Garden Realities: May

About once a month I like to check in on my garden and talk about how everything is progressing. I find that there's nothing more annoying than coming across an interesting experiment online only for there to be no follow up. Although my goals and experiments are fairly standard i hope to never leave you without a conclusion.

I have two garden spaces this year, and a few main goals. I want to try out a couple breeding experiments, put up as much tomato sauce and tea herbs as possible, and save more types of seed this year than I did last year.

The community garden space is set up so that there are three main rows, with a patch of strawberries at the back, and a patch of withering tulips at the front.

The left side is planted with the main melon in my breeding project. It was a green-fleshed cantaloupe with the best taste I have ever experienced. Some of the plants are coming up, which gives me quite a bit of relief.

The right side is planted with Tigger, Presscott fond Blanc, and Rich Sweetness 132. Rich sweetness is the other main component in my breeding plan for melons. I only want it for it's size, and possibly its interesting rind. I might not even eat any of them, because they were super gross last year.

The center lane is devoted to Sunflower Variety #2. It was the larger of my two accessions from last year. With a stem that was at least an inch in a half in diameter and the plant was probably seven feet tall. It's the main focus of my "breed the beefiest and fastest growing sunflower for a trellis" program. These plants are just barely coming up. I should really have planted them a month earlier, but I wasn't ready a that early. Next year I'll do better.

I was able to harvest a few strawberries, and a couple bunches of lemon balm this year. Both are perennial gifts from previous gardeners. I love perennials, and I look forward to planting a few of my own. It's awesome that I can harvest these plants just as I have seedlings coming up.

Gwendolyn is a huge fan of the strawberries.

The yard share garden is has one main bed and a large trellis.

The main bed is filled with chamomile, blue-shelled garden peas, clover, and Sunflower #1. The clover didn't really come in like i was hoping. So this year might be more of an mulched vs. not mulched experiment. So far the exposed dirt has made a huge difference. There are more weeds, the soil is harder and hotter, and the seedlings have had a harder time. There does seem to be an improvement on the side of the bed that I raked some coffee grounds over, so I'll try to find time to add much more of that as the season goes on.

The sunflowers are also coming up here. This accession had the interesting mutated blooms all over the branching plants. I got a lot more seeds from this plant that from sunflower #2, so it would be good for edible seed production as well as amusement. These were also planted super late despite my best efforts.

I'm super grateful to have two spaces to grow my sunflowers this year. It'll be much easier to divide the lines this way.

I bought four tomato plants and some allysum for the trellis area. I also tucked in some interesting beans seeds I had lying around. The tomatoes were the super tall and gangly kind typical of plant nursery's. I had never tried burying the stem before so I planted two of the tomatoes deeply and two shallowly. One of the shallow plants immediately died, but none of them seem to be doing particularly well.

The next step in my garden is to baby all of the new sprouts and weed often. Hopefully I'll be able to thin the plants soon.