It has been a long while since I have entered a vegetable gardening post (over 5 years!). We finally completed our last move to our new home so I've decided to start the blog back up again to journal my new gardening experiences. I'll definitely be learning new things. We purchased our retirement home in 2019 in Sequim, WA on the Olympic Peninsula and made our final cross country move from north Texas in October 2021. We made numerous cross country trips to update the 1980 house which needed new flooring, lighting, updating in general as well as clearing out the extremely overgrown front and back yards. Large trees that were either sick or dead were also removed (but the up side is that the tree removal provided extra sunshine for a vegetable garden).
While I was familiar with growing two vegetable gardens a year in north Texas, I'm learning that Sequim, WA vegetable gardening is entirely different. Although both north Texas and Sequim are in Zone 8 (orange), that designation refers to coldest temperatures and frost dates. The difference I'm learning with Sequim, is that warm soil temperatures (60 degrees) dictate success for many of the warm weather crops such as tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and peppers.
With that in mind, my husband built several raised beds as well as a protective 6' fence to surround it since my new neighborhood has a large deer population. The deer eat anything and everything and I'm going to do another blog post on what plants they won't touch versus "deer resistant" plants that they didn't show any hesitation in decimating. You'll notice the twin fawns are enjoying my planted perennials in this photo.
Fawns were also watching my husband while he was working on the fence in anticipation of some tasty vegies.
Here is the vegetable garden area, the photo is taken from our front porch deck on 6/26/22. The garden was planted on 6/18/22. We purchased approximately 2 yards of garden soil and compost mixture in bulk. Each yard of topsoil weights approximately 2100 lbs for a total of 4000 lbs of soil.
Vegetable plants in these beds include cucumbers, cabbage, broccoli, and Swiss chard. The bed with seeded plants coming up contain, radishes, beets, spinach, and beans.
The beds on this end contain several varieties of tomatoes (we tried to select varieties with early maturation dates to ensure harvest before temperatures drop and daylight recedes too much.) We also planted several varieties of bell peppers and jalapeno peppers. Eggplant, yellow squash and zucchini too.
On this end, we added 5 planting bags that are the 10 gallon size. In these bags we planted seeds for carrots, lettuce, more beans, dill, catnip, and nasturtiums.
I'm adding a few photos from this morning 6/28/22 to show additional growth. Broccoli, cabbage, Swiss chard and cucumbers in the back.
The beans began sprouting this morning to join the radishes, beets, and spinach.
Finally I want to discuss a looming and potentially huge problem facing my garden and the possibility I won't be able to produce "fruiting" vegetables at all (those plants that need pollination which include, tomatoes, peppers, squash, zucchini, and cucumbers). We live in a golf course community and I suspect that a lot of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are all being used liberally to keep the greens beautiful. Unfortunately, I've observed we have no honeybees! I do see a few small bumblebees and other solitary bees, but definitely not what I'm used to having when I gardened in Texas. I'll be checking with my Home Owners Association to get their position on me potentially keeping a small bee hive near the garden, but I am skeptical. In the meantime I have planted several good perennials that will hopefully help to bring in the solitary bees I've seen. Here's what I've planted so far.
French and English Lavender are planted right next to the garden. They should be pulling in bees but I rarely see any bees on them.
My volunteer snapdragon from last year came up again in the driveway and I continue to water it. It is over 3' feet tall. Snapdragons should also be pulling in bees.
Salvia Meadow Sage is a perennial and it survived in the backyard deck pot over the winter. I severely pruned it in the early spring.
I have three large pots of English lavender blooming beautifully in the front yard next to the garage.
I have a large pot of herbs with flowering chives and thyme that have flowers also attractive to bees. The plants in this pot also lasted over the winter and came back well after a severe pruning in the early spring.
I planted several of the salvia greggii, the hot lips variety. I grew these plants in north Texas and they were fantastic for bring in pollinators.
Even my hanging strawberry plant should be bringing in bees. See all the beautiful flowers? But I have very few strawberries, which means very little pollination. I fear my fruiting vegetables will suffer the same fate.
Finally, and unfortunately, I actually do have some pollinators setting up shop literally on our garage light. But they are HORNETS. If it were any other place other than the location where we walk by every day, I would leave them be, but the nest will be removed today.
In the end, I have ordered a bee house and a deck "bee waterer" for the vegetable garden to help attract solitary bees and I'm investigating adding a small hive. I'll finish today's post with early morning and late afternoon photos of the sun on my garden. I'm looking forward to getting gardening again and I'm hoping I can overcome my pollinator crises.
Very Early Morning Sunrise
Evening Sun
