Doesn’t it always seem to be true that the heaviest harvest comes in while the gardener is somewhere else? At least it seemed that way to me earlier this month. I was away for a week and asked the assistant gardener to pick the green beans and zucchini when they were ready. He is very reliable and harvested about 10 pounds of fresh beans, 2 pounds of snap peas, and way too many zucchini to count.

Fresh beans

Snap and Snow Peas

Zucchini

There is always one zucchini that’s forgotten.

Forgotten Zucchini – now a baseball bat

Growing under plastic and cloth row covers has turned out to be particularly successful.

Vegetable Garden

I even have tomatoes this year! It took covering the bed in plastic and putting out traps for the voles who were eating them before they had a chance to ripen.

Home Grown Tomatoes

We pulled out the peas and beans from their raised beds and prepared them for fall planting. I have read (not confirmed) that it is not too late to plant another round of zucchini and beans up here on the coast, so one new bed was planted with 3 squash plants, a row of beans, and seeded with arugula on the far side. I hope the squash plants will shade them once they come up.

I will let you know if this experiment is successful. We still have a lot of warm weather going all the way into late October. Fingers crossed.

Vegetable bed with baby squash, beans and arugula

The bed that held the peas was unsurprisingly full of redwood tree roots which had to be dug out. We have a new method of preparing the beds once they are finished. We dig out all the redwood roots (saving as much soil as possible), then put two layers of industrial weed cloth on the bottom of the bed and cover it with cardboard before adding back the soil with amendments of compost and nutrients. It seems to delay the redwood roots, it also means the bed retains more water and doesn’t dry out as quickly.

Newly prepared planting bed

The new one is for fall planting, lettuces and chard.

The flower garden is beginning to show signs of fall. The spring and early summer annuals have been allowed to go to seed and then pulled out. Grasses are beginning to dominate the beds.

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The pollinator garden is dominated by Black Eyed Susans, Shasta Daisys and Yarrow.

Pollinator Garden – August 2020

That’s a quick walk around my garden. What’s your own garden doing?

Be well and safe!