We have had some excitement in the garden this week. Our plants are continuing to grow super fast from our week of excellent sun and we harvested our first few strawberries.  I got some more seedlings planted and we spent quite a bit of time weeding and cleaning up the back yard. Whew. It was a lot of work but well worth it in the end.

Our first ripe strawberries happened this week. Our daughter ate a few of them but the rest were stolen by our thieving squirrel. I had to chase him off twice and just now when I went out to turn on the soaker hose I discovered he had left a half ripe one on the sidewalk.  Luckily we are all strawberried out from picking them last weekend so our daughter didn’t even notice.  Usually she is way more on top of that sort of thing.

The lettuce in the top of our strawberry tower continues to flourish and our three year old continues to be the only one eating it.  She spends most of her time in the front yard randomly telling me she is going to eat a piece and then running over there and chowing down.  It is awesome because she will not eat lettuce in the house.  We haven’t been eating a lot of salad lately and I honestly prefer romaine lettuce but I should really pick some of it so we can eat it. Maybe I will put some in my salad next week.  I need to buy more seeds so I can do some succession planting.  I have a long planter I want to fill with a variety of lettuce but just haven’t gotten around to.

Our apple tree has a couple of apples. I was really surprised since we planted it only a year ago. I thinned a few of the smaller ones but I am on the fence about the remaining ones.  I have heard conflicting information about whether to leave apples on the tree before the third year and honestly I haven’t had time to look it up again to double check.  So far of the 5 varieties on our combination tree the only two with fruit are the Gravenstein and the Gala. I will probably end up removing them. I think we also need to prune back our tree a bit since it is a little leggy so I will definitely have to read up on my apple tree care this week!

Our bush beans are doing well.  I thinned them a bit after I took this picture but I am still having a hard time ripping seedlings out since they are all so healthy. I know that they will be too crowded though so eventually we will be down to about 4 based on the space available in the bed.  I will continue to pull a couple out every week until we are at a good number.

Our carrots are doing ok.  They are finally growing a little bit but not super fast.  We didn’t have much luck with these seeds last year.  There is a lot of room in this bed so I may grow some fast growing plants such as radishes on the edges while the beans and carrots grow since I am running out of room in my garden.  I have heard that is a way to increase your crop yield but it may need more soil amending than I am ready to do.

Our broccoli seems to be having a hard time getting started.  All of our seedlings are still small and a little leggy so I may start some other plants inside for crop succession since we eat a lot of broccoli.  I am just really short on time and a little concerned that the garden will get away from me if I plant too much.

The luffa plants are in the ground with their trellis and doing well. I may have to guide them towards the trellis with some string but they have grown a couple of inches since I planted them a week ago which is fabulous!

So I am only partially certain these are both cucumbers.  We may have mixed up our seedlings since I only labeled the front of the rows and I didn’t warn my husband when he brought me some and then I may have forgotten and mixed them up even further but hey, it will be a nice surprise later?  I don’t have enough trellises so I planted these two along the fence hoping they would grow up the fence if they needed more space.  I am quickly realizing we need a much bigger garden if we are to grow the amount of food I want to.

Our green beans are starting to come up under our tepee and I am really excited about it.  The little kids are going to have a ton of fun sitting in there while I garden sneaking fresh green beans.  I really with I had room for a bigger crop of green beans so that we could freeze a bunch but maybe next year.

Our squash continue to do well.  The zucchini is really taking off.  I was slightly crazy and planted my last zucchini plant so we have four total with a couple of yellow squash and possibly some spaghetti squash.  That is a lot of squash for us. I put some Mylar firecracker decorations in the squash and pumpkin beds because I suspect the squirrel is eating some of the blossoms.  I did some research and Mylar strips are supposed to keep both birds and squirrels out and we happened to be at the craft store and saw these with the Fourth of July decorations.  They are pretty garish but I love them.  Hopefully they work.

Both our Shortcake and our mystery raspberries are doing well.  We have a number of berries on the larger variety and I am hoping I will be able to freeze some of them.

The blueberries continue to look delicious.  I am really excited to eat them later this year!

My gigantic Hydrangea bushes in the front are covered in blossoms.  They seem to have grown at least two feet in the last month as well and I can no longer get even close to trimming them back to a decent height.  I am pretty sure I will be majorly chopping these back this year and probably won’t get any blossoms on them next year but I am ok with that because they are completely taking over the space and it is going to be a nightmare trimming all of those flowers.  Last year there were probably a third of the blossoms and I spent several hours a week deadheading these bushes alone.

I thought I would post a picture of our small herb garden.  We planted Rosemary, Thyme, Oregano and Sage last year.  They Rosemary didn’t make it through the winter and I have yet to buy another plant.  For some reason I keep not liking the ones I see in the store or they are tiny.  We also have some garlic in there that we planted last spring that probably should have been harvested.  I will probably pull one up at the end of the summer and see how they are doing.  We are going to have to redo this section after a little bit since the plants are starting to crowd together.

I think the next few weeks will be interesting as the garden really starts to take off with the nicer weather.  We are planning on removing all of the ivy in the back by mid-July so we can install our back fence.  We have made some progress but there is quite a bit of it and we haven’t had time with all of the end of the school year stuff going on.  I also really need to weed the side yards and start trimming all of the bushes that tend to overgrow.  I need to move or find homes for several bushes in order to put the fence in and that will take some time as well.

What’s happening in your garden this week?

We had a really busy week this week with playdates for the younger kids and prom for our oldest.  There were errands to run and the one year old didn’t nap all week. Both little kids must be growing through a growth spurt because I spend a lot of time feeding hangry (yes hangry) kids who had been fed an hour prior and then having to run to the store because we some how were out of everything. There was a lot of cleaning up of messes and my husband and I spent all of Sunday working on cleaning out the garage. We made a lot of progress and I feel much better about it.  We just need to add another shelf to the ceiling and some along the walls for our gardening stuff and we should be mostly done. Ug. It was both exhausting and fun hanging out with the kids this week but we didn’t get a lot of gardening done.

I spent most of my time weeding and cleaning up the back yard.  I didn’t have a lot of time so I pulled the biggest weeds from the asparagus bed, around the fruit trees/bushes and in the back around the deck/huckleberry bush.  I found the biggest Stinky Bob plant I have ever seen underneath the huckleberry bush. It was easily three feet across. They are native here so they are everywhere in our back ravine and luckily they are easy to pull once they get big enough.  My teenager also spent quite a bit of quality time with her sister pulling ivy along our back slope in preparation for the back fence.  Getting the back area clear will be a family effort but well worth it once the fence is in and we can let George out to roam.  I didn’t get any pictures of her efforts because I was busy in the garage (which I didn’t take pictures of either because it was a huge embarrassing mess).

Our indoor seedlings are past the point of needing planting but I was waiting on our trellises to come in the mail. I ordered them from Gardeners Supply Store a few weeks ago but you can also find something similar on Amazon and they will come much quicker since I had to wait almost three weeks for them to ship which was kind of a pain. I am going to plant my Luffas along the red three panel trellis and my three year old and I planted some pole beans under the bamboo stakes to create a bean tepee for her and her brother to play in.  She was very excited! I let her choose beans or peas. My kids love their vegetables and peas and green beans are their favorite. I am really glad she chose green beans because I am not a fan of peas and I have been having to eat them quite a bit lately so that I am modeling good vegetable eating behavior.

My Luffa plants are doing well. I have been hardening them off all week and they should be ready to plant some time this week.  I am really excited about them but also nervous because we just started out gardening and these are a little unusual.  I have some bottle gourds that are ready to plant as well but I am in need of another trellis for them to climb.

I used some Earth Staples to anchor the trellis and some of the soaker hoses down.  I plan on anchoring more of the soaker hoses down but I am waiting for after I add another trellis or something for the gourds to grow on.  I probably need to use a splitter with my soaker hoses so there isn’t so much wasted water but I am still trying to figure out a good configuration for them. I am afraid that if I bury them I will forget where I put them…

Our green bean trellis is looking good. I am hoping it will be fun for the kids to sit in and sneak eating beans while I work in the garden.

Our pumpkins and squash are doing well with new growth and lots of flowers.  I am hoping to get at least one good sized pumpkin and I know that the zucchini will probably over produce so I plan on freezing a bunch of it for the winter since I am the only on that really likes it.  I only have two plants in the garden and a couple still in their red cups but I don’t think I will be planting the extras since two zucchini plants it probably enough for us.

After I worked in the vegetable garden I spent some time looking around the rest of the yard while my husband and son watered the asparagus and the front garden bed.

My gigantic bush by our front door is abuzz with bees.  It is really pretty with all of it’s white flowers and the way it is shaped.

We also have these pink flowers that are stunning. We almost killed these last year when we planted the asparagus. They die back every year and the previous owners must have cut them back before they put the house on the market so we had no idea they were there until after they had been stepped on. They did not bloom last year but this year the bush is much bigger and has several big blossoms. We have really enjoyed the anticipation of waiting for the flowers to finally open. Our three year old has been checking them daily for progress which has been fun to watch.

This week I am going to continue to do bi-weekly watering, try and plant my luffa plants and maybe the gourds or my leftover cucumbers. We also have a ton of cleanup work to do in the yard for the oldest’s graduation party in two weeks (time has flown by too fast!) and to get the back ready for a fence.  Our strawberries are starting to ripen and we got one berry off of them this week which the three year old promptly ate.  I did find some unwelcome visitors in the garden this week and I used a non-toxic solution to hopefully get rid of them but that is for another post!

Happy gardening everyone!

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We have finally been able to make some progress on our garden this week.  Our pumpkin and sunflower seedlings are growing well and are almost ready for hardening off and transplant.  I checked this morning and the watermelon seedlings are just starting to peek through the soil. Our ground cherries have yet to sprout but I was not able to get them to germinate last year either so I will probably buy seed starts again this year at a local plant sale.  If you can I highly recommend buying plants from your local Master Gardeners group. You can just google  “Master Gardeners” with your city and find a local club.  Many put on plant sale which allows you to buy locally and also gives you a chance to talk to a gardener with experience growing the crop you are buying in your particular area. 

Last night after nap time I was able to plant the strawberries I received from my local buy nothing group and plant lettuce, zucchini, spaghetti squash, luffa, gourds and cucumbers seeds. I used this planter we bought off of Amazon for the strawberries and lettuce. I put strawberries in the lower layers and lettuce in the top two.  I wanted to save some of the strawberries to plant along the slope I want to keep from eroding.

We bought our potting soil from Costco and our local nursery.  For the seeds I used mostly potting soil and then added about 1/4-1/2 inch of seed starter to the tops of the cups.

Our current seed starting method is to use red cups with three holes cut out of the bottom (you can just use kitchen shears) purchased at Costco in a low waterproof container. Since I was planting so many seeds I used this sterilite container with 20 cups. This still left room on the side to add water to the bottom for a passive watering system. 

I added about a 1/2 inch of water to the bottom and let it sit while I planted the strawberries and lettuce.

I did have to refill it again since the soil was pretty dry.  After I refilled it I poked two seeds into each cup and labeled them with wooden sticks. I bought ours at a local craft store but mine are almost gone so I will be ordering a gigantic pack from Amazon pretty soon.  You can use anything you want to label your seeds and since I didn’t use a waterproof pen to label mine I will probably be able to wash them and use them again.  Since I did not have enough sticks to label all of my cups I just labeled the first row of each.  Hopefully I won’t mix the cups up…

Here are the seeds I used.  They are just regular seeds bought from the grocery store except I ordered Luffa and gourd seeds from the Burpee website. They had a free shipping special on seeds and I did not have time to look around for luffa seeds since they are not common.  I have this idea that we will grow our own luffa sponges and make bird houses out of the gourds but I have no idea if they will actually grow so it will be a fun experiment.

I rearranged our seed shelf in the laundry room so that the new seeds would fit, sprayed the tops of the new cups with water so that the seed starter would not dry out and let them bask in the glow of the light.  All of them should germinate in 7-14 days and I am excited for them to come up!

A close up of the seed cups. The lack of waterproof marker caused the writing to run when I sprayed them with water but I can still read them so we are all good.

Today we spent some family time in the garden getting it ready for our seed starts and doing general clean up.  We live in a heavily treed area and there is a constant need for leaf blowing.  Here is the area where we are planting most of our vegetables.  The previous planter from last year has had it’s soil turned over and I weeded and raked the area where the new planter box will go.

We bought our planter box off of Amazon. It is a little smaller than I pictured but you can add another one on top of it to make it deeper.  We will probably buy another one to add to the top next year.  It was super easy to assemble and our kids loved helping with it.

We placed the second one slightly farther away from the driveway so that we have a bit more space.  I may plant our sunflowers along the driveway since I don’t want them shading out our planter boxes but I haven’t decided yet.  We will add dirt sometime in the next couple of weeks when we can borrow a truck to haul it.

I am really happy with our progress in the garden this week. Next week we are planting our tomato starts we got from Costco and looking at adding our seed starts to the garden.  I also need to direct sow our carrots and install a pest management fence around the vegetable garden which we can hopefully complete in the next couple of weeks.

What do you have going on in your garden this week?