as it has the means to keep growing, that once the fruit is set the plant changes direction and halts the process. That would explain why we got fruit as early as the end of May last year. The fruit looks fantastic and should lead to a bumper crop within a couple of weeks and hopefully last well into October. I've kept up a thorough schedule of watering - hand watering on Monday and Thursday with drip irrigation at an hour on Saturday morning with two leads into each plant's reservoir. I also fed with the neutral fertilizer back at the end of June.

Box 3

I just removed the remaining onions to store inside and will be preparing the bed for cole crops this weekend - kale, chard, broccoli, etc.

Box 4

The peppers are starting to set fruit. We got one crop of padróns so far with plenty more to come. There is still a bit of lettuce to go, I added a new set of seeds yesterday to fill in the spaces along with some beet and radish seeds. There is a new crop of beets ready to pull and the basil has done very well.

Box 5

The herbs have done very well I think due to a more diligent pruning on my part especially of the oreganos and thymes. I've had some trouble getting a good bunch of parsley going but I've had enough to work with so far. Replanting a new herb box each year seems to be the way to go from now on.

July 15, 2016 - zucchini stem borer issue

Just back on July 9 the zucchini looked very healthy and was still yielding fruit but on July 11 it was obvious that something had changed. Some of the leaves now looked like they were wilting although it was still on the same watering schedule and the temperatures had been normal. Best I've been able to determine is that it had a stem borer. Since then the fruit has stopped growing and now appears stunted. If it is a stem borer, then there is little hope that the plant will survive. I'm going to give it until Sunday but I really don't expect it to improve at all.

The good news is that its crook-neck summer squash neighbor is still going gangbusters. We've been pulling at least one fruit if not more a day and they have been fantastic. It wouldn't hurt to provide more space for the remaining plants in the box anyway.
Apparently the only way to deal with the issue is to proactively spray either Malathion or Sevin on the plant as a prophylactic measure - i.e. when the plant is first growing. I'm not planning to use any insecticides and certainly not as a preventative measure and even more certainly not Sevin. As we should continue to have more than enough squash and, soon, beans and tomatoes, I think we'll survive this and will just have to hope for the best next summer.

July 9, 2016 - early summer

Well, now, that's a little more like it. The past couple of weeks have resembled much more of a true Bay Area summer - foggy, windy, and cold. Daytime highs below 70°F and evening temps in the mid-50s. With the bay and ocean temps just outside the Golden Gate hovering in the low-50's this year, as opposed to 60°F+ last summer, we're seeing less of the atypical heat and warm evenings that we did last year. The peppers and tomatoes have been hanging in there though and should be able to get to the warm late summer and autumn weather intact.

Box 1 - the zucchini and summer squash have been doing spectacularly well this year. I've seen a bit of blossom end rot on a couple of the crook neck squash but the rest have been very healthy as have the zucchini. The plants had started growing towards the beans until I put up the small trellis between the two. Now the plants have redirected towards the outside of the box. One thing I learned for sure is to keep picking the fruit as it will grow too large to eat very quickly.

The beans are great but I probably planted too many again. I also didn't put enough supports for them so they may wind up strangling each other to some extent. We'll see but so far so good. The plants are just flowering now, we should be picking beans after another 10 days.

Box 2 - the tomatoes are doing fabulously well, so much an improvement over last year's disappointing results. I think this is mostly due to the wells I kept in the plants' perimeters, the heavy twice-weekly hand waterings (along with the once a week irrigation), and the thorough soil work I did before planting with steer manure, blood, and bone meal. I just fertilized them with the general food yesterday as a half-time measure to get them through fruiting.

My take is that the first third of growth should be to get the plants growing very healthy and green as preparation for the fruiting phase. I think that early fruiting, like last year's start in late May, indicates stress and is not something to hope for. Now that the fruits are coming out, the leaves and the overall greenery is starting to diminish which means that the plants are moving their focus from growth and plant establishment to fruit production. The plants will now start to diminish in beauty and will probably yield a shitload of tomatoes.

Box 3 - I'm keeping the onions in as long as I can before using them and before changing the box over to cole crops for autumn. This seems the best way to preserve them until use.

Box 4 had a poor result from the seedings of greens, beets, and radishes but that may have been a blessing. The plants that made it had much more room to grow and mature and have turned into a very nice yield. I just harvested the first batch of beets today and they were very good. The lettuces are now bolting but we had no lack of them to use over the past 6 weeks. The basil is also doing very well. Although the radishes are quite outsized now, the variety we planted have not turned hot at all and are still good for salads. The peppers are still doing well even with the recent cool weather. They are just starting to fruit.

Box 5 - the herbs are doing great I think mainly due to my diligence in keeping them trimmed. Apparently once they go into flowering the chemistry changes and the plants start to die so keeping the flowers down maintains the growth. I finally got chervil seeding started by moving them to a pot in the shade. It seems they are very sensitive to sun and heat. The only disappointment is the parsley which seems to have a hard time getting established from nursery starts.

June 18, 2016 - end of spring

The summer plantings are well under way. The weather has been rather temperate this spring - mostly in the high-60's to the 70's in the daytime with no real heat waves so far. The lows had been in the mid-50's but in the last week has started to come up to about 60°F again as it had been the past couple of summers. I think the endless weeks of foggy evenings and mornings that had always been typical of the climate here are starting to become a thing of the past as climate change progresses. If the past couple of years are any indication, it will remain like this through October, not that the peppers or tomatoes will be complaining about that.

Box 1 was completely turned over last month for the zucchini and the beans.

Box 2 has the tomatoes which have been greatly outperforming those of last year. I think the winter rains this past winter along with 2 daily hand waterings along with a weekly 60 minute soaking from the drip irrigation is to be credited for this. It may be that the weather has not been nearly as cool this Spring as it had been in May-June 2015.

Box 3 still holds the onions which I am pulling as we use them. I harvested the last of the garlic a couple of weeks ago. They seem to have done a lot better this year which is at least partly due to the rains in the winter as well as the fact that I was able to plant them in October rather than January. They were starting to develop a rash of yellow 'dust' on the leaves in the middle of the patch. This may have been due to the plants being placed too closely as well as keeping them watered through to the middle of May. I removed the worst plants early but the rash may have developed too late to ruin the crop as they seem to have survived it ok.

Box 4 - the peppers, save for one, have been growing ok and now that the weather is stabilizing warmer they should do quite well from here on. I'm having problems getting the greens started from seeds again. When I prepared the box I left a layer of bagged steer manure as a dressing and that may have caused an issue for the seeds. I've tried a couple of seedings again but still not having a whole lot of luck. This may be a mixed blessing as the ones that have grown are doing very well which may be from a lack of crowding.

Box 5 - the herbs are mostly doing well. A couple of dill plants I put out succumbed to a plague of aphids but so far seedlings are coming through. The chervil plants died back quickly so I seeded some but only a couple came up and only because they're shaded. I've been diligent about trimming the oreganos and thymes which seems to have helped quite a bit.

The container herbs are all doing well. I've only been watering them once a week but may have to increase as the temperatures warm up.

I repotted the bay laurel as the soil level had gotten quite low and the tree was starting to look stressed. Unlike what I expected though, the tree was not root bound but adding a few inches to the soil level was not a bad idea. The only shock I could determine was some dieback in the tips of the highest leaves. Although bay doesn't need a whole lot of water, it's still important to keep a potted one watered at least once a week.

May 11, 2016 - Mid-spring

First post since returning from our month in Spain and Portugal. There was significant rain while we were away, at least for April. Things were pretty much booming when we returned which meant quite a bit of clean up the past couple of weeks. I turned over the soil in Box 2 for the tomatoes the last week of April and Box 4 for the new salad greens, beets, and peppers this week.

Box 1 still has the left over salad greens from the winter. I only kept the irrigation running for the beets on the west end of the box but the rain apparently kept the rest of the box growing. I'll be removing the beets next week and turning the soil over for planting squash and beans. I got a sampler of Italian broad and thin beans from online to plant.

Box 2 has the new tomato plants. I set it up for irrigation with two feeders for each plant with 360° shrubblers at the end of each then set the station to run for an hour 3 times a week. However immediately I was less than impressed with the results. Even with .2 inches of rain last weekend the plants were starting to look like the ones last year when I first tried watering with irrigation. I went back to forming 'bowls' around each plant and the shrubblers were putting out water ok but something was just NQR. As a result I'm planning to simply water by hand like I always have with such great success. One possibility I considered was that perhaps with the boxes being so high above the native soil the roots were having a hard time making use of it as they would have a much longer path to get down to it. But now that I've watered by hand a couple of times, I'm almost convinced that those plants with deep rooting really need to be manually cared for given the quick results I've seen already. The poor performance of the squash last year with drip would bear this out as well. So for now I'm not going to use drip for the tomatoes or squash except if I am out of town for more than a couple of days which probably won't be likely through growing season.

Box 3 - the onions and garlic are starting to look a bit waterlogged so I've turned off irrigation here too. It's getting near harvest time anyway so I think it's best to starve them of water now to prepare for the tops to die back.

Box 4 just got a new crop of peppers and seeding of salad greens, beets, and basil. I won't be seeding kale and chard until closer to mid-summer for the fall, perhaps trying some cole crops as well again then. Note the netting structure to keep the cats out until the plants are established.

Box 5 - herbs are doing well for the most part. The chervil plants have died back already, perhaps due to the fairly significant rain the past couple of months - they really don't seem to like too much water and dampness.  A couple of lettuce volunteers really grew through April so we've been whittling away at the for salads while opening up the space for the growing thymes and oreganos which have also done very well along with the sage, marjoram, and chives that have replaced the ones in Box 1. I planted a few more parsleys and trying to get them established.

March 28, 2016 - Early spring

March kicked in with a bang with good precipitation, at least for the first two weeks. We had about 150% of the total average for the month by the 15th, definitely appreciated in these parts. The effect of what has been basically a normal season of rainfall this year is quite obvious, especially after the past 4 years of an extreme drought. All the plants that struggled to get established and flower last year have really come alive. Hopefully we can continue with this in subsequent years. It looks like that's about it, though, April doesn't seem to be very promising but we should be able to get through to next winter ok at this point.

A couple of photos for Boxes 1 and 2 - first from March 17 then the others from today.

Box 1 had radishes, arugula, beets, lettuce, mesclun, Russian white kale, and broccolini. Everything did well except for the broccolini which didn't time well with the warm, dry February and cold damp March. 

I removed the radishes, arugula, kale, and broccolini in preparation for our holiday tomorrow. The beets will have a chance to grow over the next few weeks.

Box 2 had an older growth of beets, greens, Lacinato kale, chard, and sugar peas. Everything did quite well.

 I pulled the peas yesterday and am leaving these beets to grow further through April as well.

Box 3 still has the garlic and onions all of which have been growing well. However there are flower stalks coming up from some of the onions which I've picked. And there are signs of black aphid infestation on the garlic leaves. I expect more onion flowers but not much I can do there while I'm gone. I soaped the garlic leaves pretty well a couple of times the past week and blasted what remained with a hose today. I'll probably soap them once more tomorrow. Hopefully that protects them for a while. I haven't seen any flower stalks coming up on them yet.

Box 4 is a bit cleaner now. The parsley's about done but the marjoram, thyme, and oregano are doing so well it'll be hard to clean this bed in May. Their replacements seem to be doing well in Box 5 though, so may not be so tough to give up.

Box 5 is doing well for the most part. I pulled the original cilantro plants and the seedlings are doing well. However the dill seedlings never got going and the original chervil died in the rain. I replaced the chervil with 3 plants. I'll reseed the dill in May hoping they do better in the warmer dry weather.