The garden has really come in. From left to right: lettuce, broccoli, bok choy, collards, and spinachin bed 1; potatoes in bed 2 north and strawberries in bed 2 south; tomatoes (HUGE!) and root vegetables, including carrots, parsnips, beets, radishes, and kohlrabi in bed 3; corn, peas, beans, squash, watermelon, cantaloupe, cucumbers, onions, and leeks in bed 4.
Tomatillos are starting to form. Tomatoes have blossoms but no fruit yet.
The tomatoes have grown up huge and are threatening to out-grow the 52″ cages I put them in. You can see some parsnips and kohlrabi in the foreground.
Corn, peas, and squash in “three sisters” setup. The peas grow up the corn stalk and the squash leaves act as a natural mulch. Not that I have any trouble with mulch, mind you.
Speaking of peas! The early plants have started to fruit, although we only harvest about an ounce at a time. Snow peas are just about as good as potato chips to me.
OMG potatoes! The vigor of these plants really surprised me, given how most vegetables have to go through a very delicate baby-stage where they keel over at the drop of a hat. Huge sprouts thrust up through the mulch, seemingly all at once. I have a total of 75 row-feet of potatoes, which should produce… well, we’ll see… but I hope it’s lots of spuds.
Finally, the broccoli is just starting to form heads, which is very exciting, except I wish I’d planted more than sixteen broccoli plants, because only about eight of them did very well, and that’s not very much broccoli, if you only get one really good head per plant. Actually, I started eight more plants outdoors in the early spring, but they got totally obliterated by bugs or slugs or birds or something. They’re still alive, but they’re tiny, and not showing much vigor.
It’s been a long time since I lived anywhere there were fireflies, but they’ve started lighting up the night here at The Wallow. Can anybody tell me whether they’re a beneficial insect or not? Unfortunately, there is a movie called Fireflies in the Garden, which makes it impossible to look up any information about fireflies and gardening, because all the hits are about the movie.
#1 by Issa at May 18th, 2010
I think that last picture is a soldier beetle, which is in the firefly family but unable to produce light. Wikipedia says they are: “highly desired by gardeners as biological control agents of a number of pest insects…They consume grasshopper eggs, aphids, caterpillars and other soft bodied insects, most of which are pests. The adults are especially important predators of aphids. They supplement their diet with nectar and pollen and can be minor pollinators. Soldier beetle populations can be increased by planting good nectar- or pollen-producing plants such as Asclepias or Solidago.”