Garden Update

Tomatoes are on the vine.  Lettuce has been picked.  Sunflowers are now a good 18 inches high in the raised bed.  Beans are ready to start blooming and setting beans.  My garden is looking great!

I recently read an article on how walking barefoot on the soil grounds you and correct a boatload of problems.  I can’t attest all my aches and pains, physically and mentally, are cured by going barefoot, however, there is something about standing there, toes curling on the cool earth and checking out my garden.  Instantly, a calm feeling comes over me.  I can tell my tenseness level goes down about 20 points immediately.  That is until the dog makes a beeline through the middle of the whole thing.  Luckily, she is staying out of the raised beds.

Currently I am  marveling at my purple bush beans and my French filet beans.  They are up about 18 inches, huge leaves and ready to start flowering. My fajita bell  pepper is just about lost in their midst and is flowering and setting peppers.  My other bell peppers were transplanted last weekend and are coming along.  I have to say I haven’t had a pepper plant get so big on me before.  Usually they are just about 12 inches high, produce a couple of puny peppers and that’s it.  Being in this raised bed is giving me some high hopes my peppers will actually produce well this year.  And this is my first year of planting some beans.  (I am very familiar with beans from my parents and grandparents gardens, but it has been years since I have had enough room to plant beans. )  This is an experiment to see if I can get a couple of servings of some unusual beans.  My fennel in the corner is doing well.

My mother’s day present to myself was getting things in the ground and in pots.  I still have an area an I want to clear for my watermelon and maybe some more beans.  Hopefully, between things the girls need to get done and work, I will have Sunday to play in the garden.  And some recent rain to loosen the ground so I can get some shrub stumps out.  I need to cut up some bamboo for stakes and ‘fencing’ around my garden area.

  These are my cucumbers and some more mammoth sunflowers.  The “plan” is to have the sunflowers grow up around the bamboo pole and then the cucumbers to go up the string and make sort of a teepee effect.  All the string around the cucumbers is to hopefully keep the dog from making a shortcut across them until they get bigger.  I need to mulch around them however.  Hopefully, this really sandy soil can grow them well.  Need to fertilize them some.

The yarrow I ‘liberated’ from an old house is taking hold nicely.  I need to transplant some more of the zinnias from the planter to the ground.  Although they do look nice and lush where they are now.  And I am surprised at the Gerber daisies.  They are holding up nicely, despite the afternoon sun.  We will see how long they last once the temperatures get out of the 70’s and into the 90’s.

In addition to my tomatoes in pots, I have 4 dwarf tomatoes I am ‘reporting’ on.  I put these in a couple of mail bins which I had on hand.  They are about the same size as the grow bags NCTomatoman is using for his dwarf tomatoes.  So my regular tomatoes are in buckets and my dwarfs in bins.  I am calling this area “tomato row”.  There is a bucket of Mrs. Burn’s Lemon basil and a bin of regular and Red Rubin basil there also.  What is a tomato without some basil?  This picture is from last week.  Already the tomatoes in the buckets are shooting up and the dwarfs are just a little bit bigger.  I want to move some pine straw from the back and put around these buckets and bins…just to make it look a little nicer if nothing else.