A Heap of Garden Updates

Remember the"heap" gardening experiment last year?

A rather simple concept it began; piling up garden trash in the same place every year, burying it at the very bottom of the heap, which is covered with a soil layer.  The decomposing organic matter composts in place, enriching the soil with earthworm castings and micro-nutrients.
The growth potential is no less than amazing,  here's what the "heap" looks like now!

The Heap 2012

And yes, it is HUGE, at about 12 feet wide and 20 feet long.  We have Hubbard squash, cantaloupe, cucumbers, and Spaghetti squash all growing on the heap.  Hm..a few pumpkins too.  Imagine that. Flowers everywhere, some like this one.

Squash? Pumpkin? Cantaloupe?....  I know, a flower!

It seems that even with the strange, even weird weather, the garden is proceeding along just fine!
 The garlic is high,  see these scapes? Straightened out, some of them are over five feet high.
          Although garlic scapes  are wonderful to eat in stir-fries or salads,  I'm letting these  super- scapes ripen so I will have a new supply of bulbils  to propagate more of  this specific garlic.  When the florets develop bulbils, and ripen, they will be harvested and dried for a couple of weeks. The small bulbils can be planted this fall,  a couple of weeks after harvesting. 

Very tall Garlic Scapes

Let's look at the spuds!  We have four varieties,  all hilled up nicely, aren't they?  The plants look small, but the hills are huge.  Quite a change from the soggy spring mud isn't it?  Nary a weed in sight, too! Well, almost! Looks like more work sprouting!

Four Varieties of Spuds growing in the Fog

We have four varieties of spuds planted in this patch.  See? It's right  beside the heap.
 "Gold Rush", "Yukon Gold",  "Kennebec" and an old Heritage white potato variety called "Pimpernel". Last year we bought 2 lbs of "Pimpernel" seed potatoes as an experiment and  ended up with a wheelbarrow full of potatoes.  We saved some of the seed to replant,  and this year we have two long rows-- happily growing.

Sweet corn in the foggy morn seems to be doing fine too--the leaves on this corn are unbelievable, over 4" wide!   It, too, is growing happily.  No wonder, it is heavily mulched. Last year this same variety, by the end of the growing season, had  reached close to  8' tall. 

Sweet corn doing just fine! 

Off to the beanery we go, where purple and yellow beans grow.  Not a weed in this heavily mulched intensive-grow style bean bed!  Beans are ready to pick!

These are yellow wax beans;  the Purple ones  are way down  there.....

Let's hop on  over to the tomato patch.  As you can see, it's a jungle!

Tomato Jungle

A compact, prolific Heritage tomato plant   "Sophie's Choice"

  One of our  most interesting experiments this season  is a  Heritage tomato variety named "Sophie's Choice".     It is a prolific tomato,  a very compact plant--and has, at last count, at least a dozen good-sized tomatoes on it.  Curiously, one is already beginning to ripen.   We will be saving seeds from this amazing tomato plant as the tomatoes ripen on the vine.  It seems to be a determinate type, unusually efficient, compact, and happily,--- a  very early variety.    We have to wonder if the ongoing progressive  ripening  as opposed to ripening en masse caused this amazing  tomato variety to fall out of favour with commercial growers.  Their loss, our gain.

Well, that's  about it for the garden update except for the carrots, cabbage, tomatilloes, Swiss chard, lettuce, onions, peas, dill, zucchini,  novel pumpkins -and THE turnip.  
Yes, we only had ONE turnip sprout. It's growing quite happily.   Go figure.  ONE seed out of a hundred.  Maybe Uncle Mac   who has all kinds of weird stuff happening over at the shed  can get Farm Girl to explain that one!

For our resident gardener dedicated to all things beautiful  I have to add one of her favourite garden things, a spotted lily.  Know why?

Spotted Asian Lily

She graciously took the photo of this pink Calla lily for me.    
 We really needed this special picture for our friend Glory Lennon, the brilliant gardening zeitgeist over at Glory's Garden.  I hereby offer,  as promised...a  pink Calla lily, and yes, we grew it, not in the garden, but in a pot, right outside the door!

Calla Lily            photo by  w.l.kukkee 2012

  Kind of short, isn't it?  Here at Incoming Bytes we all know that with all things growing,  both beautiful and good things come in small packages!


Is that Incoming I hear?