All the Squares are Full. Let's Grow Some Summer Veggies!

I finally found some sweet potato slips at the store so they are now in the ground in the south-west corner of the bed. Now the bed has plants growing in every square. The sweet potatoes are in the corner because they like to run. We will have to watch them carefully and steer them to make sure they run over the edge of the garden and into the walkway. If they are allowed to run into the garden they will take over.

The peppers are a light green color. This is a sign of a nutrient deficiency, probably nitrogen. The good drainage of raised beds means the nitrogen is washed out quickly. Even in a ground level garden it will only last 4-6 weeks. The rule of thumb is about a tablespoon of 34-0-0 nitrogen fertilizer per pepper and tomato plant every month or so. Too little fertilizer and the plant won't be healthy, too much and it will grow lots of leaves  but no fruit. I side dressed the peppers and tomatoes with a little less than one tablespoon per plant because they are so close together they will get each other's nitrogen.

I also fertilized the onions with nitrogen. I would have done it much earlier, but I realized that the nitrogen I added a few months ago also caused the cauliflower to grow quite a bit. With too much nitrogen fertilizer cauliflower will not head. So, I held off fertilizing again until the cauliflower was picked. Now that is is gone I put about a little more than a tablespoon of fertilizer per square on the onions. Note to the future: Don't plant onions next to cauliflower in a square foot bed.

While on the topic of onions: Onions grow a top until the length of daylight is longer than a certain number of hours (usually 12, 14 or 16 depending on the type). Then they switch and pull all the sugars from the leaves down into the root to form a bulb. So the objective of the gardener should be to grow that top as much as possible. Nitrogen fertilizer aids in that, but once the bulb starts to form you don't want to add any more nitrogen because it will reduce the store-ability of the onions. The "perfect" onion has 13 rings. Each of those rings corresponds to a leaf on the top. So ideally you want 13 leaves too. A new leaf will form every 2 weeks or so while the top is growing, which is why you want to get onions in the ground as soon as you can.  We have a few onions that have 11 leaves at this point and some large tops so we should have some good bulbs. We might even get some square onions because the bulbs grow into each other underground.

The basil has been growing now for about a month and so I pruned it. The purpose of this was not for harvest, although it will be used for that. The main reason is to get the plants to bush out. Right now they are primarily one stalk growing straight up. They are pruned just like any other shrub, just above a node. By pruning them just above a leaf they will form two branches from that point. More branches means more leaves which means more harvest. Joellen shows how to prune basil in this video from a few years ago.

Before

After. Any good pruning should look like no one was there

Some of the carrots are starting to form orange roots. When I picked the cauliflower I found some exposed roots. If they stay exposed, the part the sun hits will turn green. So I just covered them back up with some dirt. You can check to see if carrots are ready by gently digging down beside the plant to see how big the root is. A couple more weeks and these will be ready to pull.

We have our first tomato on one of the plants Alainia Hagerty planted (see the video). It is about the size of a quarter now.