July 15, 2011 - Summer Lettuce, Fall Planting & Super Sack Suckers

So far the lettuce is holding up well and may possibly get us through the entire summer.

The last two heads of spring planted lettuce are surprisingly sweet. The heads are huge, but there is so much slug and earwig damage I've been getting just over a pound of edible leaves from each plant, and the rest feeds the compost pile. None of the spring lettuce bolted, so it was all used.

The summer planted lettuce has grown large enough that I'll be harvesting outer leaves any day now. This bed is filled with Summercrisp and Red Sails.

Fall lettuce has been started inside. It looks like 18 of 20 are growing.

The Walla Walla Sweet Onion bed has been cleaned out and amended with composted manure. Bush beans (a single row) have been planted to the left, carrots (a triple row) on the right, and the lettuce seedlings will be transplanted down the center when they are large enough. The beans are already beginning to emerge, but the weather is turning hot so carrot germination might be a bit iffy. I really need to cover the rows, but slugs have been such a problem in the garden this year, I hesitate to give them another hiding place. This is a fairly cool, semi-shady area, so maybe the carrots will be alright.

The next bed, to the south of the former sweet onion bed, will be the next one cleared. The single remaining (huge) broccoli plant isn't giving me enough side shoots to warrant the space it takes, and the onions don't look like they are going to do much more growing. There are still two cabbages behind the broccoli. They will likely remain, and another planting of bush beans will fill the rest of the bed.

Some of the small onions have already been pulled, and are drying on the patio next to the bundles of basil.

The poor beets are so infested with leaf miners, I might just as well pull them out so I don't have to look at them! I have no idea what to replace them with....probably more bush beans!

At the rate I'm planting and picking green beans, I soon should have a freezer full. I bought a new vacuum sealer to replace the Reynolds and ZipLoc hand pump types I previously used. After conning us into buying those things, they stopped selling the bags! For just $17.99 and $5 shipping, I bought an electric "sack-sucker-sealer" that works great.

My new hands free sack-sucker- sealer.

I found I can cram a lot of green beans into a quart sized bag. I've also sack-suck-sealed broccoli, sweet & sour red cabbage and pea pods. But it's the green beans that will get the most use, because Annie and Otto love them. What? Doesn't everybody grow and freeze gourmet baby French beans for their dogs to eat?