Garden Update: 6-24-13

I know you are all on pins and needles anxiously awaiting our garden update, so sit back and take in the view from our garden!  It’s been 10 days since we have had any rain, and we need it badly.  Our rain barrel is close to being empty and desperately needs to be filled back up again.  We also have a huge garbage can placed next to our rain barrel to fill that up, once the rain barrel is completely full.  I just switch the gutter extension hose from the barrel to the can…presto, instant rain container that I just dunk my watering can in!  I think we are supposed to get some rain later today, and I am keeping my fingers crossed on that!  Our grass is even starting to dry out from all of these hot humid temps.  We are just doing our best to use only rain water that we collect for watering the garden to cut down on our water bill, and this has definitely helped tremendously!  You can not imagine the amount of water you use when gardening!

Other than our constant battle on a daily basis chasing off the Chipmunk we named “Chip” from our garden, we have not experienced any issues yet and everything is coming along nicely.  Nikita has been very helpful in chasing away “Chip” and the birdies that sneak under the strawberry netting.  We have seen a few white garden moths around and they usually like cabbage, so I did some reading on Pinterest and a lot of people are stating that we can minimize and/or rid these moths with just plain flour, by sprinkling it on top of the cabbage.

We had some nice garden soil left over from the garden, so we decided to add the rest of it (and get it off the driveway as I am tired of looking at the blue tarp already) to our backyard flower bed behind our garden.  This spot is now the home of all of our pumpkin plants.  I forgot to count how many pumpkins we have planted back there (and I will be planting about 8-10 more this week) which range from Connecticut Field Pumpkins, Jack Be Little Pumpkins, and the famous Red Warty Thing Pumpkins.  Since this flower bed looked 100% better, just by adding the nice dark garden soil around the pumpkins, I decided that I would finish the garden bricks around this bed.  Man oh man, this totally completed the garden area with beautiful results!  I could not wait for a certain someone to come home from work to see what I did, and when he did, he was WOW’d!

Our Romaine Lettuce has finally had a growth spurt.

The cucumbers are coming along nicely.

The zucchini has its moments, and some days the leaves turn a little yellow, but that is from all the rain we had been getting, but they are green again.  And today, I looked really close and I think I can see a really tiny zucchini forming!  Yeah – zucchini bread is on my mind!

We finally have sight of small Big Boy Tomatoes this week!  Yeah!  As you can see, you can tell the difference from a Big Boy to a Juliet from the shape.  Big Boys are round, and Juliets are longer in shape.  The Juliets usually sprout in groups of 8-10, so you can just imagine how many we are going to harvest this year!  Nice!

This Juliet Tomato plant is now over 6 feet tall!

Our Flat Dutch Cabbage is growing by leaps and bounds.

Both Red & Green Peppers are multiplying daily.

And our Black Seeded Simpson Leaf Lettuce will be picked this week!  Parts of our two rows of leaf lettuce has gotten so big that it is now ready to eat!  Gotta stock up on lots of salad dressing now!  Look at that row of lettuce, nice eh?!

So there you have it, our garden update for the week!  Everything is coming along nicely and we can’t be more pleased with its progress!

The flower bed is also popping with colors, from our Russian Sage, yellow wild flowers, Bee Balm, Cat Nip, and our hot pink Phlox just bloomed today.  Our Coreopsis will probably start to bloom in July, so just a little more time to wait on them!  We snuck about 8 pumpkin seeds in this flower bed too, and although we knew better to not plant them, we did, and we were not surprised that when the deer roamed in the other night, they nipped down about half of them.  We knew it was coming, we just kept our fingers crossed that they would not find them, they did.  Live and learn.

Summer would not be the same if we did not have a garden.  This is something that we truly love!