Tomatoes, 2007

Vegetable beds, early July

We don't have much time for garden tending, so we designed the vegetable area of our garden to be easy to care for. We made raised beds out of livestock watering tanks purchased from the feed store; we took the tanks to a shop to be powder coated a nice bronze color, and had the shop cut out the bottoms of the tanks for drainage. We ran pipes up through the bottom of each container for drip irrigation and filled them with a very good soil mix. All of this pre-planning has paid off, the vegetables are very easy to care for, there are hardly any weeds to pull, the height of the containers excludes many pests, watering is nearly effortless since the drip system is set up on a timer.

Vegetable beds, early August

The problem is, the vegetable beds are too small, or, maybe not enough of them. We grow veggies year round and I have a terrible time with the timing of the crops. Often one crop is delayed by waiting for the previous one to mature then suffers from a late start. Last year we got such a late start on the tomatoes that we had to ripen the fruit in the garage, the first glimpse of a ripening tomato wasn't until the end of September!

Tomatoes, August 3, 07

My timing has been a little better this year, we picked our first ripe tomatoes on August 1st! Unfortunately we ate them before i got to take a photo. The plants are covered in fruit and flowers, it looks like we will have a great crop. The peppers are growing well, and the beans are flowering.

Bean flowers, Poblano pepper with cilantro