How Does Your Garden Grow?

 After the Memorial Day Rain/Snow Event, the remainder of the week was fairly nice, allowing for some time to work in the garden spaces.  Lots of vegetables and flowers have been planted, both at my house, and at Tom and Carol's. Primarily, the garden spaces are at their house, but Jeff and I have a small container garden here, too.

A recent trip to the local community greenhouse yielded many vegetable starts which we now had to find permanent homes for the season. Jeff and I visited the greenhouse on Saturday of Labor Day weekend, on its first day in operation.  Hopefully I can do a post just on this greenhouse and its owner sometime in the near future because there really could be a lot to write about it.

Anyway, tomatoes came six to a packet, not individually, and we wanted three varieties... so we ended up with eighteen tomato starts.  Jeff and I planted six or eight maybe in our containers at our house, and the rest joined Carol's in the new Tomato Plot.  Carol had quite a few tomato plants as well. In total, I think we have 27 tomato plants, representing 7 varieties.  I guess we will see what we like! If they all produce, we could have quite a heavy harvest later this summer. Plenty for making sauces and salsa!

I am a little nervous that the close proximity of the different varieties of tomatoes will cause them to cross-polinate. Does anyone know anything about that or have experience with that happening? 

Here is the tomato plot. We have cages, mini hot-houses made from milk jugs, and water wall thingys (technical term, yes) to help them out. 

Here is a view of one of our other vegetable plots. This one was reserved for larger veggies-- plants that need more space. Here we have zucchini (in the tires), two rows of corn, and two rows of bush beans. All the green stuff kind of growing in a patch is volunteer spinach.  The spinach has been very prolific this year- we have had many delicious spinach salads!

We do have a plot dedicated to herbs, but there is also an abundance of volunteer chive plants coming up EVERYWHERE! 

Harvey is not much help in the garden. He prefers to either be running around the yard, or to be asleep, as in this photo. 

So. The raised beds are coming on very well.  Jeff and Tom fashioned a protective fence around the two beds out of some old sheep-wire fence and some leftover fence posts.  What are we trying to keep out? Deer? Rabbits? No, No.  We are trying to keep out our DOGS who LOVE to dig in the dirt!! 

This bed contains: red onions, white onions, cucumbers, okra, broccoli, carrots, peas, and various types of salad greens. 

This bed may appear to be coming on a little slower, but really, most everything planted in this one was put in the ground later.  Here we have radishes, carrots, more onions, sugar snap peas, and some beans. 

Here I am harvesting some fresh oregano in the herb plot. 

After the days efforts planting and weeding in the garden, it is so rewarding to be able to harvest a few things, too.  Today's pickings were oregano, chives, lots of spinach, and the last three asparagus stalks! 

I am pretty sure the geese were wondering why they were not still south for the winter!

As I mentioned, Memorial Day Weekend was dominated by cold, wintry rainy sleety weather. This had the farmers in a great mood as the moisture was desperately needed. I took these two photos of some geese in our farm yard.  The image quality isn't that great, but you still get the idea. 

And... They're off!