The vegetable garden is in full swing! I took this as an opportunity to experiment with my panoramic setting on my phone camera (someone explain to me why I have not used this feature before?), so you can see the full vegetable garden in all it's glory (even if some of it is currently in shadow from the maple tree).
You can sorta, kinda, see the raised beds further out in the yard. Please excuse the weed-ridden sunken patio. The hubs and I have plans for that area, but we need time (and funds for materials) before we can do anything about it.
So, details...if we move in closer (much closer), you can see that the blueberry bush is fruiting! I've gotten a few wonderfully ripe berries off of it so far, but I think the birds are mostly beating me to the punch. Guess I need to hang some shiny things to scare them off.
I dug up a large crop of my Egyptian Walking Onions a week or so ago which I am, in short sessions, chopping and freezing. These onions are not kidding around. They are VERY strong and they make my eyes burn and tear like you wouldn't believe. Last year's crop mostly filled a one-gallon freezer bag, and lasted us all year. I took a few of the above-ground bulbs this plant uses to spread and planted them in pots. I will find a new spot for them later, but in the meantime, they have lovely white flowers!
The hubs and I picked this wonderfully fragrant cinnamon basil up at our neighborhood farmer's market. It has lovely purple-ish stems and purple flowers. It's going gang busters, and I need to pinch it back so it doesn't go to seed!
The rosemary and sage seem to like their spots. There are multiple plants of each of these, and I recently had to (viciously) cut back the sage as it was making a bid for world domination, but I waited for it to finish its show of purple flowers first!
The asiatic lilies were here when we moved in, but they are now tucked between the sage and lavender, which is also in bloom. You can also see the borage blooming behind it in the in-ground garden.
These tiny portacula (also known as moss roses) are on their third or fourth round of blooms. These are some of my favorites this year, but I kind of wish I had planted them closer together! Live and learn...
The dill I purposefully planted two years ago continues to re-seed itself. It smells heavenly!
Please excuse my finger that made its way into the following picture. Since so many of my seedlings got fried this year, the hubs and I bought several pepper plants from the farmers market. There are five varieties this year, so we should be set for peppers for quite a while! I planted most of them in pots to save room in the raised beds.
The swiss chard is looking lovely, and one of my projects for the day is to make chard chips from these lovelies!
A better picture of the borage. I have never planted this before, but bees love it, and the tiny flowers taste like cucumbers! I also hear that you can eat the leaves if you get them when they are small, but they get spiny and tough when they get large.
I have had to steak, tie, trellis, etc. all of the tomato plants. They are HUGE and have tons of green tomatoes on them right now. You can see them peeking through the leaves, and I've got one or two that are almost ripe!
Another experiment this year is pumpkins. I planted Jack-be-little pumpkins. They are small sugar pumpkins that are ideal for small-space gardening, and can even be grown in a large container and trellised! I planted one to grow on the ground like traditional pumpkins, and a few more to be trellised. I wanted to see if one way worked better than the other, so I'll keep you posted on what I find!
Moving on to the raised beds, the squash is blooming! I only planted two of these so we wouldn't get overwhelmed by squash as the summer goes along. As much as I love yellow squash, I don't need five tons of it!
I ran out of appropriately sized pots before I ran out of peppers, so some of them ended up in raised beds after I dug out the onions. Supposedly, this is a less than ideal rotation, but I had to have a place to put them, so hopefully they'll turn out okay. One of them is currently sporting a banana pepper, so I'll take that as a good sign!
The second bed is planted with nothing but beans. I plant bush habit green beans every year because they always give a good harvest, and freeze well, but I also planted some speckled lima beans my mom gave me seeds for. The seeds are gorgeous...red with black speckles. I can't wait to see what they taste like!
The third bed is planted with purple beans and another trial this year: okra. I love making vegetable gumbo (it was one of my grandmother's best loved recipes), so I'm hoping for a good crop to go with my tomatoes so I can make a big pot or two!
The last bed is planted with turnips, which you can see peeking up above the soil, more peppers, and what is looking to be failed malabar spinach. You can see in the close-up picture how tiny those seedlings are, and I planted them in March!! What a disappointment. I probably should cut my losses and find something else to plant there, but I kind of want to see what happens with them. Supposedly, this variety will grow through the summer, but I will need to give it some kind of trellis to grow on.
So there you have it. One very long post, but a good idea of what is going on in the veggie garden. I have a couple of to-do's which should get done in the next week or two, but other than pulling weeds and keeping things watered, the garden is mostly self-sufficient, which is great. How is your garden doing?
