Cardiff Garden Blog

My watermelon vine is growing very large.  I'd say it's beyond 30 ft in length. I've already reaped a few melons from the vine.  It's funny how sometimes the shapes just don't come out like they are supposed to. Like this watermelon with growing pains. I still holding out hope that it's upper body will fill in.

I call it. A day's pick.  Seen in photo: Habanero, Anaheim, chili, thai, green and others.

As I wrote in my previous post I had this problem with a subterranean rodent that was destroying the roots of my plants. One of the plants affected by the monster is this pepper plant. He chewed away the roots and I quickly noticed it wilting and dying.  I uprooted the plant with what little roots it had left (you can see in the upper pic) and wedged it into my fence. See the peppers on the plant were all still green and weren't ripe enough yet. So I figured I'd let nature do the rest. Very cool.

Anaheim peppers tend to be mild. They grow to be about 6 inches in size or more. You can see one growing here that isn't quite ripe yet. They grow to be a nice cone shaped pepper great for stuffing.  Just picked two from this plant the other day.

This plant was stunted and never grew beyond 8 inches or so. I suspect due to the rodent chewing roots below all my plants for so long. But I had a chance to get even and haven't seen my subterranean friend in some time. And I suspect I won't ever see him again (If you get my drift). So since then, this plant has been making a comeback along with all the other plants in the box. I feel like all the peppers are all going to ripen the exact same time. Can see some garlic that just sprouted a few days ago in the background of the shot.

I've planted so many different plants and rarely remember exactly what and when I planted. I need to get better about documenting what I plant. Maybe I thought that is what this blog would do for me. Anyway I know this plant to be something in the squash family.  This is growing in my alley box which gets a ton of sunlight and seems to have the best soil of the boxes. In the background you can see an artichoke plant. Now last year I tried growing Artichoke and one of the most valuable lessons I learned was to give it plenty of space.  Now I heard that last year and ignored it because often times every plant will say a lot of space and not really need/use it.  But in this case you do need to give it it's space. Probably about 3 feet.

Just planted more garlic. I actually used a lot of the garlic I've harvested to replant the next crop.  All you need to grow garlic is soil and some garlic cloves. You can buy them either at the garden store or use the ones you buy at the supermarket.  Simply using your thumb push a garlic glove pointy side up into the soil a few inches. That's pretty much all the work you'll need to do.  Some say it's good to cut the flowers off so that more energy its given to the garlic itself.  These have been in the soil a few weeks. When they first sprout they look simply like a thick green weed coming in. When the plant begins to dry naturally it's close to harvest and stop watering plant.   There is no right or wrong time to harvest garlic. You can eat it right away or let it dry out. It comes upon preference.  When harvesting remember to dig up bulbs and not to yank out like weeds. This ensure you get a full clove.