Its the second week of July and its pretty hot and humid up here in Old Town, Maine, but I planted peas late (June) but, I planted them in a really shady spot. This spot (next to our kitchen) gets 3-4 hours of pre-noon sun and then its in shade the rest of the day. As a result, I think, these peas are doing alright considering the weather. There are a few pods and I suspect that we'll have some to munch on by next week. Certainly not early, but its telling me what I wanted to know. Also, notice that I have quite the number of bean plants growing in there as well. I read that green beans would do okay with partial sun and indeed they are. I just need much longer canes as the vines have already outgrown the tee pees I set up last month.
Onto the potatoes. I haven't posted too much about these as I played around with them. Its time for a summary, though the real results won't be in until this fall when I tip the buckets over and see what kind of loot its born. I used buckets I obtained from a local bakery for a dollar a piece. They're not quite five gallon buckets, probably 3-4 gallon. Each bucket got a couple of eyes planted in about 3-4 inches of composted manure. The going was slow at first and I initially used straw to 'mound up' the potato plants. However, for two buckets I used compost (from the town) to 'mound up'. What I found was that the potatoes that were given the compost did better than the ones given straw. I'm a newbie so I can only conjecture but I wonder if the compost doesn't both hold moisture better and provide some nutrients while the straw does little except block light. So I tried switching some of the potato plants from straw to compost. They did much better. Once I saw that, I switched all of them over to compost. Now they all look lovely.
Lanie's garden (our oldest) is a flower garden which isn't very far from flowering. She's got nasturtiums, holly hock, and morning glories. I finally got around to putting up a tee pee for them to climb on.
That is, if the japanese beetles don't eat all them yet. They started showing up a few days ago and these folks will eat at night but are also more than happy to take an afternoon lunch in the sun. They crunch a bit when you squish them and they're smart enough to fly away once you start on your beetle killing spree. So we'll see who wins.
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