Garden status 2025-10-10: Selection of weird squash.

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September went quickly. I got sucked into my new classes, of which I am taking four: Second semester organic chemistry, first and second semesters of physics and physiology. It’s already intense. But over in the garden, some of the squash are starting to be fully developed. Most exciting, I have tomatoes! But they are very small!

Garden status 2025-09-17: Starting to be able to harvest tomatoes. Some of them taste so good!

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In August I started to get some mature cucumbers and a few beans and zucchini, but not much else. I upgraded the tomatoes from 5 to 7 gallon buckets and added cages in that process using 4 inch square wire fencing.

Garden status 2025-08-26

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July is when most of the squash started growing well, and I realized I planted way too much too close together. I also started getting powdery mildew on the pumpkins and aphids on the kale.

Garden status 2025-07-17: Now we're getting pumpkin flowers every day. So cool.

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In June the potatoes and butternut and acorn squash really started to take off. Everything else I transplanted barely grew at all. I started to consider if I should plant fresh seed to avoid transplant shock.

Garden status 2025-06-26: Transplanted the squash into their final growing spots. Probably too tight, but we'll see.

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The time came to use more of the 2 in. x 12 in. x 12 ft. boards to make a third garden bed. I realized the second one was already too high up into the shade to be very useful, so this one needed to go lower down the hill. I hoped to put it at the top initially, but now it will need to eat into my wood chipped dog chilling area. It also needed to cut into my drainage trench unfortunately, but not a big deal.

Third raised bed complete!

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In May I finished transplanting seedlings into the first garden bed and tomatoes into 18 pots.

Garden status 2025-05-22

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The first garden bed ended up being nowhere as big as I thought once I actually planted things, so I built another one up the hill from the first. This time I bought new lumber from Home Depot, which was out of stock of everything I hoped for. I had to go with much larger 2 in. x 12 in. x 12 ft. boards, which were naturally much more expensive as well! But it turned out all right.

After cutting all the branches in smaller pieces, they compacted down pretty well. I'm sure there are tons of air gaps though I won't be able to fill well.

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The rest of April’s gardening activities included starting potatoes, kale and butternut squash outside and many types of tomatoes inside.

Planting potatoes.

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Last week I got inspired to build a garden bed into my backyard hillside using some discarded fence boards and other wood lying around my property. It took me a while to decide where to put it, but once I got going, it was mostly done within a day. I’m quite happy with the space!

Completed first raised bed using mostly salvaged wood.

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