Garden update - August 2011

I missed writing a post here earlier this week, but you'll be happy to know that I've painted lots of trim, fixed the garbage disposal (yay!), and decided that the wired doorbell wasn't going to be salvageable wired so today I'll be picking up a wireless one to install. All of this is at the rental house though, so what's been going on at home you ask? Well lots of garden time! My garden has been growing (weeds) like crazy, and the real plants are growing well too. Here is a selection of garden pictures from last week before I went crazy weeding, but I figured I would show you the ugly (weedy) pictures to keep things true :)

 The marigolds are doing quite well where I randomly placed them near the strawberries right before we left on vacation without anywhere else to plant them.

 The onions (Copra Onions mostly) aren't growing quite as big as I would have hoped. More water? Less Water? Some manure? I'm not sure what to fix, but something needs to change for next year's garden :)

 

The eating corn is growing tall, but just starting to flower. Hopefully we get ears before frost! Next year I may try a shorter season corn, or it may just be that same lack of fertilizer :) Good thing we have chickens now!

 The potatoes did great this year, although we'll see how many actual potatoes we got. We should dig them sometime in the next couple weeks and then I'll let you know how they did. We were happy to just have live plants considering the last 2 summers we've tried to grow them and managed to either drown them or smother them with dirt! The tomatoes in the background are doing alright too, although nothing is remotely red yet...

 Our peppers are doing really really well. This is the first summer we have had peppers produce, so we're pretty happy with the number we got! Especially since the first ones we planted this spring got hailed (almost) to death and I had to replant with my extra starts. Luckily I had plenty of extra's since I grew over twice as many as I wanted to plant. Next summer I'll plan on planting way more peppers, we can freeze extra's for use on our homemade pizzas among other things. In fact I think next summer I'll plan on more of most plants. That's only if I manage to expand the garden though! :)

 The green beans are doing fairly well, considering I almost lost them amongst the weeds! One day about a week and a half ago I realized that the 2 rows of beans between the 2 areas of peas were just hopping with grasshoppers, so I dove in and pulled lots of large weeds, and revealed a floppy double row of green beans complete with some beans all ready to be picked! Since then I've picked about 5 meals worth of beans that have been blanched and frozen for cooler day.

 Our zucchini has been somewhat of a disappointment this year. last year at this time we were harvesting numerous monster zucchini, but this year we haven't even had one yet. There are a couple little teensy ones growing, but nothing worth picking yet.

 The cucumbers have also been a bit disappointing, but at least they are flowering... I really picked a poor spot for them, they are really hidden by the raspberries that just filled in this summer, so likely a different spot would have been better. Next year!

 The popping corn is growing, although perhaps not as quickly as I would have liked. (Can you tell it was really windy when I was taking pictures?!)

 My watermelon grew this year! Although likely the teensy little watermelons won't get big enough to harvest, it is at least heartening to see the little plant grow after last summers repeated failure.

 The pumpkins are doing really well, there are at least 4 pumpkins growing big & round for Little M to 'carve' with us this fall!

The hubbards are also growing well, and have several squash growing. The butternuts aren't doing quite as well, but they are slowly coming along.

Well, that's it for the garden update this month! How are your gardens growing?