Tuesday, July 25, 2006

July 25, 2006

It appears my weekly garden update is turning out to be monthly *sigh*

This past month saw a lot of drama in my life so the garden was pretty much on it's own for a couple weeks. My how it's grown!

My triple tomato plants are crawling over the tops of the cages, and all are finally producing fruit. Nothing is ripe yet, however there are many gems on the roma and early girl... so far I've only seen two mini-fruits on the Mystery Heirloom, I'm excited to see exactly what kind of plant I ended up buying.
I've added two tomato plants to the garden... a grape tomato in a pot at the end of the mid-path, and another heirloom (black krim) in between my squash vines. I know it's late in the season, but they were 50% off and looked very sad in the garden center, so I thought I'd give them a nice home. Grape has two fruits on, the heirloom hasn't even bloomed yet, but appears to like it's new home.
The squash are going crazy, I've already picked 7 zucchini over the weekend and judging by the speed in which they grow, we'll have another dinner's worth of veggies by the end of the week.
Off in the distance you can see the back corner of the property... Dan cleared a lot of weeds and created a secondary fire pit with the leftover cinder blocks from the garden. He also cut down a cedar sprout and has started clearing some oregon grape from that triangle section. Eventually we want to expand the garden and hang a sky chair from the big cedar... slowly but surely we're actually landscaping a new area of the yard.

This is a closer view of the tomato half. As you can see, my beets are very sporadic (only maybe 15% of the seeds I threw down are growing) I barely have enough beets for a pint, I'm debating about bothering to pickle them this year... especially since Mom put up 25 pounds this summer. Perhaps I'll stick to pickles.

Dan actually picked out the cute little flag, doesn't it brighten things up? It seems to have bugged the deer, because since we put the flag up I haven't seen any new hoofprints in my garden. They have nibbled the extra reaching tomato vines from the other side, but they haven't gotten to the fruit, and the vines can be trimmed back anyway. Hopefully we won't end up with another missing cage this year!
The tall guys in the center of the pic are my cucumber plants. This is the first time I've planted cukes that actually grew straight up the trellis... I think I need a taller trellis next year! Lots of cukes are starting to grow, so I'll need to brush off my jars and get ready to make Grandma's Famous Dill Pickels this year!