Sanderson's Urban SFG in Fresno, California

Looks great, S!  Cukes love afternoon shade when it's hot out.

I'm thinking that I should plant the Muncher cucumbers in this area of the BTE next year. The corn can go in the 2'x4' SFG bed.

Looking good, s!

It's now Fall and I have been busy for a couple weeks cleaning the beds, amending with home made compost, and sowing seeds for the winter garden.  I never got around to starting the seeds in containers in early September.  It was still too hot to try to keep them alive outdoors.  September 25, I started direct sowing broccoli, bok choy, kale, colorful Swiss chard and 3 kinds of peas.  The summer flower bed has been sowed with lettuce, radish, green onion and carrot seeds.  This time around, I will only have to cover 2 beds with bridal tulle.

Before sowing the seeds, there was a lot of clean-up and trellis netting repairs to be done.  Summer was a killer with the prolonged heat and smoky air.  Everything was, or still is, covered with sticky dust.  My annual week-long vacation starts Monday so everything has to be ready for me to be absent.

The garden as of this week:
SE corner.  The cotton is popping open, the sweet potato vines are shading the 2'x4'garlic bed, and there are a few tomato plants with green tomatoes left in the BTE strip

South:  Right side foreground is the former flower bed, now sowed with salad stuff.  Right side middle is the long 2'x8' pepper and eggplant bed now sowed with brassicas.  These 2 beds will be covered with bridal tulle.

Looking toward SW.  The 3 foreground beds in a U-shape formation are the salad, brassica and herb beds.  The 4 beds in the surrounding spots are various peas.

SW corner. L-R, tumbler, orange tree, prolific New Zealand spinach, and cleaned-up cantaloupe bed with trellises.

West side yard.  Three resting beds with bedding straw and alfalfa hay protected with blue tarp.

East side yard.  BTE or amended dirt strip and cleaned bean beds with trellises removed for cleaning the whole area.  Washing windows and walls, pruning roses, weeding, repairing trellis netting that I always manage to cut in at least one spot!

A couple of clean-up photos:
Washing and drying some of the shade cloths.

Cleaning and repairing trellises.

S, where do you get all that energy? Send me some seeds, please.

The weather has been so nice that I feel like a new person. We leave on Monday so I needed to get the seeds sowed which meant amending, repairing trellises, taking down and cleaning the shade clothes.. I've been so embarrassed with the way the back yard and patio looked this summer, what with the heat and smoke. Lots of washing!

I am quite impressed with all that you got going on in that garden.
Have a great vacation!

Thanks for sharing your garden pics.  They are an inspiration for this newbie.

Lookin’ good, there, s!

Sanderson, you're a real garden lady, washing and drying the shade cloth. That thought has never pass thru my mind.

Thanks, Has. Washing is really important because of the nasty air quality here.

Ken put up new Christmas lights for me.  Plus there is a beautiful full moon tonight!

Looks great sanderson.  

You've got me thinking that I should put up some lights on my megatrellis and other trellises (trelli).  The first winter I did have lights on the only two trellises that I had at the time.

Thank you. I remember your colored (?) lights. I love lights, so cheerful.

This thread has almost come full circle to where it started.  Maybe one more series of shots and this year-around garden will have been shown with all its good features and all its warts.  Each year since March 2013, I have expanded the number of beds and/or modified the features.  My favorite features are:  elevated beds, permanent but interchangeable multi-use PVC frames, the grids, micro-drip systems, and the weed fabric and wood chip walkways.  I've had to change from making compost in a 3'x3'x3' bin to an 80-gallon Lifetime tumbler, now using the bin for storing finished batches of compost.

View of SE corner.  Lots of green tomatoes that I don't think will blush before the frost.  The garlic bed hasn't had any "visitors" since I covered it with tulle.  The tall grass in the back ground is lemon grass.

Straight south.  The New Zealand spinach just keeps sprawling.

Shooting towards SSW.  Herb garden, winter greens, salads and 36 sq. ft. of peas this winter.

More SW.  Peas and tomato buckets and Inara.

Oranges are edible but not quite to their full luscious sweetness.

West side of mostly resting beds.  Those pumpkins are now in the compost tumbler along with the bags of Starbucks!  

Baby bok choy.

Opening the bridal tulle with Inara.

Me.

Inara patrolling the backyard.  I'm so happy with the weed fabric and wood chip pathways during the rainy season. Ignore the dandelion!

Looks great sanderson.  Happy gardening and happy eating.

Wow!  This garden is fantastic!  And it was so much fun watching it change and grow over the years.  Thanks for sharing these great photos.

Inara is beautiful!  Is she new?
CC

What a great looking garden, quite a transformation, Sanderson, something to be proud of.

Thanks, folks. PS Inara is my 4-legged granddaughter, visiting for the holiday with my daughter.

Love your nice clean looking pathways.

CapeCoddess wrote:Wow!  This garden is fantastic!  And it was so much fun watching it change and grow over the years.  Thanks for sharing these great photos.

Inara is beautiful!  Is she new?
CC

+1

Ching Chang, a toy bok choy. Four per square.

End of January and almost time to start the indoor seedlings.  We have had such a warmish sunny winter (=not much rain) that the bok choy has bolted to the delight of the bees.  Shortly after these photos, I completely uncovered the bok choy and Swiss chard and tucked the tulle to keep the other half of the bed covered.  I haven't seen a white butterfly for a month or two, and she doesn't seem to lay eggs on the chard.   Taken Jan 14.


It'[s been so warm, in fact, that the oranges have to be picked now. Maybe it's also the variety, Washington Navel. Three or four oranges each morning in the juicer with lots of celery and lemon/lime.

This is the first winter I have grown lettuce.  It is so neat to have clean, fresh lettuce with counter-ripened romas and FB radishes.  Well, I can't seem to be able to find the photo of the salad but here is a dinner of poached wild caught cod with my winter peas and Swiss Chard and tarragon on the fish. My first year of shelling peas, Alaska and Strike.

The peas Dec 26.  Since then, they fell over and started back up so, on Jan 26, I topped them and new side shoots are already starting.  In a month (end of Feb) they will be removed in preparation for amending the beds.

The 1'x50' strip of dirt that I use for extra growing room was amended with compost that got wet even though I thought I covered it well.  Ken said it was some nasty stuff (slightly septic) but I know it will in the end be good for the strip.  I pulled back the wood chips and replaced them after Ken was done.  That was one activity that I was healed enough to do.

I covered the tumbler with a blue tarp to keep the "finished" compost from getting wet.  I think rain gets in through the aerating breaker bar that is open to the outside.  I won't make another batch until March, but meanwhile I am freezing the kitchen scraps, making use of the baby upright freezer in the garage.  We have a front moving in and are expecting rain starting Friday night through Monday.  I always say I will believe it when I see it, but one can hope.

That's all for now.  Maybe one last post at the end of February, and I will have gone through a year's cycle on this thread.

Fantastic sanderson.

I can't even imagine picking my own oranges and your SFG looks great.