Today was a day of planting carnival carrots. For those of you who do not know what those are, aside from obviously being carrots; Carnival carrots are red, purple, orange, and white. Yes, not all carrots are orange.
I planted four rows total. Two rows between each row of my sweet corn that are growing. I planted them 4.5 in apart and 1 foot row spacing. I basically planted approx 80 carrots. Some spots got more than one seed, but I tried to keep it to one seed each hole.
Normally people plant them 1-2in apart, a few seeds a hole, and then thin them to 1 plant per 4 in… I don’t like thinning. I think it is wasteful. I would rather risk not all the seeds germinating then throw out half my harvest basically.
I tried doing it once with beets. Every single seed germinated. I advise never over planting beets.
In other news. My tomatoes are bouncing back for the most part. I harvested two gardeners delights from my garden and soon will have saved seeds from them. Super tasty by the way as well as very easy to save seeds from.
I have a few more gold nugget tomatoes I need to pick from the vine soon.
After this photo I added more soil to the tops of the onions as they were pushing out of the ground.
Don’t remember which this one is. Gold nugget.
Speckled roma. Mint julep Green Zebra
The above are the close ups. Speckled roma is finally reddening up. There is only one of them on the plant. While the plants are looking better, I am not sure they will produce anything more than what is already ripening.
Above is my yellow squash plant. It is doing great. I am seeing squash forming on it.
Below is my zucchini plant which is also forming squash.
The ones in the containers are doing better than the ones in the ground due to pill bug, ant, box elder bug, and earwigs… We have a lot of these and I will be tackling them early next year.
I am still not sure if the ones in the ground will make it till harvest time, but we will see.
This was right before I trimmed off some of the dying leaves on these ones.
I also have some lambs quarters in the yard I had not gotten to picking and now have seed heads forming. I will try and save seeds from those as well.
Lambs quarters are a good wild edible.
I was in the garden for about an hour and a half or two hours just tilling, planting, watering. I very much enjoy my time spent in the garden.
My husband says for next year we will most likely end up renting a rototiller for the part of the yard that is overgrown with cheat grass right now. We have rocks in our soil, so it will help to break up the soil so we can rake them out.
I will probably pile the rocks up and use them in other garden projects.
I may have lost my container garden during the construction at the old place we were at, then also lost containers during the move, but my garden is well worth any small loss I have made from my previous one. My old garden was so destroyed nothing came back this year, so I am not sad over losing any plants. My new plants are keeping me quite happy.
Next year I will most likely be getting mostly heirloom seeds to replace the plants that will not return. Pretty much everything in my garden save for the grapes are not a returning crop type. I am ok with having some heirloom and some hybrid tomatoes, though I will be replanting the saved heirloom seeds I do get from the ones I have.
I would like to save seeds from my squash plants but they are not heirloom. I will replant an heirloom variety next year that I can save seeds from.
I have been hand pollinating the squash flowers using a q-tip in hopes of a fruitful harvest.
I have mostly herb seeds, carrot, broccoli, beet, and that is mostly it. I will need to set up a grow station with shelving and grow lights in addition to getting other seeds I need.
On the food preservation side of things I have pitted (using a chop stick. Don’t judge) about 1/3 of a gallon of cherries and have frozen them for later use. I could make pie, cobbler, smoothies, and a million other things with the cherries later.
I am slowly adding bits of frozen fruits and veggies to the freezer here and there. It will certainly make cooking meals that much easier later.
I am focusing on freezing things for now until I get my canning set up complete next year.
Closer to the end of the month I will be direct sowing some beets in the garden. I will have at least a little harvest this year with the start of my garden.
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