The Pings: Jon, Jenny, Elton and Rafa

I was so motivated by my initial landscape project, that I decided to extend the garden along the entire length of the house.  I found a how-to online article at Sunset magazine about edible garden paths.   Here’s a “before” picture:

If you look at the back of this photo, you can see the black cinder way in the back.  I had to clear all of the cinder, and because I didn’t have anywhere to put it, I made a trough to hold it all.  I’m sure that the cinder will be useful someday, but for now, it’s being held in a 7X7 foot bin.

After I cleared the rock and roots, I made a path with rocks from Mom and Julie’s yard.    Props to Jonathan for lugging all of the rocks out of mom’s yard and into my car.

Next, I installed a new sprinkler system and trellis with PVC pipe and the remnants of our old fence.  I made the trellis by attaching the fence material onto PVC pipe with regular screws and held the entire contraption upright with rebar.  The other trellis is made with just  twine running through eyelets in the PVC pipes.

I back filled in my new planting area with a good quality soil mix.

And now I plant!  I’m keeping the avocado in a container, because I don’t want the roots to invade our house, but I’m putting in grass on the path, and bananas, lilikoi, plumeria, stephanotis, lavender, beans, and other herbs and flowers to fill out the bed.  It doesn’t look like much now, but in a few months, I’m sure that it will fill in.  Exciting.

Jonathan and I are super amazed by my extra large vegetable plants.  My tomato plant is now taller than me (and three times the size of Rafa), with tons of little baby tomatoes, and since it outgrew it’s original tomato cage, now on it’s second set of staking materials…

And the cucumber vines are taller than Jonathan (It doesn’t look that tall in the photo, but I’m training the the vine to curl down to the right, and back down the trellis, since we ran out of wall space)!

I’m not sure why everything is growing so well, since I’ve only had moderate success in the past.  Jonathan thinks it’s because of the super soil that I mixed into the existing top soil (Kellogg Amend mixed with Niu farms potting soil).  Also,  I’m pretty sure that all of the water, sun and better lawn location (I moved my garden from containers on the East side of the house to a raised bed on the North side), contributes to my overly exuberant plants.    But,  besides all of the other factors, I truly think it’s Dad’s green thumb helping out.   He was a really great gardener– anything he touched grew really well– and I think he is helping my little garden grow.

So, I woke up this morning, and found my BEAUTIFUL daikon covered in pillbug babies and eggs.  Literally, and totally covered.  It was super gross and very, very, very sad.

I sprayed the entire crop, and surrounding plants with Neem oil, and liberally applied slug bait around the entire patch.  It was a pillbug genocide today at the Ping household.  I probably should have been more diligent about the slug bait, especially since I already identified pillbugs as a problem child in my garden.  In any case, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and after realizing the ALL of my daikon were infested, and not wanting to spread the problem to my other plants, I decided to do an early harvest and to pull out the daikon a couple of weeks early.  Thankfully, the buggies didn’t infest the root itself, and after a good wash and scrub, they still look delicious.   Small, but enough for a homegrown tasty dinner– Jonathan’s making daikon soup tomorrow!

Three cheers to Jonathan’s tennis friend, Leonard, who uprooted a couple of Banana suckers for me.  His plant is going growing a crazy ton of baby shoots, so I’m a lucky chicky who got new plants.  I’m putting it in my new patch, on the sunny side of the yard.  Super excited!

ps-  We survived the Tsunami warning unscathed.  I got called into work, since the hospital set up an “emergency command center”, and they needed extra bodies for the ER.   And although we don’t technically live in a flood zone (Julie and Grant do, tho),  Julie, Grant, Homer, Jonathan, Elton, Rafa and I  spent the night in the valley at Mom Sato’s.

The plants are all well watered and well fed and are now producing vegis!  I planted them in January and have seen so much growth in February (see much they have grown!  Super exciting!).  Every plant has now grown beyond the original “square foot” that I allocated for them.  While the square foot garden sounded good in theory, it didn’t work out for me this year, and next year, I’ll need to pay better attention to the number of plants per foot.  I simply did not pay enough attention to the “recommended spacing” for each plant, and did not thin out my seedlings as much as I probably should.  Lesson learned: Just because the seedlings look cute and small doesn’t mean that they won’t grow to giant, beautiful plants.  Despite this however,  I’m pretty amazed by my garden this year.  As Jonathan said:  “Wow, your plants are on steroids!”.  No steroids (although I did use a little miracle grow at the beginning….), but they are thriving and I’m so excited to see my plants grow so much every week.

The zucchini are doing really well.  I didn’t have the heart to thin my crop, so I just let it be.  The humungous zucchini plants overtook one square of daikon, but I have two other daikon squares, so I wasn’t too concerned about losing that crop.   Luckily, so far, so good, and now, I have beautiful squash blossoms.  I was a little depressed when they first blossomed because all of the blossoms fell off at first, but then I learned that squash have boy and girl flowers and the boy flowers appear first, and then fall off.  I now have girl blossoms and since there is a paucity of bees in my garden (I think I need more flowers…), I am learning how to pollinate the flowers by hand.

My strawberry guava gave me a bumper crop this year. I’ve collected 3 gallon sized bags of fruit and I’m learning how to make guava jelly now.  My bush beans also started to grow baby beans and the green onions and daikon are also doing well, and will be ready to harvest in a couple of weeks.  And, amazingly,  after a really difficulty time last season with my topsy turvy, my tomatoes have also outgrown the original tomato cage and is now producing a lot of little baby tomatoes.

My cucumber is growing up the trellis and starting to flower.  It actually outgrew the initial trellis, but thankfully, I made the trellis out of PVC piping and simply added onto the base with a couple of extra PVC joints and pipes.

I’m actually so motivated by my first patch, that I’m working on a second patch on the other side of the yard.  So far, I’m built a trough to hold all of black cinder rock, and am now moving all of the black cinder into this container.  There’s a lot to do,  but I’m hoping to plant some bananas and flowering plants soon!  Three cheers for plants!