Garden Update: Early June

So I took some pictures awhile back and apparently never posted them here.  These pictures are more recent, so I won’t bother showing how it all started when, you know, they were just dirt plots…  As stated in an earlier post, we’ve been busy!  Still, we got started relatively early this year and the weather was pleasant enough that we could get peas, carrots, lettuce and radishes planted (above).  We already picked the radishes and, while many of them turned out pretty good, others were left in the ground a bit too long (as evidenced by their thoroughly tough exterior…).

This is the most lettuce we’ve grown and it has turned out pretty well!  We’ve had weather in the 90 F range this past week, so we’re probably getting to the end of the line with lettuce, but the carrots aren’t quite done.  It’s about time to pick peas but, at usual, we aren’t expecting to get all that many.

We also switched up the locations of crops from last year, so now the green beans are closer to the house and a bit more shaded.  The mounds above with the greenery is watermelons, and the two mounds in the background are supposed to have pumpkins, but they haven’t sprouted all that much yet…not optimistic…  The peppers are positioned around the smaller trellis and we already lost a few of them, but the plants that are still there look passable

The tomatoes, on the other hand, are looking pretty solid.  Those plants took off pretty well, mostly because we didn’t rely on seed starts as much as last year, so they went in bigger.  We planted most of this the weekend before Mother’s Day, so they’ve had time to grow in the last few weeks.  Brooke did plant a few that she grew downstairs, but they didn’t take off as well as last year.  Hopefully we end up with a solid crop this year!

Lining the edges of this plot, we put in some soup beans.  Those are substantially larger than when I took this picture and they’re looking pretty good.  I’m hopeful they don’t decide to vine all the way up the tomatoes, ’cause that would be a huge pain…

Brooke expanded the herb garden, as well.  The sunflowers all came back as “volunteers” from last year, and our lemon balm plant also returned from last year.  Unfortunately, that was about it!  Otherwise, Brooke planted some other stuff like sage and, oregano, and some butterfly-attractive flowers.

The blackberries are also taking off quite nicely!  I may need to get a shotgun to fight off birds (and people) that may try to take them before they’re big enough…
Lastly, the trees all survived the winter and are growing well, especially the peach tree!  We even have a few peaches on there, but that’s the extent of the fruit we’ve observed.  The trees will keep growing this year and we’ll get some more stuff next year, we guess!