I try to keep the garden related posts to a minimum on here since we have a separate blog for that now and because I figure that most people renovating their homes don’t necessarily have the time of interest left over for gardening. But our plants are exploding in our greenhouse and I thought it might be about time to share a progress report.

As promised in my previous post on our Self-Reliant Yuppies blog, I just went out into the garden to take a few pictures to share of the plants. Normally I would wait a while for a new post but since the photos in the last post are 9 days old anyway, there has been a lot more growth lately in the greenhouse. Visit the link above if you want to see how much they’ve grown in such a short amount of time. Water, fertilizer and room to grow is a truly amazing concept. 🙂

This first shot was taken standing right outside the door of the greenhouse. As you can see, it’s a bit full in there. We are planning to move 2 of our 4 zucchini plants outside over the next week while Stefan is on vacation and perhaps 1 of the 2 cucumber plants. These plants are just getting far too massive to stay in the greenhouse but we want to leave at least one of each behind just to test if it does much better than the plants outside, if the fruit tastes different, etc. It’s our testing year for the greenhouse after all. But moving a plant out also means finishing another raised bed so we’ll see how that goes.

Here’s the tomato side of the greenhouse. These plants are now ranging from 3 to 4 feet high and have lots of blooms. The small tomatoes on the Red Zebra tomato are finally growing again as well and about golf ball sized now. To say we will have more tomatoes than we know what to do with is probably an understatement. But we love tomatoes and plan to not only use them in fresh salads or sliced with buffalo mozzarella but will also make the basis of our marinara sauce (so we can just open a jar or pull it out of the freezer, add the meat and have a meal), salsa and much more.

Here you can see a few of the salad cucumbers growing. They are 5 or so inches long. This particular plant is latching onto anything and everything that it can which means we really need to get it on a trellis. The other plant isn’t quite as hearty but it’s also hard to see with the other plants all over it so perhaps there are cucs on there already too.

And here are a few of the zucchinis we have now. These are also 4-5 inches long and there will be many, many, many of them.

Here’s the stevia, getting dwarfed a bit by one of the zucchini behind it. It should be reaching maturity soon I guess – they only need about 12 weeks until you can harvest from them. We have tasted some of the leaves from it already and the plants are definitely sweet. We are drying a few leaves now to see how that process goes and will decide slowly how we want to proceed with the plant. We think we can harvest a portion of the plant and leave the rest growing but we’ll have to research that some more.

And now we move on to the eggplant. These 4 are doing really well but there is a 5th plant that is almost twice their size now over near the zucchini. Maybe it’s something about that corner of the greenhouse…

As you can see, the eggplants are also blooming already and I really love the pretty lilac color of the blooms. You can also see a bit of slug damage on the leaves. We have to do some controlling in the greenhouse and lay some cornmeal traps or something. Salt isn’t going to work so well right now because we have a bit of water dripping out of the pots after waterings…but I’m sure we can come up with something.

This is the Thai Hot chili plant. There are some teeny, tiny chilies on here now but you can’t see them to well. I almost missed them even when I was standing there in front of the plant.

And out in the yard the sweet corn is still looking great while the Jala corn is growing like a weed. There’s no signs of it producing tufts any time soon or anything like that so I think we will be looking for a big growth spurt with it now that the slugs aren’t eating it to nothingness.

And here is the red current bush which is fairly full. I tried them again today and I’m still not convinced if they’re not yet ripe or if they’ve now been on there too long…

These are the apricots. The tree isn’t loaded down with them which is ok since we aren’t really sure what we would do with them…but when the fruit is done we are thinking we will cut the top out of the tree at the same time so it doesn’t get too big and so we can easily harvest the fruit. The tree wouldn’t be strong enough to support us climbing around in it, nor is it really big enough to warrant that. So we figure trimming it during the harvest will kill two birds with one stone.

For anyone wondering how the wine is doing, it is also growing like crazy. We need to get on the roof of the horse stables this weekend and do some controlling. The vines are growing along the edge of the gutter which I’m ok with as long as it’s only one vine – I don’t think it will have enough weight to hurt it. But many of the vines above the horse stalls need to be spread apart a bit and trained onto the wall. We have plenty of room for them up there, we just need to direct them.

We also want to cover the grapes already to prevent any theft by the birds. You’ve all heard about the chaos we have with birds around here and they nearly stripped this thing clean last year. I happened to find an article about growing wine at home in one of my mother-in-laws old gardening magazines which I have scanned and intend to put to good use. They suggest covering just the grape clusters with bird netting instead of the entire vine which may require a bit more work but still seems easier in the end. So hopefully that will be one of the many tasks we accomplish over the next week.