The Growing Garden

*Lots of pictures ahead!*

What's growing in the garden is doing great! My bean seeds that I planted (which would be 3 double rows along the far right edge of the garden in the picture below) didn't come up. I'll have to replant :(

Except for the peas, the garden still doesn't look like much, but hopefully in another month that'll change! In this picture is all my peppers, squash, zucchini, eggplant and space for corn or cucumbers.

The bottom part of the garden, with a trusty wandering through cat. This part doesn't look like much either. But believe me, I'm gonna fill it up!

My peas! They have grown considerably since my last post. A few stalks are even as tall as the fence! Yippee! Since my last update, I did side-dress each row with 5-10-10 fertilizer and gray lime. I've also been watering regularly with a Miracle Grow water-er. I wouldn't normally use the Miracle Grow watering system, but I am really counting on this year's garden to give us as much as it can.

The pea vines are blooming beautifully :)

And even making pea pods :) I think I will be very busy in a few more weeks picking and shelling peas! Oh yummy! No more store-bought peas, I hope!

The tomato plants are doing well. The broccoli and cauliflower that survived are looking good, too. I'm not sure why some of the plants croaked. I still have the majority if my tomato plants (Amish Paste) to put out yet. I need to get that done very soon.

Of my little rows of beets, spinach and lettuce, only the Summer Heat Tolerant Head Lettuce is growing. I'm not sure what happened to the other stuff, but it did not grow. I may try replanting with the rows going the other way - I think having them vertical to the "usual" way might've caused the dirt to wash when I watered.

Last evening I had a few hours of daylight left (I'd been gone all day helping a friend on bedrest), and I saw that it was supposed to rain alot last night, so I put it in high gear and did some planting. I planted 11 more peppers (Golden California Wonder), 10 Eggplant, 6 squash and 4 zucchini. I'm not sure that starting them indoors was a good idea. They got VERY leggy before I got them in the ground and today they are all laying over. 2 of the squash plants snapped off, even though I buried them deep. I think I'll just poke some seeds in the dirt and see what happens.

These are my pepper plants. They've grown quite a bit, too. Some of them don't look very good, but hopefully they'll pull through and produce enough for us and maybe some to share.

One thing I'm possibly behind on is getting corn in the ground. It seems like everyone else has corn in and I don't. I'm always afraid of getting it in too soon and it not growing (it likes warm dirt), and another thing is that until this year I had to wait until the peas came out. I still don't have enough room for all my corn this year WITH the peas, so some of it will have to wait for the peas to come out.

This year I'm also adding lime to each row/hole when I plant. I'm hoping the plants will like that and bear well. It's been such a struggle to get very much and very good produce from our garden previous years, and I'm really trying this year to get a good crop of everything.

Oh - remember how I had Daniel add 2 more tiller rows (big tiller) to the garden? He said our garden is now the same size (sq. ft.) as our house will be when the addition is finished!


This post is linked to Phoebe's Frugal Gardening 101 series over at her blog, Getting Freedom.