The garden is growing….

I love to grow things, every year I have a garden with  some of my favorite things planted. This year I didn’t go overboard like I usually do mostly cause of personal BS I was dealing with, took me a bit to get out of the funk and get on with stuff. On the bright side, my plants dont seem to care and are doing good. The bell peppers are already well on their way to producing some good peppers for me.

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I plant in raised beds for the ease of working and keeping the soil in shape. The ground here where I live in Central California can be hard and difficult to work with at times. Plus its easy to take the weed whacker and trim up around the outside of boxes and not risk damaging the things I want to grow. I dont get all anal with keeping every weed and blade of grass out of the planter boxes. The garden plants seem to do better if I leave some low grasses and other weeds in the beds. Its my opinion that it helps to hold some moisture in the soil instead of baking the first two inches of dirt in the California sun. I’ve also learned to leave my lawn a bit long and shaggy to keep the moisture in, for a lot of years I trimmed it short and it would dry out and die in big patches. Not good.

I also like letting things go to seed. I take the biggest and best producers and let them seed out since those plants appear to like the soil and weather conditions best in my planting beds. The idea is next year there will be a whole crop of really good producers selected to best agree with my gardens conditions. Well, thats the plan at least…..   So, in that vein heres a pic of my carrots going to seed.

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Just in case you are wondering, yes they really are that big. Thats a six foot fence behind the carrots that they peek over, the flowers average 4″ in diameter. All of that from some little tiny Nantes carrot seeds I had. I think I might be able to get some seeds from them this year. There is something about this particular planting bed that grows things big. For several years I had an Early Girl tomato that kept reseeding itself and it was a monster every year. The planting bed is 3′ by 8′ and it would take over the whole damn bed, the fence, and anything else around it. This year it didnt reseed so I went with a different tomato, just a cherry tomato plant.

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See what I mean, that was a sprout about a month ago and now I’ve got a cherry tomato plant about 4 feet tall and already giving me some nice red tomato. If you look close you will see some big clover leaves in there. I tend to let the clover grow just because I like it. I’m thinking about introducing red clover from the foothill in my garden since I’ve learned that I really like the taste of red clover. I learned that in the Wild Edibles class I need to do a write up on……

Lets move on to another planting bed, the zucchini bed. My mom makes a mean chocolate zucchini bread so I grow as much of it as I can and hope that she will make a ton of that bread. The zucch bed doesnt produce monsters like the other bed does, unless I pant cucumbers, last year one cucumber plant took over the bed, climbed two 8′ poles and drove me nuts. No cucumbers this year, I’m still peaved that the last one choked out all of the butternut squash I planted.

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Overall, I’m pretty happy with how they are doing, I even have one small zucch starting to fatten up. I like watching the flowers on these plants. They are open in the morning waiting on the morning sun and in the evening they are closed up tight for the night. I noticed during the last rain they closed up also, makes me wonder what exactly is the trigger to make them close. Probably one of those things I can google but thats not as much fun as the mystery. Notice I good little Californian and have my plants on drip? LOL. Not. I use drip because I can put water where I want it. I used to use spray heads to water the whole bed and all I got for it was 15 times the weeds and other stuff. Now the weeds and ground cover stay short because the water is directed at my garden plants, win-win.

I grow a bunch of containerized plants too. Every day before I head to work at 6:30 am I go walk through the plants and hand water the potted plants. Its a good way for me to start the day, cathartic, mellows me out so I dont start off running my department looking to bite someones head off. One grouping of my potted plants: bergamot, peppermint, and 3 tea plants.

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The tea plants are the type that all teas from green tea to good old Lipton black are made from. The different tea types are made by aging the leaves to different stages. I also have 6 arabica coffee plants and if your lucky maybe I’ll post pics of those in another post about roasting my own coffee……

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