I did a website for Five Star Farms in Brush Prairie, WA. I advertised earlier this year that I wanted to do website work for small farmers and they could pay me in produce (I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much gardening), and this is the only person who took me up on it. So she paid me with a basket of veg last weekend – tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, onions, red and BLUE potatoes, beets, peppers, baby carrots, and probably something else I’m forgetting. All fresh and from her farm or her partner’s farms (they’ve teamed up to provide enough variety to keep customers happy. So this week I’ve had tacos with peppers and onions, lettuce and tomatoes, BLT sandwiches, homemade pizza (hand made crust with fresh tomatoes and basil from my garden), homemade spaghetti sauce and pasta with steamed baby carrots, steamed green beans, I just can’t hardly figure out what to do with it all!

It all tastes so much better than the stuff from the store – the tomatoes taste more tomato-y, the carrots taste more carrot-y, the green beans taste more beany! It’s all so good! I wish we could eat fresh produce year-around. The growing season is too short!

Picked some carrots. They’re a little small considering they’ve been growing all summer! Tasted good though.

Lots of cherry tomatoes and little tomatoes. Not bushels or anything, but enough for snacking on.
The pear shaped grape tomatoes are huge bushy plants, with hardly any tomatoes on them. Just one or two scattered around. I think I prefer the scrawny plants with lots of tomatoes!

Here’s an acorn squash starting to grow.

The cabbages split open. I don’t know if I should have picked them sooner. Either way, the bugs have been feasting on them. The goats still like them though!

We’ve also been getting zucchini out of the garden, but everyone does that. If I couldn’t grow those, I would just give up completely.

I checked on my watermelons and discovered the vine had been completely eaten away, leaving the little watermelon all by itself in the dirt. I suspect a bunny had a hand in this!

So I brought it inside, it’s awfully small. It’s supposed to be a mini-melon, but it’s really mini. I wish it had had a bit more time on the vine.

Inside it’s not quite done yet. Lots of seeds, not a lot of red. I tried it but it had no taste. Oh well, there’s another vine out there still, with a little melon on it, maybe that one will have a chance to finish.

Planted at the same time:

Squash in the raised bed (those are 1 square foot sections)…

Squash in a pot…same soil, located right next to each other. I think it’s the depth of the soil that makes the difference.
Potatoes in a wheelbarrow. The potatoes are an experiment. I had some potatoes that went bad so I cut them up and threw them in the compost pile. A while later I saw they had roots and were growing, so I took the four best ones and put them in a pot. Then I read they needed to be planted and buried as they grew to produce potatoes, so I transferred them to this old broken wheelbarrow (with some holes in the bottom for drainage. They are growing well, but I don’t know if they’ll have enough time to produce. I also might remove the two smallest ones to give the other two more room.

Basil plants. I might transplant them and bring them inside for the winter, or maybe bring one inside and leave one out in a greenhouse and see how it does.

This is my bed of corn. They are doing well, but still may not have enough time to make corn. As I drive around town I check out other people’s gardens and I see their corn is so much bigger! This bed has a thick layer of manure and hay under it, a layer of newspapers to stop the weeds, and then six inches or so of 3-way soil. In front of the corn is two grape tomatoes which have grown quite a bit, and two watermelons that have also been doing really well.

The grape tomatoes have tomatoes on them, and more coming!

The watermelons are flowering. I hope they have time to make melons. These are supposed to be little mini-melons, the only kind that have time to mature in our short season.

It only had a couple leaves when I brought it home, look how much it spread out!

And my strawberry barrel surprised me by actually producing a couple strawberries! I think it likes all the light it’s getting now that the bamboo is not shading it.

Lots of tomatoes coming on the potted tomato plants.

The potted pepper is starting to flower.
Peppers in the garden have put on a few more leaves, but haven’t grown at all. Same with the tomatoes, pretty much.

Lettuce bolted in teh recent hot weather.

Carrots just don’t have enough room to grow in the shallow raised bed. Those are my biggest carrots.

The empty squares are the carrots, which just haven’t done much at all. Most didn’t even get started. A month ago I replanted the empty spots to give them another chance after the slugs had decimated the first round, but they haven’t done any better.

Two squares of Pac Choi have done nothing.

Overall I have to say the stuff I’ve planted in the raised bed has not done as well as the stuff I planted in pots. Since they use the same soil, and they are in the same area of the yard so they get the same sun, and I water them all at the same time, I am going to theorize that the main difference is depth of soil. Six inches in the raised bed, ten or more in the pots. I have a friend who did a raised bed, but it’s probably 20 inches deep, using a 3-way soil mix, and her plants are far outgrowing mine.