Early June Garden Update

Our garden has been very busy growing in the past month. Seeds and bulbs have sprouted, seedlings have skyrocketed, and we’re looking forward to a summer of produce. It’s pretty amazing to watch the garden come to life - from starting as a teeny tiny seed into something big and alive that will produce fruits, veggies and beautiful flowers.

Tomatoes

The bed of tomatoes continues to grow steadily from seedlings. Several of the plants already have blooms! We included marigolds in this bed to help keep away pests.

Vines

The squash, zucchini and melons have grown exponentially since sprouting. The melons will be trained up the green trellis. We had a problem with our cucumber seedlings. One minute they were doing amazingly well - climbing up trellis, blooming - and then suddenly we had several days of brutal rain and they were all dead. So we planted seeds and tried again, and now are waiting for round two to grow bigger.

Flowers

The dahlias have begun sprouting from their bulbs, the zinnias and snapdragons from seed. Last year we found that while this bed was slow to start, it completely exploded in August and September and continued into October. So after our experience last year, we know to be patient here.

Beans, Carrots, Herbs, Etc.

The radishes were actually the first seeds up in this bed. The pole beans sprouted right after and are finding the twine on the tower all on their own. The carrot seedlings are growing. The oregano adjusted to its new home and recovered from its transplant. The rosemary, basil and thyme we bought from the nursery settled in nicely. The weather has been too hot recently for the lettuce seeds to germinate...

Peppers

As I mentioned before, we decided to do our peppers in pots this year to leave more room in the nightshade garden bed for the tomatoes to spread out. We have jalepenos and sweet banana peppers from the nursery, as well as bell peppers and poblanos from seedlings. Originally I was going to put the pepper pots in the raised bed garden against the garage, but changed my mind when I realized watering them would be unnecessarily complicated since they were not part of the buried soaker hose system. Instead we decided to put them on the patio with our other potted plants for easy watering. If we have any critter trouble, I’ll wrap them in leftover deer netting.

Other

Over in the perennial garden, a bounty of strawberries has been ripening. All those plants that survived the winter have produced quite a few berries, with many more to go. I've been picking baskets like this almost every day for a week!

Also - the fig tree lives! I'm pleased to say that this year's fig tree survived its transplant and is living happily living in the backyard.