It's a jungle out there

The pumpkins seem really happy climbing up that telephone pole. I can't help thinking that's the coolest thing. We need more of that sort of thing in this city! Think of the potential. Melons at every street corner. Why not?

My cucumbers are taking their time to bloom; not sure why, because they look really happy too, nestled behind that sheltering sunflower.

The leaf miners continue to think they own my chard, but they've got another think coming.

I think my carrots are going to be very short little things - I tried one. That's probably the last time I follow HtGMV's carrot transplanting advice.

I continue to aim all my squash and melons out to the back laneway, and make the melons grow more vertically as well. It's very exciting.

Point-form updates

• I harvested my first zucchini a couple days ago – fresh as a summer's rain.
• My pole beans turned out in fact to be bush beans. I harvest beans from them every couple days, but they're not producing much, and some of the leaves are yellowing. I don't think they're getting as much sun as they need.
• My friend Jen visited a few days ago and she helped me transplant quite a few lettuce and spinach seedlings, and more are on the way. I keep harvesting lettuce, so there's always more room to plant.
• I keep having to tighten the trellises for my tomatoes; the fabric they're made of is gradually getting stretched. They're pretty effective, though. No longer are the neighbouring onions gasping for sunlight.
• Every day I gently steer a few pumpkin or melon vines to follow the trellises or directions I want. I'm trying to aim them north, out to the back lane where there's space, but they're naturally inclined to grow the other direction, towards the sun.
• I'm still picking off the leaf miner-attacked fragments of my chard leaves on a regular basis.
  
• I mounded up my potatoes a while ago. I couldn't find another tire for one of the stacks, so I made do with bits of brick I've collected from the yard over the summer, which I laid around the edges of the topmost tire. Soon I'm going to have to come up with another solution, though.
  

D is for dig, T is for transplant

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I have been doing stuff in the garden, I've just had no time to blog about it. Pictures will come this evening! I can't take photos during the day because the middaylight makes things look crappy on film.

So, I don't remember where I was at in terms of number of raised beds last time, but I'm up to 5 now. I'm getting into the groove; it doesn't take me quite as long to double-dig a bed anymore. Here is the layout of the raised beds and what I have planted in them:

Yesterday I double-dug the fifth bed – the square-shaped one in the middle – and transplanted lots of things into it. I also transplanted more things into the bed on the right. I've managed to cram a lot of different kinds of plants into a pretty small space. We'll see if they like it!

My method of choosing where to plant what was rather ad-hoc, but I often make use of these three guidelines to help me decide:

• Companion planting: Which plants grow well together, and which do worse?
• Shading and space: How tall and wide to the plants grow?
• Age of seedlings: What needs to be transplanted most urgently?

The second guideline came in handy for the tomatoes, sunflowers, and squash. I know tomatoes and sunflowers can grow quite tall and produce a lot of shade, so they should be planted close to the north-ish edges of beds. Squash tend to take up a lot of horizontal space, so I planted them at the back of the yard so they could sprawl onto the back laneway.

For the curious, here's an exhaustive list of what's now planted in my garden, listed alphabetically:

• barley (Arabian blue)
• basil (sweet)
• carrots (Scarlet Nantes)
  
• chard (rainbow mix)
  
• cilantro
  
• corn (Indian blue)
• cucumbers (lemon, Pointsett 76)
• edible flower mix:
  • calendula
  • borage
  • cilantro
  • cornflower
  • sunflower
• flax (golden)
• lettuce (French heirloom Merveille des Quantres Saisons, black-seeded Simpson)
• melon (Pride of Wisconsin)
• morning glories
• peppers (Frank's sweet)
• pole beans (Blue Lake)
• poppies (Shirley)
• potatoes (white and red, though not sure exactly what varieties)
  
• pumpkin (small sugar)
• radishes, now going to seed
  
• spearmint
• spinach (Bloomsdale)
• tomatoes (Sweetie, Scotch Bonnet, Ruffled Red)
• zucchini

I've also been picking off the leaf miner-infected parts of my spinach and chard on a regular basis, and it's definitely helped. The plants seem to be happier, even though they've suffered much defoliating, and the leaf miners aren't making fast progress anymore. I was finally able to harvest my first spinach leaves a few days ago (which is accounted for in the list on the right).

Leaf miners

Upon closer inspection today, it looks like little white caterpillars are consuming the leaves of my chard and spinach. It still looks like a disease because you never see the worms until they're so big and the leaf is so disintegrated that they're visible through the remnant membrane, so that's why I thought it was mildew before.

I spent about half an hour picking off all my attacked spinach and chard leaves. I probably should have done that when I first noticed the condition. Hopefully it will make a positive difference.

Update: Jon informs me that these are, in fact, leaf miner larvae. I'm investigating it.

Update #2: Okay, these are definitely leaf miners, because this page describes my dilemma very accurately. They suggest picking off the infected leaves as the first method of control (just as I have been doing). Beyond that, there's not much you can do, unless you want to take the pesticide route. I can see how farmers would be tempted by that option if they have a large crop at risk. The sad thing is, by applying pesticides you damage soil life, which is crucial for healthy soil. And as Jon and I have learned, healthy soil = healthy plants.