Urban Garden 2020: An Early Summer Update

We tried a big new thing with our garden this year, and so far, it's going quite well! Here's a timeline up updates (many from Instagram).

In mid-March, we planted cukes, tomatoes, zinnias, snapdragons, cilantro, basil, and zucchinis. We had red peppers already growing at that point because I started soaking those seeds 5 weeks earlier (soaked for 2 weeks and in the ground for 3 more):

March 14: planting, and red peppers up.


March 20th: our cukes came up the night before!


April 11: transplanting and thinning. And moving some to the porch!


More transplanting.


April 14: before & after: from 3 bulbs to 7 bulbs for the grow light set-up!
(Before, we could fit 3 flats of plants. After, we had 5+ flats.)


April 23: permanently moved 6 flats out to the porch.


May 6: Zinnas and cilantro on top. Tomatoes and cukes on the
bottom. One week before weather's good enough to plant outside!

The next day, we chatted with our neighbor. We've helped her with her small garden (mainly tomatoes) the last few years, but not much would grow for her. She doesn't use her yard for anything (and she's got good southern exposure), so we asked her about making some raised beds in her yard (for us to garden and to share with her), and she loved the idea!! That culminated in this post:

May 8: "A big difference over the last 24 hours! Our neighbor who’s yard is next to our narrow garden behind our garage said we can use her yard for a bigger garden as long as we share veggies with her. DEAL! I built two 2x10’ beds yesterday (which will triple our garden space). This morning, I borrowed a sod cutter, installed the beds, staked them down, and filled them with soil and compost. (Peat moss will be mixed in soon.) Once St. Paul offers free wood chips, we’ll spread that around on the bare dirt. Our neighbor got home from work tonight and loved it: 'This is the best news of my week!' When it finally warms up next week, we’re planting!! #UrbanGarden"

TRYING to help with the sod cutter.


Note the far box: the bottoms were filled with the upside down sod.


Pulling back some of the sod inside to cut the wire mesh
so I could pound stakes in and screw them to the box.


There are our old, narrow, weathered boxes along our garage.


Filled with a few bags of generic "garden soil" and then lots of compost
from our nearby St. Paul compost site. Peat moss yet to be added.




24 hours difference. (Her old garden bed was about 3x5' for reference.)

The next day I posted this video saying "Henry was a great help bustin’ sod yesterday:"

Direct link: youtu.be/uJaAQQN6_N4

May 14: "Bunny-proof. Plants and seeds coming soon. #UrbanGarden #TakingOverTheNeighborsYard"

And as a Facebook friend pointed out, "Nothing is bunny proof.
Only bunny resistant." So true! Hoping this deters them just enough.

May 16: here are planting photos first seen in this post:

(And notice we got wood chips the day before.)


Tomatoes, peppers, herbs, romaine, and onions.


2 rows of radishes, 4 of carrots, 4 of green beans, and 2 of green onions.


The old skinny beds on the edge of our yard. (The grass in the lower left of the
top photo is technically my neighbor's yard - the bricks go RIGHT to the edge.)


The 2 old and 2 new beds.


Weeding (I've done a good job of staying on
top of it this spring!) and planting in the front.

I posted this on Facebook 2 days after planting. The bunnies were kept out, but other things were digging things out (without eating them) left and right. That led to me covering a lot of the seeds with chicken wire to keep critters from digging:

(I actually think it's been chipmunks, and not squirrels.)

About a week later:

May 24: the green beans were getting trapped under the chicken wire,
so I built a “cage” out of cedar scraps and leftover chicken wire.


June 1.


June 1. (That's 22 cucumbers planted in about 5 linear feet!)

Here's an Instagram post from June 7: "Before and after: I took the chicken wire off the onions today, and took the two 'cages' off the radishes, carrots, and green beans. Also, the greens are looking fantastic on our white radishes (called 'icicle' because they grow long not round), but they’re not *quite* ready yet. #WayTooSkinny #PlumpThoseBadBoysUp #UrbanGarden"

Before.


After the "cages" were removed.


Tiny white radish.


June 13 (6 days later): white radishes and a head of lettuce for
our neighbor (as payment for letting us take over her yard).


June 15: the flower garden in front.


June 15: 4 or 5 of our zinnias are already blooming!

Here's a big update from June 16: "Garden update! The tomatoes are now taller than Charlie. We picked our first tiny cucumber today (that was done developing and starting to rot at one end), and Charlie ate the half that wasn’t going bad. Henry and I picked nearly all of our big white radishes, which makes our yearly total 29 so far (with a few tiny ones still left in the garden to see if they do anything). The radish tops went to Shannon who fed them to her guinea pigs and bunny. And we took our little rabbit-hampering fence down around the garden."

Radish greens packaged up for the guinea pigs and rabbit.




And I got a pic of my friend's bunny eating our radish tops...


... and her guinea pigs too!


June 17: baby veggies. (The leaf lettuce is in a small planter on our patio.)


June 19: Our first legitimate cuke of the year (devoured on the
spot), and our green onion harvest (part of which is currently in
guacamole, and part of which will soon be used on tacos).

If you scroll up to the first pic under the "June 16" update, you'll see 2 zucchini plants in the foreground with green onions growing just past them. That was good planning, because the zucchinis now need a bit more space and have taken over the area that used to be filled with the 2 rows of green onions. Nice.

And here are a few final pics from yesterday:

June 21: some cukes.


From bottom-to-top: the small radishes we left (getting bigger),
carrots (need to be uncaged soon), green beans, and 2 zucchinis.


A 5-week difference! (From nearly the same angle.)


The overall shot from 5 weeks ago and last night.

Oh, and it's covered by the cilantro in the very last photo, but we've been using our rain barrel more than we ever did in the last few years. I raised it up on some cement blocks as high as it can go, and now I get decent water pressure when filling a watering can. In the past, it was SO SLOW because the hose coming out of it started so low. I've watered with nothing but rain barrel water this year.

So far, we've harvested 2 heads of lettuce, 29 radishes (with a few more still growing), 5 cucumbers, 2 rows of green onions / scallions (I dunno, maybe 25-30?) and had lots of pickings of cilantro to use in salsas and on tacos. (Our "old" cilantro is about to be pulled, and we have a few smaller cilantro plants coming up that I planted a few weeks back.) The only critter damage we've sustained is most of our small basil was mowed down (we only have 1 big plant left) and a few green beans had the leaves chewed off and didn't recover. That's not bad for a city garden.