re: 2023 Spring Garden Thread

I will be harvesting green beans, zucchini, peppers and tomatoes this weekend. But my butternuts are just sitting there doing nothing after growing to 8" tall. WTH?

I’m thinking I may end up with a few Paul Robesons!

Soon.

Onions bulbing up and about ready.

Potatoes and carrots

Planted Feb 19. We mounded them 3-4 weeks ago.

May have a large problem soon

We planted about the same time. My potatoes are in 15 gal grow bags and they are about to bud. Beans about the same, but my onions are nowhere near like yours. I made a raised bed for onions and they look like glorified green onions. Red creoles in the ground look pretty good. Squash are looking good so far. Gave up on corn, squirrels dug seeds up faster than I could plant them. About to drop some sweet potatoes slips in those rows and a few leftover tomato and pepper plants.

Sun golds looking good.


Got another haul of carrots


First round of beans coming in. Blue lake pole and tenderette bush.


Kern standing tall. Melons and cukes still slow.


It's not saying much, but the sunflowers are taller than me.

Everything in your garden looks beautiful and very healthy!

Finally had a weekend off and got some work done in the garden. I had a ton of weeding to do thanks to some aggressive Bermuda and a kale plant that was 3 years old and 2-2 1/2 feet tall. I forgot to take before pics but here is after.





Got tomatoes and peppers in the ground.



I planted some okra and sunflower seeds as well. I do have 2 sunflowers the popped up from fallen seeds last year.



I also had a tomato plant pop up in my potato grow bags. I never removed it and it’s actually progressing pretty well. May just keep it in there.



The strawberries and blueberries are coming along nicely. I may be ready to move them into their own beds this summer.





The blackberries are going crazy. My kids ate their weight (I may have had a couple too) and we still had plenty leftover without ever checking the 2nd bush.



I got my queen I ordered came in on Friday. I had tried a 3 way split on my big hive since I lost that queen and had a ton of queen cells. When I looked in the first box, I saw eggs but ended up catching a laying worker in the act. I chose that one to introduce this queen to. They sniffed her out before I even opened the outer cover.



The next box was a small nuc that I actually brought out to a friends property 10 minutes down the road. He keeps bees as well so figured it would be a good spot to try and get a queen mated. After about 2 weeks I brought it back and opened it up yesterday for the first time. I struck gold on this one, finding eggs and larvae right away. I moved to the next frame and spotted her right away. I was on cloud 9 getting my first mated queen. I quickly got her marked and put back in the hive.





I dug around in the 3rd hive and didn’t find any signs of a laying queen. I have another queen on order that I should get Tuesday though so that one will be queen right soon. Hopefully it will be back to 100% soon.

It’s getting busy with 3 hives though. May have to figure out a different spot in the yard to put them.

My tomatoes and peppers have finally (seemingly) fully recovered from the cropduster debacle. They're setting fruits and putting on lots of new growth. Unfortunately I think I'll just miss out on the first big push of fruits, which is unfortunate - especially for the peppers. I feel like those are always the biggest peppers.