Things are continuing to progress nicely for my vegetable raised garden beds. Four weeks after planting I have quite a few tomatoes on the way in bed one. The two black plum tomatoes I planted four weeks ago from seed are interesting. One is seedling size. The other black plum is struggling like crazy. I need to do something to help it along or replace it at this point.
The herbs I planted in this bed are plugging along but they aren’t wowing me. I’d like to add some more scents and smells still to hopefully keep the tomato horn worms away.
I’m eagerly looking every day to see when I’m going to get my first zucchini blossom in bed two. The zucchini is definitely growing and branching out the fastest. The cucumber plants are getting larger. I’ve noticed that the bed with the most sun has the biggest vines at this point.
I’ve plan on staking my zucchini so I’ve started taking off the lowest branches and leaves that are close to the ground. I want to keep the fungal diseases away as long as possible. It seems like that’s what always ends up taking out my cucumbers. Still deciding whether I should stake my cucumbers. In the prior years I’ve just let them ramble but I’m guessing I might get better yields if I trellised them and kept them off of the ground. The problem when you are doing raised garden beds with so much inside is how to trellis the zillions of things you have creeping and crawling since it’s not practical to do some many trellis options.
In bed three the cucumber seedlings are growing well. I just looked yesterday and realized my eggplants and peppers still haven’t come up and I still haven’t replaced the seeds. I should have done this prior to the third week but for some reason I kept forgetting. Rather than waiting for an eggplant seed or pepper seed to grow I went out and bought a few seedlings to give these veggies a head start. I need to get them in the ground today so they can get growing. The okra isn’t very big still but the two varieties of okra planted in the different beds are all coming along at the same pace so it should be fine.
In my fourth bed my lima beans are putting more height on and my peas are begging for something to climb. I started attempting a trellis on a few but I’m going to give it a few days to see if the peas like it before doing the rest since I have over 50 plants. Vining peas can easily take over a bed in the blink of an eye if you don’t maintain some type of structure and order. I don’t want to end up with a vining mess that crowds out everything else. The okra in this bed is smallish like in the other two beds I have it planted. I just need it to get to a certain height before the peas get too large.
Up until now I haven’t used any supplemental fertilizer. Thinking it may be about time to throw some organic fertilizer on everything and maybe some fish fertilizer on the tomatoes as well. I also cleaned out and gathered my worm castings from my worm bin so I’m going to put some around my veggies. I figure they will appreciate it. I’m thinking about adding a 5th bed in my 4×4 raised garden bed area. I would really like to get some sweet corn, cow peas and some more watermelons growing.