So we have two new kinds of vegetables to harvest this week. First the eggplant exploded and only about a week after first noticing small fruit, two of them were ready to harvest. In fact, the fruit was heavy enough that it pulled the plant over so I had to stand it back up and stake it.  We should be getting more eggplant over the next few weeks as it does not look like it is slowing down.

I also put the potatoes in the ground. Confession to make, these were potatoes that I purchased at the store. You are not supposed to do that because of disease. Unfortunately there were no local nurseries that had any fall seed potatoes. One I called even said they can't get them anymore. I had to go to several grocery stores to find a bag of potatoes that had some good eyes on them. I cut the eyeing potatoes up and put them on a plate to scab over.
To plant them I dug a hole for each that was about 10 inches deep. Then put a piece of potato in and only filled the hole about half way. Potatoes need to be hilled several times and the first hilling will be filling the hole the rest of the way. As a side note, there were lots of roots in the soil as I was digging the holes. I tried to not break the larger roots. Overall I planted three squares of potatoes with two plants per square. With potatoes you can plant 1,2, or 4 plants per square. The fewer the plants the larger the potatoes. I thought 2 was a good compromise.

I have needed to put in a trellis for the cucumbers for awhile, but I have not been able to figure out the best way to do it. The trellis for the peas was okay, but it did not work as well as I would have liked and all the peas ended up sliding their twine to one side. I decided to go with cattle panel like on the tomatoes. We also have cucumbers growing up cattle panel in the main garden and it has worked very well. I attached the panel with wire. It had to be mounted under the t-posts because the tomatoes were already on top of the middle t-post.

To plant the potatoes I pulled the rest of the carrots in those squares. I have been pulling them as they grow. I pulled about 16 carrots. most were a good size, but there were a few realy small ones that I did not even keep long enough to take a picture of. After removing the tops they weighed 0.94 lbs. That about wraps up the carrots for the year. There are a few more growing around the garden where the odd seed fell. If any of them turn out to be good I will update the numbers.

I pulled more carrots (11 carrots for 0.94 lbs.). Early next week the potatoes are going in the ground for a fall harvest. The rest of the carrots will come out then.

We have also picked another 16 full size and 16 cherry tomatoes for 3.42 lbs.

The cucumbers are growing well. I need to build the trellis for them. The twine I used for the peas did not survive pulling up the peas. I may use another piece of cattle panel like I used for the tomatoes. It is strong and lets the cucumbers hang down so they are easy to find as they grow.

The cucumbers are up, but the germination was poor (about 50%) so I have planted replacement seeds where they did not sprout the first time. I am not sure why we have had such poor germination on some of the brand new seeds we purchased this year. We have a larger in-ground garden nearby and there were two whole packages of brand new corn seed that did not come up at all, while a section we planted in 5 year old seed had almost all of them come up.

Like I said in the video I would be harvesting some of the veggies. This is the first tomato harvest of the year. I picked 6.78lb of tomatoes. There were 21 large tomatoes and 10 of the black cherry tomatoes as well. There are a few more that are about ready so there will be more soon.

I also pulled 11 carrots for 1.05lbs. Most were straight, but there were two that had forked.

I got a few green beans for .084lb

I trimmed the basil and got a very large harvest for only four plants, .38lb. I took it home and made two cups of pesto which is very good.

With the hot weather of late the peas shriveled up and died. They have done well with 3.72lb of peas produced. You may remember that we have only about 50% germination on the seeds we planted (17 out of 32)  so we could have done much better. Late in the season they were affected with powdery mildew and aphids, but we did not treat because they had only a little time left.

With the peas gone it is time to plant cucumbers in that space. We planted so we would have 2 plants per square. The cucumbers are located here because they can use the same trellis system that the peas used. This allows them to lean out over the lawn. Also, it is the north side of the garden so they do not shade any of the other plants.

We ended up letting the peas go longer than we originally intended because it was a cool spring and they kept producing. The cucumbers will be done long before the frost so there was no rush to get them switched out.

The rest of the garden is doing well and in the next update I will show how all the different plants are doing.

Also we got some of our first carrots. One of the great things about having a raised bed when you have hard soil is the carrots don't have to fight the soil so they end up straight and long. These carrots are a little small so we will leave the others in the ground a little longer.

Also we have been picking a small amount of basil. The plants are continuing to grow and we will have larger harvests in the future. What we are getting now is enough to add to a meal. 

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.

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.

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.

It has gotten hot enough that all the spinach has bolted. But, that is just in time because it's time to put in the third round of green beans. So out came the spinach and in went the beans. The two earlier sets of beans are doing well and the oldest one is starting to look like it will flower soon.

I also harvested the cauliflower.
In the last about 2 weeks it has gone from only green leaves to having a good sized cauliflower head.
As you can see in the pictures I tied the leaves around the white cauliflower to keep it from turning yellow or brown in the sun. Covering the head is called blanching. You don't need to do it. Yellow Cauliflower grows and tastes the same, it's just yellow.

I'm sure the eggplant is glad to have the cauliflower gone. It was realy crowding it.  The cauliflower square will be planted with potatoes about July 1 for a fall potato harvest.

The little Swiss chard finally looks happy. It was the only one of seven to come up (four in the original planting and then three in the replant). It has looked like it was on death's doorstep until this week. Hopefully we can harvest something from it later in the year.

At the garden end, I turned the pipe up with a few elbows and put a 4-way manifold on the end.
To the manifold I attached 1/4" black drip irrigation tubing that ran to the end of each row of the garden. I attached drip emitter tube at the end of the black tubing. The emitter tube (brown in the pictures) has a small hole every 6 inches or so along the tube.  I ran the emitter tubes down the center of each row of squares long ways. and secured them with landscape staples to keep them in place.

I hooked it all up and turned it on and it works great! From my tests it looks like I will need to run the system for about an hour a day. Each hole in the emitter tubing drips about half a gallon per hour. I am going to set it to come on at 5AM every morning to give the plants the water they need for the heat of the day.

The project took me about 2 hours and cost about $55 without the automated timer. $17.47 of that was the 100 feet of 1/2" tube.

I will clean up the drip tubing at the end of the growing season, but the big long tube underground should last for years, so even after the square foot garden is done, I can use that pipe to water our three raised beds either with a drip system or with a regular garden hose. That beats having the lug the hose over and then coil it back up in the heat of summer.

I also put up a piece of cattle panel for the tomatoes to climb. I probably should have done that a week or two ago because the tomatoes took some persuasion to lean over on the panel. I used some pieces of plastic grocery bag to tie them to the panel. While I was leaning them over I pruned off some of the lower branches of the oldest tomato plants to thin them out. I also pruned off some of the bottom leaves that were in the dirt. They were starting to show signs of blight. Getting rid of them will help keep the blight from spreading up the plant, or at least delay it.

While Natalie was in Memphis we taped a segment with her planting peppers. She planted three 'Big Bertha' pepper plants in the garden. One of them was grafted and she talked about the benefits of grafting and showed how to plant that one too. While she was here we also had her plant an eggplant, watermelon, and cantaloupe.

Also in the last few days we have planted summer squash and another round of bush beans. The summer garden is getting going. We have seen some flowers on the tomatoes so we should be getting the first of those in a few weeks.

The spring rains have slowed down so I need to water ever couple of days. Because it is a raised bed with loose soil (mostly compost) it has very good drainage and dries out fast. I will be installing a drip irrigation system so the garden will water itself. We are looking for maximum production so having very dry soil for even a day or two could realy reduce the harvest on some plants.

We have plants growing in almost every square now. I am having trouble finding sweet potatoes so if I can't find some I will repurpose those squares to something else.