Garden: Goodbye Wong Bok!

Recently the wong bok in our square foot garden has gone a little wild.  After that impressive flowering display, a somewhat large storm rolled through San Diego and pretty much uprooted the plant.  I decided to rip it out:

Please excuse my outfit - I had just gotten back from spin class and Dana thought this was worthy of a picture.  

I am planning on transplanting some of the brussel sprout seedlings from the front yard to the new open spot.  The wong bok ended up in the compost pile.

Garden: Flowering Wong Bok

We recently pulled up some of our first generation of plants from our SFG and planted some more leafy veggies.  We left the Wong Bok, Chard, and Basil.  The Wong Bok has been going through a pretty interesting transition the last week or so.  It has grown about three feet straight up in that time and is flowering - pretty cool!

Garden Update

I haven't posted much progress on my various gardening endeavors here - it's been ups and downs. Let's start with the Square Foot Garden:


As you can see we've had some moderate success here. The failures were:

• Spinach - never really worked - always looked sickly and recently just sunk back into the dirt
• Onions - same - sprouted but never thrived
• Radishes - this was my fault for not pulling them out in time. At one point they looked pretty good but I thought they would keep getting bigger and left them in the ground too long and they got really gross

Doing 'OK' are the carrots. The yellow pepper was very slow to get started and unfortunately got clobbered by an ill-placed wrench that fell from the deck railing. I don't think it's going to be able to bounch back from that. The basil, cabbage, and chard are doing pretty good.

So today or tomorrow I'm going to pull out the remains of the yellow pepper, spinach and onion and plant some more chard and some lettuce varieties.

Moving on...here is a pic of our heirloom tomato plant and our passion-fruit vine:


The tomato plant has had some real issues. It grew really well at first but I wasn't looking at it very closely for bugs and it got infested with these green worms that ate all the fruit. After pruning a lot of the branches and getting rid of the bad fruit, it's doing a little better. The passion-fruit vine is the same - still growing and making fruit but none have yet ripened. We think we're about a month away on those.

I've also planted some basil, cilantro (just last weekend for this), and lavender - I'm going to make pesto tonight!


Here is a closer look at some of the heirloom's tomatoes - it's the 'Mortgage Lifter' variety - the fruit can be up to two pounds!

In the front yard, we've had a nice surprise. On the edge of our driveway a random tomato plant has grown out of the side of the yard - you can see it in the foreground below:


It's doing really well - I think mainly b/c it's in the reach of the sprinklers for the yard:


Here are some of its fruits:

There are tons on there!

Garden Updates

The Square Foot Garden is coming along...this past weekend I had to thin out the sprouted plants. This is right before I got down to business:

I felt I was pretty conservative - I don't really like cutting the little plants! I will probably have to do some more in a week or so.

Also, yesterday one of the little pods that had been growing on our passion fruit vine opened into this flower:


The plant is going to be covered with these in a week or so - should be pretty!

Gardening Improvements

Last weekend Dylan built a self-watering container for my passionfruit vine. This is something that he had read about in a book and on the web, and is a fairly inexpensive project that allows your plants to self-regulate their water intake.


We also added basil and lavender to our plant collection:


And were delighted at the first signs of life in the square foot garden, mostly from the radish square (and a little wong bok action):