This week not a lot got done in the garden besides watering and weeding. We had a busy week with the oldest daughter graduating from high school and Father’s Day so we were pretty occupied. We spent a lot of time doing maintenance type stuff around the garden so that it looked better for the party. I in no way got it looking nearly as nice as I wanted it to but the weeds were more in control and the lawn was at least mowed.
I have been really pleased with the growth in our vegetable garden. All of the plants took off when the sun came out and we have quite a few vegetables growing. Most of them are squash but now that they are starting to grow I can tell which plant is which. It is very helpful!
I pulled the last of our seedlings from the indoor grow area and started hardening them off this week. My ground cherry is growing well and has a couple of fruits on it. Yay! It looks like most of the other plants are bottle gourds. I am a little tight on space so I will have to find somewhere else to stash these. I am thinking of planting them near the hydrangeas in our front bed for now and install some netting so they can grow vertically. I also have some room over by the blueberry bushes but that area is very weedy and I don’t know if that will be a problem later. I might have to super mulch and see if that solves the problem.
The bush bean plants have gotten super tall. They seem to have grown a couple of feet in the last week or two. We have been checking them every day but we missed a day for graduation and they seemed to grow overnight.
I am really excited about our carrots. We grew this variety last year and had no luck. They doubled in size over the last few days and I am hoping that they are growing some nice roots down in the soil!
We have a few pumpkins! I am really hoping they aren’t eaten by the pesky squirrels and crows. I seem to be missing 95% of my strawberries and I think I know who has eaten them…
Our squash plants are taking over the bed. I planted way to many of them for the area. I honestly was not sure if they would even grow. We should hopefully have a bunch though so I can freeze a bunch for the winter. They are mostly summer squash so they won’t keep over winter.
Baby zucchini!
Yellow squash! I took this photo a couple of days ago and they are much bigger today. I didn’t get a picture but they almost looked big enough to eat. Yellow squash is one of my favorites!
Our Luffa plants are starting to grow up the trellis. I need to trim them back a bit but I am waiting for the first flowers so I can do it all at once. These really are my experiment this year. I am hoping they do well so we can switch to natural sponges instead of synthetic.
We have a couple of tiny cucumbers. I am going to have to train these with some string so they can find the fence behind them. I didn’t plant them quite close enough.
Our green beans are doing ok. They have been attacked by some slugs and many of them lost their leaves. I am going to start another batch next week and set up a beer slug trap as soon as I can get around to it. Hopefully that will help.
Do you see these? These popped up in the garden a couple of weeks ago and I have been watching them carefully. They first appeared to be weeds but I was hopeful and decided to let them grow a bit before I pulled the plug. I am fairly certain now what they are since I compared them to my seedling from the laundry room. Do you know what they are? I am pretty sure they are volunteer ground cherries from our plant last year. We planted it in this spot and many of the ground cherries were either squished or left under leaves since we had a very successful harvest last year and missed a bunch of them. I am really excited about it if they are because that means next year I can just save some seeds, I don’t have to search high and low or stress about how many seeds germinate next year. I was also really nervous about our one not so great looking plant but even though it has been growing ever so slowly it looks really healthy so hopefully we will get quite a bit from it.
That’s it for our short but sweet garden update! I may look into some netting for our strawberry plants but honestly I have spent my budget for gardening for the year and my kids aren’t missing them so I may not. Hopefully it will keep the birds off of our raspberry plants. I am excited about the possibility of baby squash to eat next week! Yum!
What’s happening in your garden this week?
