Discussion: fenced?

Is your catnip fenced? I'd like to grow some, but with the cat outside every evening I'm afraid it wouldn't have much chance to get going. I pulled my first beet yesterday! It was red. Time to learn how to pickle things. I started another round of beets in the now empty potato container.

beautiful! beets are awesome. So many great ways to eat them.

It's not fenced Eddie but it is a foot or so off the ground, they haven't found the actual plant yet.

I think my beets are probably still looking like my first failure, but while I was picking snap peas at my CSA farm today, there's are looking fantastic and just about ready, so I may be in luck next week too.

I think I'm becoming Dwight Schrute...

Hey Becky, you could probably re-plant beets now and still have a crop in late summer. The ones I planted in the potato container Monday morning sprouted in just 3 days. I soaked the seed pods in water for 24 hrs before planting, and the soil is nice and warm now. Not sure how they'll deal with the July heat (if we get it), but might be worth a shot if you have nothing else planned for those spots.

I'm definitely planning on replanting in the fall, but I don't think I will bother replanting now. The plan is that the various squashes will take over that box once everything else in there dies back, so I'm not swimming in space.

I might have noticed some tomato blight this morning - grrr! Sprayed the one plant with neem and will keep a close eye on it. The other three all look fantastic.

My peas are almost ready to pick! Very excited about them. And trying to resist pulling up a carrot to see how they're doing too. Hopefully not rotting away with all that rain :s

The herbs are finally up and running too. And the blueberries are almost ripe! Let's see if I can outwit the birds with my netting...

In addition to the neem on the tomatoes, you might snap off the infected lower leaves if you have plenty of crown. Throw them out in the trash and wash up after handling them. I'm trying this technique from the outset this year to see if better air flow and more distance from the soil to the leaves helps. The one year I hardwood mulched under the tomatoes it didn't seem to help, but they were heavily involved already. My toms have blight too, but so far its progressing slowly. I started spraying them all as soon as they went in the ground this year. Also the two potato containers remaining seem to be recovering. Lots of new leaf growth. I hope they aren't cannibalizing the spuds to put this on.

How are your onions looking? I'm anxious to see how well your starts from seeds work. I've never had any luck from onion seed. I've got a small bed of scallions from seed coming up, but those seem to take most of the summer to get to harvest. Also with your carrots you can probably draw a little dirt from around the top of one to see how big it is without pulling.

I weeded the whole allium bed this morning. So many weeds!

I think the onions are going well - the green is tall and strong, but there's no sign of anything peeping from the ground. I guess it's still a while until harvest, but they're certainly looking healthy. Leeks seems to have stalled a little, may have to buy some more specific fertiliser.

I accidentally dropped all my scallion seeds and have been eating/thinning them for a while now in salads. A few of the ones that had a bit more space are almost at final size. They took forever to sprout though.

The only weeds I'm really getting in my beds are sycamore tree seeds that have sprouted. Given their rate of success in my garden I'm surprised there's any other kinds of trees in the whole of New England!

Its poplars and maples for me :) My scallions only get direct sun for half the day, so maybe thats why they're so slow. Dill in that same bed is doing well. Your onions should be bulbing by now. The days won't get any longer than this. At least they give a strong signal when they are ready to harvest. I usually leave them in until the leaves completely brown on the ground. The only worry is losing track of them after the tops are gone, but most of them have bulged up above the soil line. In any case, all of the bulbing alliums should start browning in the next couple of weeks.

I have two sets of onion beds - fall planted sets and very early spring planted sets. All started bulbing at the same time. I suspect the fall planted ones are going to work out the best. But the experiment wasn't perfectly controlled. The cat rolled on the spring planted ones back in June. He found an interesting beetle in there one day.

I just checked my onions - they're just starting to bulge up now! Yey!