Vegetable Bed Update

When we built the two new raised beds earlier this year we were hoping for a whopping veggie harvest. Sadly our vegetable garden beds are taking their own sweet time to develop. The silver lining though is that they are slowly but surely getting there. I think part of this might be the soil we used in the beds this time. If you remember we’d used mostly a combination of humus and organic matter is the two new beds while the old one is as is. Strangely the plants planted in the old bed have taken off faster than the same ones in the new beds. 🙁

Here’s the old bed sporting a riot of sweet potato vines, cucumber, tomato, mint, and long beans. There is a lone broccoli plant in there which we are trying to see if we can get seeds from.

Bed #2 has more sweet potato, tomatoes, chili pepper, jalapeño, and rosemary. The red amaranth seedlings in there refuse to grow!

Did you notice the chicken wire in corner of the pic? Well, that’s our make shift barrier (using the left over from my jewelry organizer project, need to built a sturdier one) for the unwanted visitor that has been getting into the beds.

Yes, hooves! Deer! 🙁 So far he has gotten only the sweet potatoes leaves but has managed to shake off green tomatoes from the plants.

Bed #3 has more sweet potatoes (What else can you do when they came in a pack of 6!), Thai basil, mini eggplant, tomatoes, carrots, and okra. The yellow bottle hanging there is an aphid deterrent contraption that my parents swear by. 🙂

And this year’s harvest so far, whatever pictures I remembered to take before we used them up. Did you know, broccoli leaves tastes yum in a stir fry? We make the traditional South Indian stir fry, the thoran or poriyal with them with grated coconut…oh..sooo….good!

Frankly apart from the tomatoes the only veggies that are thriving are the long beans

and the Thai basil.

The okra

and rosemary are trying their level best to  survive through the sweet potato thicket!

My mom got so fed up of the Amaranth not growing in the bed that she started new seeds and are growing the seedlings in garden pots.

This weekend the plan is to add more chicken wire so that we can deer proof the beds. What do you do to keep the deer out (our yard is not fenced in)? Any idea why the veggies are having a hard time growing in the new beds ? You’d think that the humus and organic matter would be good?