Beginning of July Garden Pics

If you've been following this blog throughout the spring you really won't believe the amazing growth going on in our garden plots! This is the garden on Main Street where I have sweet corn, winter squash, and beans growing together in a "Three Sisters" combination. The corn was not only knee high by the Fourth of July, it was chin high!

It was hard to capture the impenetrable jungle of squash and beans amongst the corn plants. Needless to say it is all doing extremely well. It's seems so inconceivable that those tiny little corn kernels and bean seeds that I planted back in May have grown into these giant cornstalks and winding bean tendrils in just about two months time. There are still no discernible ears forming. Hopefully it's not just all plant with no ears or ears that don't pollinate right. Both of those scenarios are still quite possible.



This is the mini basil that I started from a free seed pack I got at Jungs Garden Center early in the spring. There are two different kinds here. I'm not sure how I'll use the little ones - their leaves are almost too small to be good for cooking. They're pretty though, like little delicate trees. The bigger ones were starting to flower, so I harvested a bunch of it for the first pesto of the year.

Remember that patch of self seeded dill I decided to keep this spring? It's not so little anymore. I gotta find me some cucumbers to pickle!


On to the next garden.....


The tomatoes at our new house (this is the one we'll be moving into in August) are going absolutely crazy! I knew I planted them too close together, but this is absurd! I snapped a bunch of the limbs off the cherry tomatoes in front to try to give the baby basil plants a little room and sunlight.

Little baby cherry tomatoes. We're going to have a ton!

These beets look a bit beat down (no pun intended!) since I watered them right before I took this picture. They're doing really well. I'd imagine they'll be close to ready when we move in in mid-August. How fun it will be to move into a house with vegetables ready to harvest in the garden!

The turnips are also doing really really well. Like the beets, they look beaten down from watering - they should perk back up in no time. I thinned them a week ago and since then they've almost doubled in size.

I couldn't resist digging one up to see how big the roots were. Not too big, but they're developing!

The eggplants are also doing well, they're flowering!

The only thing that is not doing well are these carrots, planted at the same time as the turnips and beets. For some reason they're just sitting there not growing at all. That's OK. we'll get a few carrots eventually, and we can plant that bed in something else in August. If just one thing out of everything we're growing is a failure, I'd say we're doing really well!

The plot at Quann gardens is going pretty well, especially considering that the ground here is super super hard. The Canario beans are starting to flower.

The potato plants have been suffering through an infestation of potato bugs. When I was there about a week ago they were so thick they looked like little red berries all over the plants. For some reason the fingerlings seemed much worse off than the regular red potatoes. The bugs have subsided now and most of the plants seem to have recovered, but two of the plants were almost completely defoliated.....

We decided to dig those two plants up to see how the potatoes were doing. There was one Russian Banana Fingerling and one French Fingerling (a red variety). Definitely not to their full size potential yet, but not bad. There's nothing quite as tasty as freshly dug new potatoes.


Last but not least to the garden in our current backyard. the shade has all but made this garden useless. The peas are done and about ready to be torn down. The arugula and spinach has gone to seed. I'm leaving them in the hopes of collecting the seed to plant again. It looks messy, but seed saving is something I've always wanted to try, and this seemed like a good opportunity.

The shade has allowed this Red Russian kale to remain pretty decent, even in hot weather. We've been eating a lot of it.

Same goes for the Swiss chard.

The herbs that I planted by seed way back in March are finally looking impressive. It's been a long time in the coming, but I've started cooking with them in the last few weeks.
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