More gardening photos

I'm not doing too much in the garden these days. I'm in between harvests, so I mostly just go check on it each day to make sure no critters or creepy crawlies are destroying my plants and see if I need to water. Right now I'm watering about once a week, but I can imagine I'll need to up that as the temps continue to rise. I'm still at a loss as to what I should plant in the square where my sugar snaps are. I've thought about putting a squash, but I think it'll be too close to some of my other plants.

The Quick Pick tomato is turning colors nicely.

Looks like something is eating my eggplant, but I didn't find anything on it. I will continue to monitor the situation.

Look how big the cauliflower plant is getting

The other eggplant is looking very healthy and growing nicely.

One of the little heads of cauliflower. Have I mentioned I'm worried it's going to go to seed?

The American melon continues to grow like crazy every day!

A little baby green bean

Cherokee Purple

All tied up

At least the tomatoes are. They have long needed to be tied up to the trellises, and I finally took time to do that yesterday evening. It's my first time to tie up tomatoes, and I guess I did an okay job. The tomatoes aren't complaining anyway.

Black Krim and Cherokee Purple after being tied up.

A Cherokee Purple starting to change colors

One of our Quick Picks

Tied up Quick Picks

The eggplants have really taken off lately

The corn is really growing

The cauliflower head is getting bigger too.

Fooled You peppers are looking very good

My biggest pepper

ACHILLEA Coronation Gold from Bluestone Perennials

Shasta Daisy. Some sort of bug got on my shasta daisies, and they don't look so hot. :(

Our strawberries are still lookin good

The green beans are still blooming

Look how much my American melon has grown in just a couple of days.

I love the smell of tomatoes on my hands

There's just something so earthy about it. I feel like I've really been in the garden when I smell like mater plants.

I can't believe it's been two weeks since I posted something. I've been working in the garden, but I just haven't had time to post to the blog. Plus I took some pics of the garden week before last, and when I came in to download them they were just gone from my memory card. I have yet to figure out why that happened. After that I just didn't worry about making a blog entry. Pictures, to me, are half the fun of a blog. Last week I was out of town on business, so now I'm playing catch up on my blogging.

We had a pretty busy Memorial Day weekend. We didn't head out the lake house as I had originally planned. We stayed at home and worked in the yard. Charlie had gotten a head start on the yard before I got in Friday evening, but we put some finishing touches on it Saturday. After a trip to Home Depot I came home and put some water soluble Miracle Grow fertilizer on the garden. Yeah, my aspirations of growing an organic garden went down the tubes when I started getting garden envy. While I was fertilizing I noticed that ants were all over one of my pea plants. They'd pretty much sheared one leaf off the plant and were working on another one. I had no idea that ants would do that. So I soaked 'em down some Sevin Dust. Hasta la vista ants....

I picked about a dozen strawberries out of my strawberry box. So far I'm not a huge fan of the strawberries. Most of them are very tart, and they're pretty dinky. Maybe I'm not doing something right, and that's why they aren't very sweet. Anyone have any suggestions??

The maters are growing very well.

Quick Pick

Cherokee Purple tomato

Baby black Krim

My corn is finally growing!

My American melons are getting big

One of my heads of cauliflower. I hope it stays cool enough that this won't go seed.

A good sized Fooled You pepper. Won't be long before I can pick it

Several more Fooled Yous on the other plant.

My sugar snaps are pretty well done, but the beans, peas, eggplants, and maters are coming on

This watermelon plant is still so dinky. Dunno what the deal is.

Bring on the fertilizer

I am not a patient person. I have learned to accept this about myself.

I had intended to garden in an organic function utilizing 100% Mel's Mix, but I'm tired of my corn and other veggies paling in comparison to my brother's and other gardener's, so tonight I fertilized. I put a 9-12-12 fertilizer around my tomatoes, corn, eggplant, peppers, and American melons. The directions for the fertilizer recommended 2 tbs per plant, but I was worried about overfertilizing them, so I only put 1 tbs per plant. I guess we'll see over the next few weeks if it speeds up the growth and blooming.

A pleasant surprise

I'm home sick today. Some sort of stomach virus or the vengeance of the sausage biscuit we got from Brookshire Brothers yesterday morning. Between trips to the bathroom I went out this morning to take pics of the garden sans the trees and brush my honey cut down last week. Light is flooding in! Of course, now that it's hot, the garden may miss the shade it was getting.

Less trees = more daylight = happier veggies

My tomato plants aren't looking all that great. Some of the leaves have sort of withered away, and my blooms are falling off the plants. I don't really see a lot of bees around my place so I wonder if the blooms aren't getting pollinated....

Last week I decided to plant some hardy hibiscus seeds that I bought from Baker Creek a few months ago. My sister-in-law really likes Hibiscus, so I plan on giving her some. I don't think she will need 8 plants though.... They're perennial plants that are supposed to have dinner plate sized flowers. I'm excited to see how they turn out. They've started to germinate, so hopefully I won't have to wait too long.

Itty Tiny Hardy Hibiscus

While checking on the little Hibiscus seedlings, I noticed that a lemon tree cutting a friend gave me had decided to start blooming. I thought it was dead, and I'd been neglecting it. I haven't watered it in over a month. I guess it has retained enough rain water to still be viable. That was a nice little bright spot in the day.

Non-dead lemon tree cutting

Flowering Fooled You

My flowering "compost potatoes"

Okay, my flowers are not in the square foot garden, but I'm so pleased with how they're doing that I had to take some pics and show them off. Last year I bought a pre-planned garden from Bluestone Perenials. I ended up dividing the garden and putting half of the plants in the bed in front of my house and the other half in front of the guest house. Despite my best efforts to kill them most of the plants have managed to survive. Most of these plants were only 6 inches or so high when they arrived via UPS last year. Now they're huge. Below are a few of the hardy survivors.

Nepeta Walker's Low. I have three of these plants, and they're spread out all over the place

Sedum Autumn Joy. this plant is at least 16 inches tall.

Shasta Daisy Alaska. It'll be blooming soon. This plant is about 2 feet tall

Achillea Coronation Gold