Friday, July 02, 2010

Our Garden's Running Amok!

It's that time of year, when all the hard work we've done to set up and plant that garden is paying off and we're just running full speed to try to keep up with it. Jim and I spent days out there this week catching up with the weeding, then yesterday mowed the whole yard, raked up the grass and spent hours tucking the clippings in around the plants to mulch them against the dry days ahead.

This is our best garden ever. We've had one meal of green beans and new potatoes, and it was a delicious forerunner to what's coming. We've spent so much time composting stuff and adding it and tons of all kinds of vegetation to the old sand dunes we live on, that it's finally becoming a fertile place to plant in. With the addition of the greenhouse this spring, we could get our specific plants out there and really enjoy watching the results.
Here's Jim pulling weeds and I'm snapping the pictures.
The melon plants are escaping the bed and flowing down the walkways-who knows how far they'll go!
There's one small zucchini, soon to be ready, followed by many more than we'll possibly consume by ourselves. This may be the year we set up a produce stand out front.
The Scarlet Runner Beans are taking over the fence, and what beautiful bloom!
Our second cucumber-the first one was eaten already.
Start of the herbs-lots of basil! Yummmm.
Almost tomatoes! With 17 tomato plants this year, we should have all we could possibly use, and then some.Pea Pods, in a wonderful green jumble. It's always hard to find the pods in this confusing tangle.
Each year, we try to plant something new and different. This year it's artichokes. Don't know if they'll ripen before frost, but aren't the plants spectacular? They're about 2 feet tall now, and share the bed with zinnias and multiplier onions in bloom. It's really a show.
Corn, when it gets close to ready, we'll have to put up the electric fence to keep the raccoons out.
The horseradish looks ready to take over the world.
First year for the new asparagus bed and it's coming along very well, with some volunteers I just let stay, like the nasturtiums and tomato.

Little hot peppers coming on strong. We're going to wait for them to turn red before harvesting.
Overview of the northern beds, with lots of tomatoes, potatoes and onions. Great stuff doing well.

1 comment:

Gretel said...

Ha, I popped over to reply to your comment about our little garden and saw this - I had to smile, we are in a very similar situation ourself, even down to the tangles of peas, courgettes/zuchinnis going a bit mad, volunteers coming up where they shouldn't be and tomatoes gearing up. I will do another blogpost about ours, so that you can see how two gardens in different sides of the world can be remarkably similar, though you have much more variety than we do and our soil won't grow onions.