Design

If I were the least bit handy, I could have built these trellises. But I'm not, and I don't have any woodworking equipment or fancy screwdrivers. So these inexpensive, pre-made trellises, from a big-box store, seemed perfectly decent to try. They're made by a company that has redwood in its name, but these are probably stained redwood color! I'll be improving the soil beneath the three new trellises tomorrow, and planting more pole beans, cucumbers, and maybe a twining squash. Eventually, we'd like to have permanent trellises on the side of the apartment building, but that will require a bit more investment and work!

I'm using space between our house (in the mountains) and the next door apartment to set up trellises (and planting areas) for pole beans, yard-long beans, malabar spinach, etc. The space gets full sun most of the day in the summer; we planted blueberries along the apartment side last year. But challenged by space elsewhere (uh, I've filled up my raised stone beds already, probably overfilled them, to be sure). I'd be thrilled to have some vining vegetables in the corridor between our dwellings. Cheap, probably fake, 'redwood' trellises are the supports; they're attractive, at least. And the apartment brick wall is not especially attractive, marked by cable and telephone lines, along with abandoned phone lines, etc. Digging up the soil here isn't rewarding; beneath the decaying organic matter (leaves and bark mulch), there's more of the heavy gray to red clay, but at least this stuff is friable (unlike the compacted builder's fill in the front m...

I'm harvesting the first yard-long beans (Vigna unguiculata sub. sesquipedalis ) now from the main vegetable garden. They're the 'red noodle' kind, a variant of the regular green ones. They taste just the same, a nice beany sort of flavor, one of my favorite summer crops. They're easy to cut up and cook (just like snap beans), but there's little stringing or trimming required. They're definitely hot weather, sub-tropical beans, originating apparently in Africa, and spreading east and west from there. Another subspecies is cowpea, or black-eyed pea, a bush-type bean grown for shelling. They both thrive here in the humid summers of the Southern U.S. They have an interesting interaction with ants , which visit their extrafloral nectaries.

All of the plants in our garden looked so much better this morning; we ended up with about 8/10 of an inch with more rain overnight. It makes a huge difference to parched soil. The vegetable garden beds are like sponges, rich with organic matter, and I think the bean plants in the satellite garden took advantage of the moisture to grow an inch or two. Yard-long bean seedlings The basil seedlings seemed much more robust, and the squash plants are thriving, too. I've gotten more summer squash (yellow and scalloped) this year than I ever normally do -- maybe having the rough-stemmed C. moschata plants surrounding them is good. This scallop squash was larger than I like to harvest them, but they're still wonderful. Fresh young squash hardly seems related to grocery store yellow squash and zucchini.

After a few more days of HOT, terribly dry weather, while busy with other things, I went ahead and harvested one of the potato beds in the satellite, since the tops were pretty much 'flopped' over. The soil is dry in spite of watering, and it didn't seem like much more potato growth was likely. I mixed in compost, set up a couple of trellises, and am now thinking about whether to plant yard-long beans, pole beans, or squash. One of my personal 'rules' is that gardening (whether vegetables or otherwise) should be fun, and once I start worrying about 'chores' -- this is not a good thing. Having too many beans, or squash, or lots of anything to preserve that requires lots of prep work -- this is not fun. Productive and sustainable, yes, but some things are more fun to do than others. Slow-roasted tomatoes, for example. Actually, yard-long beans are super easy to prepare and squash and zucchini, too. But I'm looking at the potato and garlic beds yet to be h...