July Garden

I took some photos of our garden recently. We have been getting such wonderful rain showers and everything is growing so well that if I don't share them soon, the garden will look nothing like these photos!

I love to see other's gardens and view their successes and failures. Mine is far from perfect, but maybe you will enjoy seeing it anyway! And I find that from a photo you can't see half the weeds!

We have two garden patches. This is the original garden. It is becoming too shady to grow things well here so I'm only using about half of the garden. To the left is a weedy patch of strawberries. Apparently these strawberries got some sort of blight. The leaves had spots and then turned brown and fell off. We hardly got any strawberries out of this patch. Since I know that blight is difficult to fight, I plan to get rid of this patch and plant something else here. In the middle is green beans (which I planted very late - I know lots of my neighbors are picking beans). To the right is zucchini.

 

This is our second garden, the larger of the two. The first row is garlic, almost ready to pick. Beyond the garlic is broccoli hiding under row cover from the cabbage worm. To the left is some lettuce that has bolted. After pulling the garlic I will replace it with some fall garden crops.

 

Next to the broccoli is red beets,sugar peas, and onions. The onions that are flowering are sweet onions. Do you know why they are flowering?

 

Next is carrots, peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes.



Ed always says I crowd the garden, and here is an example. When the plants were small it looked like I would have room for some vine plants such as pumpkin and watermelon next to the tomatoes. As they grow, I see I was wrong. But maybe I can train the vines to grow over the potatoes as the potato plants die back.

We had planted some little shriveled up potatoes with foot-long sprouts that were left over from last year's crop. I know that experts say to buy new stock each year, but these were languishing in the basement and I decided to see if they would grow. I think that every potato grew and we have some of the nicest potatoes ever. (I would be scared to try in another year though in case our potatoes do get infected with disease.)

 

I'm reaching under the plants to find nice potatoes like these!

 

Sweet corn follows the potatoes.

 

At the end of this garden is another weedy patch of strawberries. This is the patch that gave us our harvest this year. We plan to revamp this bed and mulch it for next year.



On top of the hill by our garden is a row of red raspberries. Eagerly waiting for their harvest!

How is your garden growing?