July 20th-21st

As the summer progresses so is my vegetable garden…

While I was away last week in Panama for vacation with my girlfriend, my mother (Sue Smalley @ www.suesmalley.com) helped keep track of the vegetable garden. Basically I needed her to water my plants on my balcony everyday and just keep an eye on the vegetables as they usually are pretty good at maintaining themselves. When I got back I went to see my garden and oh was it flourishing. Two of my tomato plants are topping 6ft!!! That’s my height and to think they are growing right over our grass lawn is so amazing. I can honestly say I think these are the biggest tomato plants I have ever seen. Plus they have almost no damage whatsoever (except for a few yellow leaves toward the center). While none of the tomatoes are ready to eat yet there is one that is turning a beautiful red color and will be ready to harvest hopefully within the week. Upon my arrival home, I looked at the two zucchini bushes that I have been having problems with in terms of powdery mildew. They both look heavily infected again and I think it is time to spray them again with a 10% milk spray. Other than that the plants look huge and they are starting to pop out a lot of little zucchini flowers telling me that they are ready to start making zucchinis.
Before I left for Panama I decided to get as much work on the garden done as possible. First I removed all of the flowers in the back row as they weren’t working and I planted two watermelon plants on either side. After that my parents wanted to plant some flowers (that can be cut for decoration) within the back row so they did that and I hope to be able to weave the watermelon throughout these flowers and, depending on how large they become, train them to grow up the trellis that currently houses the soybeans.
The soybeans are all producing fruit although they are very measly and do not look that healthy. I am leaving them in the soil at least until the watermelons reach the trellis or the weather starts to cool down so I can begin planting peas in their place.
Also last week I decided to uproot the arugula that had become bolted due to mid summer heat. That I replaced with edible marigold flowers which I had been growing on my balcony (the ones that had a pest infestation though no longer do.)

Currently most of my plants are flowering, which is pretty although takes away from their work in the garden; when herbs flower their culinary use is no longer as good. The dill and fennel are flowering (this is nice because their flowers are not only pretty but they attract many beneficial insects) and so is the amaranth.
It is time I do a huge harvest once again: the plants that need to be harvested are the basil (both thai and regular), the chives, sage, lavender, and everything else that is looking very big.

Upon reflection, it is truly amazing that this garden is a reality when only two months ago the land was nothing but grass. This project has truly showed me something and allowed me to understand no-dig gardening as well as allow my friends and family to see ‘the magic’ take place. With no more than a foot of topsoil every plant I planted has been doing phenomenally and there are tomato plants that are taller than me!! I find this astonishing. And now I know that no matter what people say or what books I read I KNOW than A MASSIVE vegetable garden can be planted on top of a grass lawn without even removing the sod.

The pest infestation that I experienced last week is completely gone. The best solution to solving it was to take all of the plants off my balcony and to spray them vigorously with the garden hose. Then instead of putting them all back clumped tightly together on my balcony I allowed them to be spaced out and recover. The result was no pests by the time I returned from a 5 day vacation. The main reason the pests got so bad was because I had clumped them too closely together that when one plant got infested so did all of them. Even with the proper companion plants, planting too close in a sense created a sort of monoculture that was very easy to be infected.

Another note from my balcony: The pumpkin plant is getting huge and I currently have a pumpkin about a half a foot large. I trained it to wrap around my balcony and that is just what it did (although I was away during this crucial period and for that my mother gets credit). The peaches on my balcony are huge and ripe and yesterday I picked the ripest one and ate it. I did this mid-day and I have never tasted any peach so good. Although it was not as sweet as some peaches it was all warmed up from the midday sun and I could taste the warmth and freshness which contributed to the best peach eating experience in my life. Now I have two more that need to be picked but I want to pick these in the afternoon sometime.

Another plant to note is my blueberry bush. When I came home from Panama it looked completely burned all over and was probably 50-60% dead!! AGHH… This was no ones fault as the heat of the summer got so intense while I was gone that it burned the delicate blueberry bush leaves (even though it is a full sun plant). I moved the bush to a shady location underneath a huge jacaranda tree in my backyard and am planning on leaving it there until it hopefully returns back to life.

The banana tree I have is also getting pretty big as a new leaf emerged last week. This leaf is now full sized and the plant is looking very healthy. I have so many plants in my house and in my garden right now that if I even tried to write about them all I would end up writing a book.

This experience (while still in progress) has taught me such a great deal about gardening. My mother is so excited everyday to see what is producing in the garden and this has been a great way to help teach her how to garden. And while this is just the first season for my (hopefully lifelong career in gardening) I know that while everything is not perfect (far from actually) it is perfect in the sense of what I am learning. I feel as though I am reaching an understanding of certain plants and gardening in general that is not possible to learn through books and is something that only I - with the help of nature - can understand; this journey is one that is guided by a light within all things.

Peace out July 21st A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUNTHE SUN