Mid-June Garden Update

It seems like all my posts have been about gardening lately. Well, here's another one! I thought I'd give another update on our garden. If you read my guest post at "Safely Gathered In", you saw what my garden looked like about a month ago. Things have changed a lot since then.

This is what it looked like yesterday evening.

June 13, 2011

Everything is growing nicely!

We're planting three plots of corn, each two weeks apart. The corn in the first box is nearly 1 foot high, the second is 3-4".

It was a windy day yesterday, as you can see by the corn. Hubby Dear recently fertilized them with bloodmeal to give them a nitrogen boost. This is the first time we've used that product so we'll see how it works compared to standard, non-organic fertilizer. We planted our corn nearly a month later than a lot of the people around here, so it is still pretty short.




Green beans, lettuce, and a few of the peas that survived the rodent enslaught

The insect repellent seemed to work pretty well. You can see a few holes in the green beans, but it is definitely better. The damage isn't extensive enough to kill the plants or hurt production. We continue to see a few Mexican Bean Beetles in the garden, so we're going to spray the repellent again and perhaps put out some diatomaceous earth (DE).

Our lettuce is still going strong and we're having a hard time keeping up with it. I donated some of our excess to our neighbor's chickens. Hopefully next year we'll have our own chickens to eat our extra greens!


Pumpkins


Our vine plants - pumpkins, cucumbers, and cantaloupe - are doing well. We just planted watermelon, but it should be sprouting soon. It won't be long before Hubby Dear has to put up the trellises to keep them from taking over the entire garden.

Potatoes

Take a look at this box of potatoes! The box is double deep (12"). We started out with only 6" of Mel's Mix and as the potatoes grew, we kept covering them with dirt until they reached the top. They look fabulous.

Unless we have some strange weather or the birds get them first, we should have a bumper crop of blackberries.

Blossoms on our "Triple Crown" thornless blackberry vines

There were so many blossoms on our blackberries that it looked like snow. Now the blossoms have mostly fallen off and the berries are beginning to form.




Baby berries

I forgot to take a picture of our tomatoes, but they look very promising as well. You can see them in the very first picture in this post.

It is so nice to have good things to report about our garden after several years of discouraging harvests. If you have had a hard time gardening or you don't know where to start, I highly recommend square foot gardening. It has made a world of difference for us.

In related news, my dehydrator arrived this week. I harvested the oregano in my herb garden and took the dehydrator out for a spin. I'll be posting about that soon!

What garden successes/failures/progress do you have to report?