Ha! Here it is!Now, for the gardening update…..

I thought I had updated earlier. Guess not.  OK. So a bunch of stuff has been planted. Here’s an annoying little time lapse over 4 weeks.

 

SO, what’s coming up, you ask? Well here’s my first radish! 

 

 

 

 

And here you can see towards the front, my cucumbers and pole beans. On the back half, are some vegetables given to me from a Hmong woman who has a plot in the garden. She gave me 2 eggplants, the small round kind and 3 Laotian cabbage plants.

 

Those pole beans weren’t there last Friday. I’m just sayin’.

The other long box I have has peas and spices.

Next up, is the first box I planted, where I staggered the plantings of radishes, spinach, arugula and 2 kinds of lettuce. You can see the three batches are all in various stages of growth. The salad, obviously, was from the first planting.

And you can see where I planted a bunch of onions really close to each other in the last box. They’re basically just spring onions right now.

Now here, you may or may not be able to see the carrots coming up.

They’re teeny weeny. And here you can see I’ve already done my first burial of my potato plants and the onions planted normally are really shooting up.

The big, uninteresting mount behind the onions are potato plants. Apparently, and it’s very awkward to do because it seems so counterintuitive, when the potato plants get to be about 2-3 inches above the ground, you bury them, forcing them to grow harder, or something like that. I dunno. That’s what everyone told me to do so I did it. Though I committed a major garden faux pas and took the dirt from the wrong mound. I guess there was an email sent around that I may or may not have read, or maybe I was told and just plain forgot about it, but there are 3 mounds of dirt, and only one of them belongs to the garden. The other belongs to a group called Renew La Crosse which is a Habitat for Humanity group and they’re using the dirt for landscaping projects around town. So yeah, I took dirt from Jimmy Carter. My bad.

Oddly, I didn’t take any photos of my other two boxes. Huh. I guess I’ll do that next time. In those, I have a bunch of eggplants, zucchini, bush beans, swiss chard, collards, kale and about 4 different kinds of peppers: Habañaro, poblano, sweet and the evil Laotian chilies.

I have 6 tomato plants and I want more. Might do that this weekend. Here you can see the little yellow flower on my plant which means she’s looking for a boy and wants to have some fun so she can start to grow the tomatoes.

Lagniappe enjoys hanging out in the garden with me. I park her by the big tree and she either eats the grass, watches the neighborhood or just spreads out and naps.

Sometimes she digs a hole by the tree and I have to fill it in before someone sees it and yells at me about it.

The other gardens are coming along nicely. Some of them I have garden envy over. This one is a very intense tomato garden. When I see her, I’m going to ask why she did buckets.

This guy loves loves LOVES cantaloupes and has dedicated half his plot to growing them.

The other cool thing they do here is grow stuff in hay bales. I guess you kind of get them going by letting them rot a bit and then, by the time you plant, the inside of the bale is about 20-30 degrees warmer than the outside air.

Those are potato plants in the second picture.

These folks have lots of berries. I didn’t do berries, or asparagus for that matter, because it takes more than a year or two for the plants to get happy enough to produce enough to make it worthwhile. These folks have strawberries AND raspberries. Lucky bastards.

And this guy is in the horticulture program at Western Technical here in town. VERY orderly and I betchya it’ll be productive. The first one is all tomato plants. The second one is just a bunch of stuff.

And the Hmong girl I mentioned? Here is her plot. It’s mostly just cabbage, eggplants and tiny, evil little chilies. (She gave me a few the chili plants too. Yay!)

Her and her mom garden in their bare feet and according to everyone I talk to, the Hmong, when they garden, get A LOT of food out of their plots. The Hmong have plots all over town. Wherever they can get them. This one is huge. At least four plots combined.

As for my salad, here were my ingredients: Radishes, spinach, arugula, an onion and few sprigs of oregano.

It’s like printing your own money. How cool is that?

The only real thing I have left to do (besides figure out where to squeeze in a few more tomato plants because, well, TOMATOES) is build a trellis of some sort for my pole beans, peas and cucumbers. It needs to be sturdy for the cucumbers.

I like this girl’s. It’s got a hinge and it’s portable.

Don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I’m REALLY hoping one of these college kids tosses out something interesting I can use.

Finally, summer is here!