Sunday, June 12, 2011

Summer is finally here

Spring made a really poor showing this year, we pretty much went straight from Winter to Summer, and as a result it made getting a garden in very difficult. Finally all the plants are in the ground though and have started to respond to the warmer weather.
Because of the altitude here in the springs, we have a pretty short growing season, some things do really well, like Zucchini, it grows like a weed and one plant will feed a small army, others not so much.
Every year I struggle with my tomatoes, Just when they are starting to really produce, the season is over, and I end up with several vines of green tomatoes hanging in my garage. When I saw the nice big tomato plants in Costco (3 for $15.00) a couple of weeks ago I thought "I'm going to get a jump on the season this year, I'll have tomatoes by July 4th"...yeah I bought the tomatoes, and it's not going to happen.

For those not familiar with Colorado Springs weather we get about 2-4 hailstorms a year (very frustrating) and needless to say about 2 days after planting my nice big tomato plants, we had a hail storm, which pretty much wiped them out...It has taken almost 2 weeks for them to finally recover, and now it looks like I'm behind the season again.
For the last 2-3 years I've been contemplating what I can do about the hail... and this year I finally took action... I have constructed a shelter over all my planting beds that is covered with 1/4 inch wire mesh, so it still allows the sunlight through and hopefully will stop most of the hail (I just finished it yesterday so I won't know for sure how it will work until the next hail storm)

I also planted a "giant" pumpkin this year...Had major problems getting it to sprout, finally after several failures (which set my timeline back by at least 3 weeks) I have one sprouted and growing. So it will be interesting to see if we can get a fruit from it before Halloween.

The other change we made is we decided to see if we could grow Artichokes, have never grown them before, so I'm interested to see what they do. Apparently they grow to be a pretty big plant, right now they just look like a big thistle, if I didn't know what they were and found one growing in my garden it would have been gone a long time ago.
At least everything is growing now, hopefully the "Hailinators" do there job, and we can look forward to some fresh vegetables this year.

4 comments:

Nita said...

YAY! YAY! My blog is back!! :D Glad to see you're posting again ... I know you must be busy and for you to take the time to indulge us, well...shoot, that's pretty cool in my book :). The Hailinator is a grand idea! I hope it proves to be the protective asset for your garden that you hope it will be. Who knows? You may have a million dollar baby right there (mass produce/sell them)!
And I never knew artichokes looked so thistle-y! I would have pulled it up thinking it was a weed had I not known better.
Thanks again Rich for the update and the pics are ALWAYS a nice touch. Happy gardening!!

Nita said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Nita said...

Woops, sorry..somehow I accidentally posted the same one twice ... thus the 'deleted' post.
:)

Stephen said...

DAD wow the Garden looks great!