Garden Update

The square foot garden continues to grow. The tomatoes have so far survived all the frosts which is good.

Yesterday I thinned the carrots. We broadcast them onto the soil and did not put them in neat rows. It is my experience that they wash very easily so I wasn't even going to try. I thinned them so they had space to grow. I did not count how many were left in each square when I was done. Also some of them did wash into the cauliflower square, but they are near the border so I am going to let them grow.

I also fertilized the onions. Onions are heavy feeders and require quite a bit of fertilizer. Every three weeks or so while they are growing you should side-dress with nitrogen, a lot of nitrogen. The rule of thumb is 1 cup per 20-25 feet of row... every 3 weeks. That's a lot. For our two square feet of onions I used a tablespoon and a half.

In the next little while we will post videos about thinning carrots and fertilizing onions.

I replanted the missing Swiss chard. Only one of the four we planted a month or so ago came up. I replanted it because it is going to be there all summer so there is time for it to grow and get a crop. The red lettuce on the other hand I am not replanting because it will be replaced by watermelon before the plants could grow.

The radishes are going nuts and starting to bulb out. They are a quick crop and they will be ready to harvest in not too long.

The weeds are also starting to grow. There are tons of tiny weed sprouts all over the place. Luckily, I can just scrape a trowel over the weeds to pull them up. As long as you can catch them when they are small they are easy to pull like this.

Weed sprouts

Weeds are uprooted after a pass of the trowel

We also had some marigolds left over from our summer annual planting demo that we taped with Joellen Dimond. At one time I was going to plant a square of marigolds in the square foot garden, but that square got repurposed for summer squash. I stuck some of the extra marigolds in the spaces between the concrete blocks on the side of the raised bed. Hopefully they will survive the less than ideal growing conditions and make a nice little pop of color and chase some bugs away.

The rest of the plants are growing well. We are only a week or so from the average last frost.