Garlic is done (above) and I have planted a a cantelope in its place (below). The garlics did ok.... loving the new music garlic.. I feel like last year the garlic was bigger. This may be because this soil is not as rich as my other beds. Need to work on that. This year I am a mulching maniac as I really don't want to deal with weeding this year, and it will improve the soil. So as I pulled the garlic up I started putting down thick layers of woodchip mulch.
Volunteers!!!
I have some fun volunteer plants this year.... some are not completely volunteers because I purposely buried the leftover scraps (i.e. skin and seeds) from a butternut squash last November (middle picture below).
I have a similar strategy with Cilantro this year.... all my cilantro this year were volunteer plants that came up whenever the temperature was between 60-70 degrees F. That includes the warm spells that we had this winter. What this means is that I don't have cilantro in the intense heat of the summer but I'll live with that. Now is the time when the seeds are forming (picture on the left below), so pretty soon I will broadcast them where I want to grow cilantro next year (yes now is the time so start thinking about next years garden plan).
The volunteer pictured on the right is seriously a very happy accident.... its a watermelon!!! Yes... last year my watermelon vines died before the fruit could take off (as I mentioned here). Apparently there were still viable seeds in this fruit... and while I have started other watermelon plants from seed ... these volunteer plants are the first to show any sign of fruit (yes its the tiny little fruit you see in the picture belowpn the right). This definitely has me rethinking my strategy for watermelon.
I don't have a picture of them but I also founds some mexican sour gherkin volunteers growing among some of my tomatoes, I am not sure if anything will come of them but I will let them go and see what they do.
My pepper and eggplant bed is one of my favorites right now, Its a proper square foot garden with all 16 squares growing a single plant, 12 pepper plants and 4 eggplants. Yes and lots of mulch.... between the mulch and the dense planting there really are not many weeds.
The wait is on to see which of these two cherry tomatoes will ripen first. My black cherry (on the left) or my sungold (on the right). Sungolds are usually my first to ripen but I these black cherries are really giving them a run for there money. Lets see what happens.
I'll end with a few other random plants that are making me happy....
First up is my sugar pumpkin vine. I love making choclate protein shakes with frozen pumpkin pulp (YUMMY). Of course one of these will be earmarked for thanksgiving pie and another will be earmarked for next years volunteer sugar pumpkin vine.
Can you see the tiny baby mexican sour gherkin on this vine?
We went to Disney over spring break and honestly the one thing to truly suffer because of this trip was my onions... oh well. Not sure that onions like woodchip mulch but you live and you learn.
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