Garden News

I pulled some volunteer melons today. That was hard! Last year I grew two types, and both were delicious. In order to save pure seed without isolating my plants, I decided to grow just the little green one this year (Petite Gris de Rennes). And since there's no way to tell which of last year's melons volunteered, or if they were from seeds from store-bought melons, I needed to pull those. Not that I need more - the ones I planted have really taken off and have over a half dozen developing melons already. Last year's were planted so late - middle or end of June I think - that I did not get many melons to ripen.

In other garden news, I have some volunteer tomatoes, so we won't be completely without. The ones I planted were held in their pots too long, are heirlooms that tend to get leaf curl, and who knows what else went wrong. Well, bad plan, for one thing. I thought it would make sense (and this plan was developed PRE-chemo, so chemo-brain is not my excuse) to put the tomato cages in place early and plant peas on them. The peas were planted mid February and did great; they were still producing a few as of early July. So I needed to transplant these already too large tomatoes into cages covered with pea vines. Can't move the cage, can't get a shovel in there. Not to mention all the volunteers I'd let grow -- carrots, lettuce, chard everywhere.

And speaking of chard! I haven't planted chard in probably 4 years. This year I have the best chard crop ever. It is scattered here & there -- two plants came up in Clare's flower garden, several on the edges of the raspberry bed, and bunches in the other beds. And these plants are producing HUGE leaves. We've eaten chard daily for the past week and a half, and every other day prior to that. It's gotta be the water. I have the soaker hoses on a timer set to run for 1/2 hr every other day. My last timer would only allow me to set particular days of the week, so I did three days/wk and probably only 20 minutes or something. Everything is doing a lot better this year, and it isn't because we've gotten rain. Elsewhere in the city rain showers have been frequent, but here in our little corner we tend to miss most of the storms this season.