How is that broccoli doing now? I'd love to see an updated photo.

Martha

You beat me to it, Martha! I was going to ask the same thing ...

Well I probably should have grown this as a fall crop (new gardener - no clue what I'm doing), but I did get a bit of broccoli out of it. And it certainly grew! I was actually going to cut it down this morning since the temperature is in the 80s, but I found more little broccoli heads in there so I'll keep it going. The Di Ciccio broccoli worked out much better than the standard broccoli mix in my garden.

I may try growing broccoli as a winter crop and see how it goes...

Fantastic! For a new gardener, you are having great success.

Martha

I've never grown broccoli, but your plants really look good! How did your other wsing efforts pan out? Those plants in the upper tier look pretty good too ...

Lest you judge too soon, may I present Exhibit B: The Carrots. I call the one on the right "Carrot : Deconstructed".

I wintersowed them (apparently you're supposed to direct sow), and my ground is rock hard. The carrots seem to have compensated by getting... creative.

The top terrace in that photo is my espaliered fruit trees and my strawberries, purchased bare root. At the far right you can see some onions which I wintersowed. They're doing pretty well. Apparently I can grow fruit. Mind you its not hard in this climate. At one point this whole island was strawberry farms. It's the vegetables and the bedding plants that are a bit more of a challenge for me.

I planted around 70 pots of seeds and about 60 of them came up. I still have a pot ghetto going which is chugging along fairly well. The food plants are in a more protected environment and irrigated, so they're doing pretty well - even the veggies are struggling along in general

When I plant the non-food plants out, though, my failure rate is huge. Most of the bedding plants are either struggling or disappear completely. My husbands excitement about his new weed wacker doesn't help (he wacked down my hollyhocks last week), nor does the construction we have going on (they keep piling dirt and construction materials on top of my plants. But the rock hard soil and the bugs and the slugs and the heat and the deer and the dogs are all having a go too. Trial and error. I figure in 5 or 10 years I may have a handle on this gardening thing. :)

I'm kind of scared to plant out the rest of my pots though. I keep thinking if I let them get a bit bigger, they'll have a better chance at survival...

that all looks fabulous, pugetsoundgardener, love the "Carrot : Deconstructed" =)

yeah its kinda common to get the multiforked, and odd shaped carrots....thats what real carrots tend to look like...but its cool to get it so that most of them come out more straight and not forked. one trick i have recently picked up is to sow them on top of straight SAND. and ideally with a very sandy and/or loose and not compacted mixture underneath the sand layer.

and brassicas of all types love the lukewarm cloudy ways of the northwest and especially coastal areas. kale, cabbage, broccoli, mustards all the brassicas should do very well for you. the only thing is they easily cross, so if you grow different types you end up with hybrids and collard looking things...those broccoli look well isolated so you should be able to get good true to type seeds from them.

I've got two types of sprouting broccoli plus two types of Brussels sprouts going for my fall garden, so it sounds like I'm better off buying seeds if I want to know what I'm planting next year. I am saving seeds from my Early Ssubakis tomatoes, though, as it looks like you can't buy those. I think I only had the one type of tomato succeed, so hopefully those are true to type.

My soil is rock hard dry and squelchy wet - pretty much pure clay. I think I'll wait to plant carrots again until I've had a few years to improve the soil...

And hey, I'm pretty sure you adopted me as a newbie and sent me a ton of seeds this year, right? I was just thinking of you because I planted out the Woodland Strawberries you sent me in the edge of the woods behind my house last week to help hold a stream bank in place. So far so good - they're holding their own and the deer are leaving them alone. They're running like mad so I have high hopes for them as ground cover under my sword ferns and cedars. Thanks so much for all the seeds!

or unless you can isolate them from each other. but yeah the brassicas cross really easily if you want to grow a few types at the same time. but sometimes they are on such different cycles (especially in the warm zones we can plant them at different times more flexibly) ...it can work out so that they flower at different times, then it should still be true.

with mixing one kind of brassica, it could be cool to do a landrace type mix. or at least i am interested in this, as i am less interested in the name of the plant than in how reliably it produces food for me. "landrace" type in this case being several good heirloom types of broccoli mixed together, with survivial of the fittest being the main factor, and you keep planting it year after year. whatever survives far enough to produce seeds eventually, all mixed together. i suppose theres not as many gardeners interested in this, but i do some of this with my own gardens.

tomatoes are pretty good about staying true, as long as you start with heirlooms. though there are fussy things about tomatoes that can alter that, that i dont quite have a handle on, for the most part they reliably produce true to type, or very close to type, offspring.

and totally, yep, thats me =)

i'm glad you put those seeds to good use. i love the woodland strawberry, for that quality, here a lot of the "yarden" area has wild strawberry and wild violets as a ground covering. even in areas we walk over, they still get by and produce small amounts. then i have a lot of them where i gave them actual dank rich soil, lots of room and irrigate...there they take off incredibly well and are still producing a lot of cutie little strawberries...

heres an area thats just getting going with walking onions, but the wild strawberry plants are totally filling in and getting prolific! probably in the next year or three that will be a huge mass of wild strawberries...

also it couldve been me that sent you the di ciccio, i did buy some seeds for it last year, and have grown it several times and always had it work out well. but i cant remember if i did....

also also - you sent me a sweet gift of some lemon seeds =) i sprouted them and got at least three or four sprouts and now have a few new baby lemon trees =) i might even have some pics somewhere, ive been a shutter bug lately...but cant find them atm...

Oh the Meyer lemons, that's right! Did you still want fruit seeds? I have an Asian pear that's producing right now, and there are heirloom plum trees around. Oh and my raspberries are producing too - I have Caroline and Autumn Britten.

That's an interesting idea, letting the broccoli cross. If the Green Calabrese Sprouting broccoli does well I could cross that and the De Cicco and see if it improves over the generations. I'm trying to get my hands on a local cherry tomato that's apparently been running wild in a friend's garden for years as well. There's a lot to be said for those fully adapted food plants!

nice cherry tomatoes are some of the hardiest, and easiest i have found. i have a couple of epic cherry tomato plants this year =)

and totally...read up on it, landrace gardening that is. there are sort of different definitions of "landrace" - one being more like feral regionally wild plants, the other being...perhaps more new, but then again maybe not so...if you think about many people growing food on small scale and learning as they go, it is sort of a natural progression to get into...especially in weird/harsh climates.

*edit to add a link to read about - http://www.motherearthnews.com/landrace-gardening

and yeah ok, we can trade. maybe in a bit...i am taking a break from...well just about everything! ha, well no...i havent been taking a break from gardening and seed saving...but in a bit i will be ready to trade with lots of new stuff. what kinds of plums you got?

Some kind of Italian plum with a red skin. It's not mine - it's a friends and I'm not sure if it's still in season. No need to trade, I'm happy to send you any of those fruit seeds if you're interested. You've certainly sent me enough seeds already! :)

Carol Deppe talks about breeding your own strains in The Resilient Gardener. It sounds like a similar process. I'll read up on it.

Excellent book! ^^^^yeah thats a great read....

and that sounds dandy =)

but do tell me if theres anything on my current list that you like. within a few weeks i should be adding a lot of stuff. actually i have a lot to add, but i havent gotten around to sorting it all out.

i would also be interested in the asian pear.

The Asian pear is a Shinseiki and it fruited prolifically in its first as a wee little thing. It may or may not have cross pollinated with the Chojuro planted next to it. I can't remember if they need pollinators. I'll save from seeds from the next one I pick. :)

I've started reading up on Landrace Gardening and it sounds intriguing. I think I'll play with broccoli first...

Crazily the broccoli is still going - apparently I live in broccoli Shangri-La.. It's not only still alive, it's giant, and it's given us broccoli all through the winter. I should have planted it as my privacy hedge! It's at least 3' tall with a crazy spread, and the trunks are so high they have bark. I'm actually pruning it at this point.

It slowed down a bit in the winter, but I still got about a gallon of broccoli every other week. We're back up to a gallon a week now. I'm a bit scared of how much I might get this summer.

A gallon of broccoli... again.

Amazing! Everbearing broccoli shrubs.

I've been told by the local experts that it's winding to a close. Ah well, nothing lasts forever...