The Garden – Week 8

Up until now, the garden has just been in a maintenance state. Water it, weed it, and let it do its own thing. From now forward, though, it’s going to be something that I have to stay on top of. Another couple of weeks and I will just kind of keep my house in a maintenance mode and focus my energies on harvesting and preserving. The kids and I will start spending a whole lot more time outside and then in the kitchen.

In the last 2 weeks, the garden has grown a lot.

I had to add more dirt to the potatoes. But before I added dirt, I saw a couple of little tiny potatoes that had become exposed! So, there are at least 2 potatoes in this container!

The herb garden is so-so. I’m not really too happy with how this experiment has worked out. Maybe if I had started with full plants instead of seeds it might have done better – I don’t know. The only thing really thriving is the basil.

The pumpkins already have a bloom! I just discovered the plants a few weeks ago.

The zucchini and squash are getting huge, as zucchini and squash are want to do. I have blooms on all of the plants, and a squash growing on one of them.

The watermelon are beautiful this year. I have several blooms on a plant. I’m afraid that they may choke out the honeydew I planted. We’ll see if they can get a toe-hold in the patch or not.

The corn is taller than me now.

The volunteer tomatoes that popped up in the corn patch are blooming.

There are pea pods growing on the pea plants. I think they needed stakes much earlier than I put them out. I only put them on a few plants and only one actually climbed the steak — but they want to. They send out little grabbers, but in all directions and never quite make it to the stake. I’ll likely put smaller stakes in as soon as I thin out the peas next year.

I’ve already started harvesting green beans. One plant seems to be farther along than the others — the others just have blooms.

All along the top of the rows I planted cucumbers. They’re trying to take over their rows! When I moved a leaf aside to take a picture of the bloom for you, I found a large cucumber — and ended up picking 6! I need to start paying more attention, I guess!

I had to unwind one of the eggplant plants from a cucumber. I’ve never grown eggplants, so I’m not sure what they do and how, but this one has a bloom — so I’m going to take that as a good sign!

The lettuce is doing okay. Not great. I think if it had been put in the ground I would be eating it by now.

(Sidebar: See my pedicure? I love the color. But, I wanted a French pedicure. I have friends to have it an their toes look so pretty. Well, the lady doing the pedicure said that because I garden (and cut grass) barefoot, I can’t have a French pedicure. My toes are too stained. So, red it is!)

The pepper plants are doing well. I have pimentos and jalapeños growing, and blooms on several other plants. Nothing yet on the two mystery peppers – I’m excited to see what they might be.

The tomatoes are getting huge. Not a lot of blooms on them yet, but they are healthy, good looking plants so I’m not worried.

Onions are looking stronger every day.

The radishes are just about done. I have a refrigerator full of them. As soon as I pick the last one, I’ll get the row cleaned up and put in more radishes and maybe some lettuce. I don’t know how well it will do with the heat of the day, but it’s worth a try.

The carrots finally look good.

I think the blueberry bushes are going to survive. One of them looks very healthy – the other has a bunch of new growth just in the last week.

My strawberry plants put out blooms this week, which surprised me because I just planted them this year. I haven’t protected them from birds in any way, so I’m not really anticipating getting much of a harvest from them, but I’m excited to see them blooms.

I think the grapes will survive, too. We’ll get an arbor built for them this winter.

The raspberries are still a little iffy. One of them had no growth and was what I thought was a dead stick for several weeks. It finally pushed out a stem, though, so maybe they’ll survive the year after all.

So, that’s the tour for this week. How is your garden doing? Are you getting anything out of it yet? Have you started preserving yet? I saw a fantastic price on corn the other day, but I have so many corn plants planted that I held off from buying it. It’s still so early that there will be more sales if something happens to my harvest.