A lot of sun, a lot of rain, and plenty of good compost means a lot of growing. June is here and the garden is popping. It feels like forever ago that we first started planting and seeding, but now the garden really feels like a garden.

What We Are Harvesting?

Our harvests are still fairly limited but we have some vegetables and herbs from the garden. The purple snap peas have been flowering and producing although the yield is low. We are picking bush beans – we’re probably getting 1-2 beans a day. We’re continuing to harvest dinosaur kale, oregano and parsley. The broccoli and cauliflower grew large but then stalled and got stalky so we harvested them. We’ve also harvested some green onion tops – keeping the bulb in the ground to continue growing. And we’ve had a few peppers – a green bell, some shishitos, and tabasco peppers.

The Mizuna greens went to seed. The produced pretty flowers and seed pods. We left them until the seed pods turned brown and will harvest the seeds to re-sow next spring.

What Are We Succession Planting?

In the sunroom we re-seeded what will be our fall crops – brocolli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, and some lettuces.

In the garden we seeded more carrots, Swiss chard, and cilantro.

From our hydroponic garden, we planted basil that had fully established, as well as a few extra cucumbers.

We are also exploring growing ginger, by planting some ginger root that we purchased from the food store, soaked and then buried about 1 inch deep in a grow bag.

What Will We Be Picking Soon?

Soon we’ll be ready to harvest our potatoes, they are beginning to die off. We are planning to wait until the leaves and stems are fully yellowed and dying back before harvesting. This will increase our odds of larger potatoes.

The cucumbers, squash and tomatoes are all beginning to fruit. Peppers continue to grow. The cabbages are filling out nicely.

What Pests and Problems Have We Seen?

Slugs have been an issue throughout the garden. Unfortunately, they love the damp soil. The only real way to prevent them ruining your garden is to put down Sluggo. This is effective but has to be put down after rain. In addition to the sluggo, we put down some empty cat food cans filled with beer. This makes a great slug trap but also has to be reset after heavy rains.

The cabbage white butterfly were flying around and at first we thought they were keeping away from our brassicas. We didn’t see any signs of eggs. However in what seemed like overnight, we were barraged with caterpillars. We tried to pick them off where we could but ended up spraying with Captain Jack’s Bacillus Thuringiensis (BT).

We have seen a few tortoise beetles on our potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants. Since these are all part of the nightshade family, this was no surprise. While these will mine the leaves, they don’t do much damage to the plants. Instead of spraying, we pick these off and squish them.

What Maintenance Have We Been Doing?

Like last year we are growing zucchini and cucumbers vertically. Because of this we continually check and re-tie the stems to prevent them from falling or getting out of control.

This year we decided to not pinch the suckers on the tomatoes – there are a number of theories for and against doing this. We felt that we had a much smaller harvest last year due to pinching the suckers preventing more horizontal growth. So instead we have been trimming off the lower stems to ensure they don’t get splash-back from the soil and just keeping the main stems growing up.

We’ve been adding compost around all of the plants from our compost pile, as well as adding granulated fertilizer and bone meal.

Every other day we water, unless there has been heavy rainfall.

We continue to visit the garden multiple times a day, checking for pests, soil dampness, and weeding.