Garden Update

I can't believe it has been three weeks since Photo Dude put our new garden in. We have had absolutely ideal conditions for planting. There have been lots of great rain storms coming through about every day so we haven't needed to water the garden at all. I'm sure as the summer goes along we will have to start watering but until then I'll happily take Mother Nature's help. Today was the first day that we really needed to get out and weed. Photo Dude has gone through a few times and pulled up more of that stupid rhubarb that we thought (hoped) we had killed off. The kids seemed really excited about weeding until we actually got out there. Jack took off right away to play with his toys and one of the neighbor boys came over to play with him. It was probably better that way. Molly helped a lot and got into spots that we had a harder time reaching. She is going to be a great help when harvest time comes and the plants are even bigger than they are now. We unfortunately lost two of our tomato plants to unknown reasons. And since they hadn't been individually staked we won't know which ones they were until the rest come in. We also lost most of our pea plants only one of the four is still a viable grower the others were just dead sticks. We weeded for a while and then Photo Dude got out a claw looking tool to break up the soil a bit. We've had so much hard rain that the ground had a hard top layer. Our soil is also fairly clay-ish so a little aeration was needed. Almost everything has done amazingly well. As we tended the plot we started talking about what we would do differently next year and we are thinking of doing some raised beds because this has taught us that it is really easy to plant too deep to reach everything. But look at this our very first tomatoes are starting to grow! This is the Fourth of July tomato that we planted first. It is huge! I think that it is definitely going to live up to the promise of ripe fruit by early July. Our pepper plants are starting to get flowers so we have high hopes for them as well. The squash and cucumbers are growing very well with big gorgeous leaves but no blooms yet. The green beans are growing but they don't seem to be getting as big as the others. I don't remember having them in the garden when I was growing up so I have no idea what to expect from them. Thanks for taking a peek at our garden and I would love to hear what you guys are doing in yours or even if you have any tips for us to keep our little plot going strong. Have a wonderful day!