A Little Bit of This and A Little Bit of That

Hi All,

It's been about three weeks since I gave a proper update of the garden's progress.  Let me just say it's looking very different since my last pictorial update.

So, how's it growing?

Please, enter my garden and you shall see. ;)

 One of the least important but kind of important tasks I did was tidy up the walk way.  I have some ground cover cloth that I previously used not only to weedblock the walk way but also rows that I was not using.  Right now, bare garden rows is not really a problem although it may be once I do some more harvesting and clearing out of spring crops.

Tomato Town

 Seriously, the front half of my garden is absolutely a land of tomatoes and peppers.  Above I have my lemon boys, sweet millions, sweet hundreds, brandywine yellow tomatoes as well as , zucchini, red and yellow peppers.  Oh, and burgundy beans and watermelon, too.  With marigolds and herbs mixed in, of course.

 This is my most recent (and final) planting of the summer.  You can see the black eyed peas I planted along the fence as well as a row of red bell peppers and some sweet one hundred tomatoes my mom gave me.  Around the cage I planted my cantaloupe and my spaghetti squash.  I hope they will enjoy the trellis.    In the lower right corner you can barely see one of the butternut squash, which were interplanted with banana peppers.

You've got to:  Move it!

 All right, get those visions of dancing lemurs out of your head!  As you can see I have a ton of plants in containers.  I'm not generally a successful container gardener but I had so many plants, not a lot of time to till, and further, not really sure that I wanted fruit bearing plants in that spot (due to crop rotation patterns).  So, containers it is.  I have better boy red and Dr. Wyche tomatoes which I grew from seed as well as patty pan squash in the row furthest down.  I also have some okra, so we will see what that does.  In the background you can see my kentucky wonder beans and corn.  How exciting!

 Here is a little more of my bean vine as well as my brandywine yellow tomatoes in the front.

 Another view of tomato town.

Three Sisters

 I'd talked about doing it and here it is - my version of Three Sisters anyway.  Yellow crookneck squash along the corn and then black eyed peas along the other sides.  Should be neat to see how that goes.

Back that Thing Up

So, here in the back of the garden are my carrots, onions, strawberries (which started producing again), and peas.  They look a little raggedy because I may have accidentally pulled some of the vine up.  Eeek!

 Potatoes!!!  This was such a surprise.  Seeing these in the ground caught me off guard.  I had a moment of frustration and confusion as I tried to figure out what on earth these potatoes were doing in the ground - why did someone break into my garden just to bury potatoes.  I guess that goes to show that I am not a child of the farm.  I haven't dug them yet but I look forward to it!

Last but not least what is left of my lettuce and bok choy.

Have to admit, I am so pleased with how my garden has grown.  Everything has virtually doubled or tripled in size.
This weekend I was able to harvest:

• 3 squash / zucchini
• 6 cups of snow peas
• 10 cups of lettuce
• 1 head of bok choy
• 7 carrots

I'll say, that's not too shabby for a beginner.

Look out for some more posts.  I hope to do some on my goals for this month as well as some gardening book reviews.

Take care,

Rebecca