Monday Garden Club

So much going on in the garden this week, and outside the garden as well.  The cornfield in the background  has started to grow and pretty soon it will look like our property is completely surrounded by the corn.  Of all the field crops farmers plant around here, we love having corn neighbors for the summer.  I'm still shocked that such a giant plant can grow from one tiny seed.  Same with sunflowers that plant themselves all over the garden from last year's leftovers and grow like mad into a 10 foot tall stalk by the end of summer with big blooms and enough seeds to make all the neighborhood birds happy. So far, no ten foot tall plants here, just seedlings.

Seedlings and weeds.  Last week, Sheila asked about the weeds that had started to sprout up in the garden around the emerging plants.

"I see in your pics you have sprouts of what looks like grass in the cracks of the dirt. Tell me... do you just let this go? What do you do? This is my issue and I assumed I had to be grass free. But since you're the expert... do I have to get rid of every blade?"

I'd like to say otherwise, but yes, my garden does grow weeds as well, if not better than it grows veggies.  I wish there were a weed free way to garden, but short of making 20 or so raised beds and hauling in clean, weed free soil, we live with them.  The Gardener made the first pass with the rototiller last week (that's why our rows are so wide, to fit the tiller down without ripping out any plants) hence the squares of green in the vine garden where the zucchinis and other vines are growing along with the weeds, including grass.  Once the plants get a little bigger and more hardy, I will start pulling weeds by hand right around the plants.  We also plan to lay down giant sheets of cardboard topped with straw around all of the vine plants to keep the weeds under control in the most out of control area of the garden.  Last year, the vine garden became so weedy that we could hardly find the cantaloupes and winter squash. 

Onions

Broccoli

Bush Beans

Kohlrabi

Pole Beans and Sunflowers



Pear Tomato



Silvery Tomato- an early, determinate variety

Rhubarb

Strawberries

Raspberries

Above are the raspberries still in the big garden and below are the recently moved raspberry plants. 

Some are doing better than others, obviously, but in gardening, casualties happen.  Good thing more plants pop up out of the ground each spring.

We needed the ATV trailer for other uses, so the water tank had to find a new ride.  And of course, since we filled the water wagon, there has been more than enough rain to water everything.  Go figure.

Peaches!

And some nasty looking leaf curl on the peach tree.  I'll see my father-in-law today (a peach growing pro) and ask him what to do about it.

Apples!

Mulberries!

And finally, some flowers, all of which I started from tiny seeds in my basement last year. 

Lupines

Apricot Beauty Foxglove

Anybody else gardening this week? If so, grab the Monday Garden Club button on my sidebar, paste it to your blog entry and link up below with Mr. Linky.

Wardrobe Wednesday

The last few days have been quite hot around here.

 Yesterday was no exception, further demonstrated by Flash who couldn't keep his giant, panting tongue inside his mouth.

The girls wanted me to take them to beach yesterday after school, but instead they settled for dragging out the blue plastic pool and splashing around until dinner time in last year's one size too small swim suits..

Today will be the last of the super warm temps for a while, with a giant storm and cold front moving in right now, putting on one heck of a light show outside.  This morning, lightning knocked out our power for 4 hours which in turn, made me ask myself a very important question, how do I get my car out of the garage during a power outage when I have an ELECTRIC door opener?  Turns out garage door opener manufacturers thought of such a situation and added a handy rope to pull so you can manually open your door and get your car out.  First time I ever had to use it, and when I returned home, the power was back on.  Hopefully it will stay on tonight!

Garden Update Just Barely On Monday

So, I'm late once again with the garden update, but at least I'm posting this week.  Last week was a holiday and with company in from out of town for the weekend, plus both the girls and the Gardener home, there was no way Garden Monday was going to happen. I don't have a good excuse why I didn't post on Wednesday or really any day last week other than the truth that life happens and other stuff ends up trumping the blog. Stuff like Binny falling at the park, scraping both knees and the entire right side of her face then getting some sort of eye infection in the left eye 2 days later.  There was also a field trip to the zoo in there, several sunburns and a new pair of glasses for a certain 8 year old and enough good gardening weather to keep all of us busy and outside as much as possible.

First an overview of the big veggie garden, and the freshly planted corn field in the background.

Many of the seeds have now germinated and I plan to re-sow any plants/seeds that don't emerge by the end of this week. 
The entire 55 foot row of onion sets are up and growing like mad.

The broccoli and brussel sprouts are growing as well.

Like last year, I'm growing a row of sunflowers and pole beans together.  It was so much fun last year, how could we not try it again?

The strawberries are blooming and fruiting in there current home smack dab in the center of the garden for hopefully the last time.  The gardener just tillled up a new garden for me back behind the shed that will be our new berry garden.  I already moved lots of raspberry plants out there but I'm going to wait until after the strawberries fruit to move them.

Tomatoes.

Zucchini.

Cherry tomato.

This is where the raspberries were taking over the garden living until I plucked some of them (just the new shoots from this spring) from their happy home in the big garden and moved them to the new berry garden.

The new berry garden.

Transplants.

After I planted the 40 or so rasberry plants, I knew I needed to water them, and carrying buckets from the house did not seem appealing to either of us, so off went the Gardener on his trusty 4-wheeler to retrieve this tank from behind the barn he had been saving to fill with water for the trees around our property.

And some of the plants were thirsty!

Also in the new garden is also where I stashed the extra tomato and pepper plants.  The greenhouse is finally, almost empty from all 6 flats of plants I started from seed.

There's lots more going on in the garden these days, but it's late and I still have some sun-burnt shoulders that are screaming for attention. Until next week...

Anybody else gardening this week? If so, grab the Monday Garden Club button on my sidebar, paste it to your blog entry and link up below with Mr. Linky.