garden update!

Sunday morning was spent sweating and having a grand old time harvesting, documenting, and enjoying the garden.  The flower above is one of my favorites, a blue dwarf cornflower.  Beautiful.

 Kohlrabi did well, but were planted too densely.

Lovely zucchini.

The haul:  carrots, Easter egg radishes, cucumbers, kohlrabi, and beets, all left at the front desk for students to take and eat!

Some general thoughts and ideas for next year:

--herbs do really well up in the Penthouse; each herb should have two full boxes
--one planter box should have 8 seeds for cucumbers and zucchini, not 30
--plant things like carrots, beets, and onions in three rows instead of two, and less densely
--start lettuces sooner in the winter (say, early April) and sew them directly outside
--use the indoor grow lights for lettuces in the winter
--of the wildflowers I tried to plan, only one kind came (the cornflower); some of them are a bit pickier, but I think in general it's okay for them to be planted outside in the designated flower boxes
--weed more often!  this year, the weeds have infiltrated.
--split the chives once again before the winter and let them continue to colonize their boxes
--peppers need to be planted early, say May, to get peppers before late September
--none of the strawberries came up, try and get a cutting from the housemasters (though even they said this was not a banner year for strawberries)
--I saw bees polinating flowers every time I was walking up in the garden; this is fabulous.
--stagger the plantings of cilantro; they bolt really quickly and go to seed, so if between two boxes I always had starter plants going, I could actually have fresh cilantro all summer
--some of the rosemary plants died over the winter, but some are better than ever...I have no idea why there's a discrepancy. 
--do research on which herbs/plants I can let over-winter