June 2015 Wishetwurra Farm Report, the North Side from the Ground

We’ve come down from, and stowed, the Herbert Poindexter Memorial Ladder Section. Let’s go into the garden and take a closer look at what’s happening as we coast through these light-filled days on our way to the summer solstice.

Outside the door of the greenhouse is a mob of starts that need to be placed in the garden or elsewhere. It’s hard for me to just toss extra seedlings, so I often pot up leftovers, to keep in reserve in case of failures, or to give away to gardener friends. If you come by for a visit, you might just get offered some of our orphans.

In the picture below, you see the mob that has been evicted from the greenhouse, due to lack of room inside.

Evictees…thrice-potted-up peppers and tomatoes, leeks in the window boxes, a brugmansia that after a winter as a stem rooting in a glass of water is settling into a plantpot home.

One of the reasons for evicting all those other seedlings is that as an experiment, one side of the greenhouse has been planted with peppers, eggplants, and basil. These plants love heat, so perhaps they’ll do well inside during the summer. It can get stunningly hot inside the house, but these plants are native to stunningly hot places, so maybe they’ll feel right at home.

 

Experimental pepper, eggplant, and basil planting in the greenhouse. In pots along the edge are some single black hollyhocks. In the foreground with grassy leaves is a row of garlic chives, and in the front RH corner of the image, you see a whitish thingy. The whitish thingy is a blossom from the cactus that you see. Cactus blossoms are lovely. The original plant came from one of the curators at the Museum of Art in Boston. That’s another story.

We’ll stroll down the path between the North and the South.

The path we call the “Mason-Dixon Line”.

The asparagus patch, with snaky irrigation soaker hose, and in the LH corner, the legs of the Broccoli Diver. The little swordlike leaves are a row of gladiolus, from a too-big box of bulbs purchased on a whim. The glads are one of this year’s experimental follies. Then comes a moundy row of  of pease on fencing, from which I hope today to pick enough pods to win the Morning Glory Farm’s “first peas of the season” prize. Maybe I’ll get there in time, maybe I won’t. You can bet I’ll call ahead, ’cause I don’t want to waste any pease. And that white thingy on the right is a conch shell. The shell came in with a load of seaweed. It’s fun to put things on top of posts.

After the mound of early peas comes a row of garlic, the little dots of green along the soaker hose are this year’s celeriac crop, and then there’s another mound of pease.

The white thingies on the pease are pea flowers.

After the pease come more garlics, another row of gladioli, another row of garlic.

And another row of pease.

The triune bamboo structure at the near end of the garlic row is for the pole beans planted at the base of each stick. The white thingies in the foreground are plant ID stakes. The darker green blob amongst the pease is a parsnip, heading up into bloom. We missed a parsnip root when we dug the parsnips, and when we noticed it, the pease were already planted. So we’re going to leave the parsnip, and let it bloom.

At the bottom of the North is this year’s tomato patch. The upper row is mixed main crop tomatoes, and the row nearest the fence is three varieties of determinate paste tomatoes, for sauce and for tomatoes to dry.

Just outside the fence is the rhubarb patch, which we’ll visit in another post. The whitish thingy in the fence is a gourd that grew into the mesh of the fencing. It grew in so solidly that we left it there. My guess is that it will take at least two or three years to rot out. 

So concludes our northward-looking trip down the Mason-Dixon Line.

In the next Wishetwurra Farm post we’ll take a look over our shoulder.

At the South.