first zucchinis

I’ve got zucchinis in my garden, the closest I can come to the Pinoy patola (or luffa). I plan to have the luffa variety this coming September season. In the meantime, we’ll make do with what we have right now. :)

more zucchinis coming up...

first harvest of zucchinis, cherry tomatoes and bitter gourd 

memories of summer 2011 growing season

My first ever vegetable garden—in my entire life, that is—was hewn out of a grassy patch of sandy yard.

sandy soil, overgrown weeds...my first ever vegetable garden

Vain Asian girls like me take pride, and aim for, a fair silky complexion. (That's our definition of beauty, I guess.) In Manila I had a diamond facial peel monthly, without fail, just to clear my skin of any gunk. I was even on a glutathione regimen—worth $80 a month—just to maintain a fair, glowing skin.

All those thousands of pesos down the drain with my vegetable garden in 2011, which I grew in the midst of summer, in Central Florida…where the temperatures are typically around 101ºF (38.33ºC). After a few weeks, Hubby said I was too...brown! (He was pining for my old skin tone apparently.)

I started late into the growing season, you see, because the gardening bug bit me just after spring has gone. And I hadn't known that smart Florida gardeners take a break from their gardens in the summer.

I imagine people driving their cars by and seeing me and they're shaking their heads at the crazy Asian lady hoeing and watering and tending her plots in the broiling heat. (I didn't know! I'm new to these woods, y'know.)

It was an experimental garden where the mantra was “Anything goes!”

And truly, anything went in and out—weeds, pests, alternating 3-day-rains and high temps, gadzukes zucchini that died after setting forth a seriously leafy front...

the gadzukes! zucchini would flower, then not follow
through on the promise of fruit! bad plant. bad!

I even met a ladybug once!

a most welcome visitor in the garden

We had lots of okra, bitter gourd (ampalaya in Tagalog) and string beans every other day.

we had a steady supply of vegetables for our table.
our family just luv veggies!

the okras were the most prolific, sending out new
flowers every day so i could pick fruits every couple of days

ditto with the bitter gourd (aka ampalaya), which didn't
have any problems. probably because it didn't have any predators

the string beans (aka pole beans, asparagus yardlong,
and sitaw,  Tagalog name) were just as prolific as the okra.

And for the first time in my life, I was able to grow several bell peppers from seed, culled from ones bought from the grocery store. How awesome is that, eh?

bell peppers, seeded from store-bought veggie

The only thing that didn't do well were the bush beans. I don't know if it was me or the seeds I bought but they definitely didn't grow beyond a spindly 2 inches long...and I know for a fact that they're not supposed to behave like that. That is, I don't know if I gave them the nurture they needed (grimace).

this was the size that's as far as the green beans would deign to grow

I'm hoping this growing season, started on time finally, all my plants will thrive and fruit vigorously.

planting with mosquitoes

It isn't summer yet—though the days are already in the middle 80s!—but mosquitoes are already everywhere this spring.

Today, I finally got ‘round to sowing additional sweet corn to fill up the spaces in one of my beds. I did seed in March but somehow, the shriveled up corn seeds failed to germinate.

the corn-and-zucchini bed, where the corn seeds didn't
germinate well. had to play catch up and sow more
corn seeds. hope all of them sprout, wfc

And I added some big Spanish onions and evergreen bunching onions in my, er, onion beds.

the onion-and-garlic bed (L to R, respectively), where
new onions--bunching and Spanish--were sown.

I also transplanted two of my zucchini seedlings from one bed to the one, empty bed beside it. Both were growing robustly so I didn’t have the heart to throw them away once I’ve thinned out the zucchinis.

And speaking of transplanting and throwing away, I found enough nerve to uproot two leafless okras and replacing them with catch-up ones I’d sown in late March.

the two tiny okras in the foreground are the catch-ups
i transplanted today

The seeds that I got from another company were doing poorly so I decided to sow more just in case. Good thing, because as soon as the weather evened up, my okra bed was like patchwork, bald spots glaring at me whenever I came to water my garden.

Like I was to blame for a seed company’s poor choice of mother okra to harvest seeds from!

one of my perfect okras last season, from another seed company
i didn't use this growing season. 

One of the beds, too, had half of it planted with carrots but the other half was bare. I couldn’t let that premium real estate go to waste so I decided to sow more garden beans.

more garden beans sown here

In our family, we can’t get enough of our beans so more plants bearing beans is always a good thing, right?

garden beans emerging from one of the vegetable beds this season

Overall, it was a fruitful gardening day, sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings.

The only blight to my enjoyment were the mosquitoes. They were buzz buzz buzzing everywhere!

One of my few pet peeves is this tiny pesky scourge of mankind, particularly because they always seem to make a beeline for me even if I’m in the midst of a crowd.

What’s so good about my blood that I’m always the first victim of choice, huh?

And whenever mozzies mess up with me, I’m always the big loser.

Argh! I was itching not only along my legs and feet but also all over my arms!

Hubby got mad when he saw the red skid marks that my nails made when I scratched my skin like crazy. I was afraid he was going to declare the backyard forbidden territory from now on but he just harrumphed, heh.

Methinks he was thinking that he wasn't insane enough to engage one obsessed vegetable gardening fan--and his wife, to boot!--in an argument about the pros and cons of backyard gardening.

Good thing I had White Flower, a mentholated oil balm from the Chinese that's good for the itches. The relief was instant!

I'm planning on growing me some catnips and citronella in my garden to ward off them mozzies when I putter 'round my backyard.

I wonder where I can get citronella, mosquitoes' sworn enemy, here in Central Florida though. Anybody have any idea?