I am going to kill things

Organically.

This freaking tomato plant is crazy

This tomato plant survived the winter, and then survived three nights in a row of frost in April. It was about 80% dead foliage, I slowly cut off the dead stuff to make way for the new stuff. The new stuff kept growing and growing and then I went away. When I came back in June, this stupid plant was laden with fruit, now it has OVER 20 tomatoes on it. Maybe I can keep it alive for another year?

October 2011 - tallest plant climbing the trellis

November 2011 - lots of green tomatoes

December 2011 - lots of ripe tomatoes

                                                  

January 2012 - a sad looking harvest, but tasty

                                                 

March 2012 - survived winter, with minimal damage to leaves and there's a tomato!

April 2012 - after the frost, serious leaf damage and sad fruit

Late April 2012 - it's the ugly brown thing behind the chard

May 2012 - spindly and ugly, but alive

July 2012 - weird looking, but LOADED w/fruit

This plant is older than my cats, just sayin'.

Potatoes! (I have very original titles for my blog posts)

 This is my first year doing potatoes, hopefully I don't screw it up.

First, you cut all the potatoes bigger than a golf ball in half, making sure there are eyes on each part.

Mountain Rose potatoes

Even the eyes are pretty

 Then you let them sit and form a scab on the cut part for a couple days.

Pre-scab

Then you shove them in the ground, mound the dirt weekly and pray.

Potato plants around some carrots

Then you do some optimistic exploring in the dirt several weeks before the potatoes should be harvested because you have OCD and just want to make sure they are coming along...
 

YES

Then you eat the crap out of the little things and promise not to pick the rest until they are truly ready.

Sour cream and chives from the garden. Yum.

Then you also make some pasta with leeks from the garden because, why not?

GARLIC!!!

I planted garlic last year for the first time and was very successful. Huge bulbs, very tasty. So this year I decided instead of planting 10 cloves, I'd plant over 100. I pulled up the first 50+ today, and will pull the rest in two weeks. The bulbs are not as big as last year's (probably since I planted Inchelium Red this year, the Music garlic was huge), but they are pretty and smell damn garlicky.

July 1, 2012 - That's a lot of garlic

July 1, 2012 - Decent size

July 1, 2012 - The ugliest garlic braids ever

Check out my garden plan!

http://gardenplanner.motherearthnews.com/garden-plan.aspx?p=105642

Warming Up

This spring has sucked way less than last spring. Although we did have a very late frost (end of March), and for 3 nights in a row! A little snow too, which melted immediately. The first frost everything did pretty well, but 3 days later...I lost a lost of seedlings. Despite this, the garden is doing quite well, as you can see below.

May 19, 2012 - Corn

 

 

May 19, 2012 - Pepper transplants and melons in the back

May 19, 2012 - Garlic!

May 19, 2012 - In front a leek, garlic behind.

May 19, 2012 - Radish seed pods

May 19, 2012 - Volunteer lettuce going to seed

I hit some weird button on my camera for these next ones, accidentally. Kinda neat though because only the green hues show up.

May 20, 2012 - Herb bed growing swimmingly

May 20, 2012 - Carrots at the top, potatoes surround

May 20, 2012 - Tomatoes on the right, edamame in the middle

May 20, 2012 - MOAR GARLIC!

May 21, 2012 - Nasturtium, the picture does not do it justice

May 21, 2012 - Peanuts! Surrounded by diatomaceous earth

May 21, 2012 - My baby, the rio red grapfruit tree

Bird Netting

My bird netting has done a lot of things, unfortunately keeping birds from eating seedlings doesn't seem to be one of them.

• It has taken out a beautiful lizard (it's head got trapped and it strangled itself)

• It has trapped and killed an equally beautiful dragonfly that I didn't get pictures of
• It seems to be a cool place for snails to hang out on

 

I have to conclude that this stuff is pretty useless. I won't be buying more.