Happy days, ya’ll! We’re finally weapons free to go, go go with the rest of our garden! We’ve got a 10 day outlook above 50F, so everything gets to go in!
It’s really nice to see this garden that we prepared a couple weeks ago actually getting used! This is largely a pepper garden, along with a handful of artichoke. We try to put thirsty plants in this garden as it’s fully automated for irrigation. We have both tried and true peppers and experimentals going on this year, as we usually do.
If you haven’t been with us for the evolution of our pepper gardens, we’re now 100% outdoors with all of our pepper plants. We’ve been focusing more on varieties that do well outdoors and have achieved the gamut of sweet and hot (enough) peppers alike, and great variety. We just weren’t seeing that much benefit from growing peppers in a greenhouse, at least as much as we could get out of good genetic selection.
We also got our bush beans in today. If you recall, we sowed ours indoors this year and did a transplant, as opposed to direct sowing like we’ve done in the past. We were quite surprised to see our beans all ready blooming, we’re definitely on track for a July harvest by the looks of it! We’ve found them to basically be a full season crop when direct sowed, so this should allow us to move our preservation up to mid-summer.
Some out there might question our choices, how can we be “sure” that we won’t get cooler nights in the future? Truthfully, we’re virtually certain between now and late August that we’ll have sub-50F nights! But, one can only be so hesitant when growing in a cold climate. We grow a garden to have a garden, risks and all.
We were definitely glad that we potted up our peppers into 5.5″ pots this year. We’ve sometimes skipped this step in the past and it is just a nightmare when we have late plantings like this season. Our plants were seriously drinking up the water, even in the larger pots. Though this isn’t our latest point at which we’ve planted peppers, it’s definitely “up there.” At a certain point, we just plant, regardless of what the weather does.
So, we’re pushing hard here to get things finished, finally! By this weekend, we should be 100% with all of our gardens, well on the way to growing great produce and flowers. We’ll be telling you more about the technical details behind this garden soon, it’s a good one for us!
