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Produce Garden on 10 July 2015

Week of July 13 - the Plan

Continue to mulch the flower beds wherever we see bare soil.

Weed. Water. Prune.

Finish moving the remaining sod into Bed 29. We moved about 2/3 of this pile last Friday:

Comments are Enabled

I have now enabled the Comments capability for all subsequent Posts. Looking forward to seeing how this works - John

Mangels and turnips and beets, oh my.

Well, let's start with turnips. Bed 25 only. This is certainly a crop from 1886, but we are really unsure as to how it would have been planted. The seeds are extremely small and hard to manage.We will definitely have to thin. We'll see about next year.

Beets are okay, but they are also a smaller seed to plant. They are in Beds 23-24. 

Mangels. Let's talk about mangels. It's a beet relation used as animal fodder. I never heard of it until I wrote the Orientation Guide this spring. There was a visitor from Austria earlier this year that was familiar with the mangel but most North American folks don't seem to know about it. For more about mangels, see http://www.feedipedia.org/node/534
(thanks Judy)

I'm guessing the above is a mangel. I weeded it and several more from Bed 17 - until I realized that many of these weeds were growing in very regular patterns. Hmmmm - what a coincidence. The 2015 Produce Garden list dated July 5 currently shows that we planted mangels in Beds 21-22. Hmmmm - I think not. A new version of the list will be issued shortly.

I anticipate that next year we will plant over a much shorter time period and keep better tabs on where everything goes.

The Produce Garden is planted. Finally.

Turnips in Bed 25.
Mirella cucumber and sunflowers in Bed 26.
Diva and English Long Telegraph cucumbers in Beds 27-28.

Also finished up the Three Sisters planting.
Spaghetti squash in Bed 3 and Bed 8.
Table Queen squash in Bed 4 and Bed 7.

And finally, I threw some dill seeds in all the corn beds.

We will still make harvest, but having this all planted by mid-June would have been much better.

Week of July 6 - the Plan

Plant the last four beds: Beds 25-26 Turnips, Beds 27-28 Cucumbers and Sunflowers.

Continue to mulch the flower beds wherever we see bare soil.

Weed. Water. Prune.

Move the remaining sod into Bed 29.