Mixin' it up. This is an example of how I plant my veggies now. If you look closely you can see a pepper plant, zinna and dahlia, yellow squash and cukes. Although it makes harvesting a bit more difficult, I like to interplant vegetables and flowers instead of grouping all of one together. This is how nature does it, and I've never seen a natural planting infested with pests. Confuse the bugs-works for me!
While we've enjoyed banana peppers in salads for a couple of weeks, the green bells picked today have just provide us with enough peppers to enjoy our first roasted peppers of the season.
Although the majority of tomatoes need a couple of weeks to ripen, we've been picking a few green ones that ripen in a few days inside the house. Contrary to popular belief, homegrown tomatoes that are picked green ripen to very good red tomatoes. In fact, if you leave them on the vine too long they are attacked by pests, and if they receive too much water during maturation I believe it dilutes their flavor (true of most fruit). I think the reason store bought tomatoes are so flavorless is not because they are picked green, but because of the varieties planted, chemical vs. organic fertilizer, and soil quality.
This carrot patch has been yielding carrots for awhile now. It was originally planted with spinach which was harvested before the carrots needed much room.
Mixin' it up. This is an example of how I plant my veggies now. If you look closely you can see a pepper plant, zinna and dahlia, yellow squash and cukes. Although it makes harvesting a bit more difficult, I like to interplant vegetables and flowers instead of grouping all of one together. This is how nature does it, and I've never seen a natural planting infested with pests. Confuse the bugs-works for me!
While we've enjoyed banana peppers in salads for a couple of weeks, the green bells picked today have just provide us with enough peppers to enjoy our first roasted peppers of the season.
Although the majority of tomatoes need a couple of weeks to ripen, we've been picking a few green ones that ripen in a few days inside the house. Contrary to popular belief, homegrown tomatoes that are picked green ripen to very good red tomatoes. In fact, if you leave them on the vine too long they are attacked by pests, and if they receive too much water during maturation I believe it dilutes their flavor (true of most fruit). I think the reason store bought tomatoes are so flavorless is not because they are picked green, but because of the varieties planted, chemical vs. organic fertilizer, and soil quality.
This carrot patch has been yielding carrots for awhile now. It was originally planted with spinach which was harvested before the carrots needed much room.
We are enjoying our first corn of the year this week. The patch above was plant in mid February in the main vegetable garden. The top two photos show corn planted in "the annex", an area I started a couple of years ago, mainly for corn as it is such a space and water hog. This corn has 3 plantings spaced in 10 day intervals, so we'll have fresh corn for more than a month.
Some areas of the yard are well planned as to color and placement, but in the vegetable garden I tend to plop in flowers willy-nilly without regard to color schemes. I grow dahlias, periwinkles and zinnas from seed and they are usually multicolor assortments. I plant them in and around the veggies because they attract pollinators and I believe their scents confuse predator bugs. The zinnias above were a happy accident. I wouldn't normally plant orange and pink together, but I love the sherberty colors with the blue larkspur backdrop.
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