The Garden is Coming Along

These photos are actually a couple of weeks old. You get to pan across the garden. We've started to get a few pea pods from the handful of pea plants that actually came up. In this first photo you can see the Hamson DX-5212 tomatoes that I have. They now have some blossoms on them, but they've spent most of their time getting big and leafy. It's a tomato variety that was developed at Utah State. They're just to the right of the apple tree (that I still haven't figured out how to prune) in the back right garden box. And I have to say that I have LOVED having gravel down around the boxes. I still get little weed seedlings that try to get going, but their roots are only on the surface and it's easy to pop them out. I also had a tomato volunteer that sprouted in the gravel next to the bean box (on the side left). The yellow sled? Well, the kids got that out and it's never made it back to the garage for summer storage.

Here you can see the green beans have filled up their box (more pickled beans and bottled beans) and to the left of that the cucumbers and summer squash are just starting to get going. They're really huge now, especially the squash. It's trying to cover up the few carrots that didn't get dug up by marauding chickens. Behind the beans are my strawberry plants that just haven't ever done much. They get big and leafy and that's about it. Hmph. They may be getting pulled out. The back box on the left has five Celebrity tomato plants in it. They are getting large and they have fruit on them now. The largest of their tomatoes now is about a golf ball size. I'm having issues with blossom end rot, but that's because I'm not watering on a regular schedule. It's the, "Oh dang! I haven't watered for a while" schedule. Oh well. We just cut out the spots. The foreground is part of the weed chaos I'm trying to keep at bay.

Aahhh, the corn furrows. And raspberries at the back right. The berries actually starting to produce now, three weeks late. We had a long, late, cool spring. Getting this chunk of the garden ready was ... well ... not very fun. I think it was a bad combination of I-have-to-get-this-done-today-but-my-hormones-are-freaking-out-and-my-kids-are-just-fighting-with-each-other-so-I'll-just-do-it-myself battle with soil and tiller. Sigh. It was a sign that I need to stay on top of the yearly tilling (or even twice-yearly), as well as getting rid of weeds when they're small and haven't decided to set up residence and invite their relatives over.
The corn is now about seven inches tall! And I have two kinds of pumpkins and a few watermelon plants coming through. I really hope the varieties of pumpkin that I planted (a regular sugar pumpkin size and a packet of mini pumpkins) don't get verticilium (sp?) wilt. I'm hoping that only affects the giant pumpkins that I tried a number of years ago. And I will actually have about six blackberries on a bush that I planted last year. It loves where I planted it. This is all making up for the poor peach harvest I'm going to have. Snows during blossom time saw to that. Oh well. The few that do come are going to be huge!