It’s hard to believe this garden has been in the ground for a month now. The weeds are taking over the garden and the plants don’t seem to want to grow. It’s pretty frustrating. I think it’s time we pull some weeds, fertilize, and start thinning some of the radish, carrot, turnip, and leek rows.

We keep talking about planting peas and potatoes, but we haven’t gotten around to either of those yet. Maybe we’ll do the potatoes when we start weeding this week? Time will tell.

Weedy Garden – June 12, 2008

Black Manuka – June 12, 2008
One of the bright spots this week is the addition of 3 grape plants along the back fence. Charmaine picked up 3 different kinds, but I only remember the name of this one… the Black Manuka.

Corn Row 1 – June 12, 2008
The first row of corn continues to do well, but you can see the weeds are doing even better

Radishes – June 12, 2008
It’s obvious now that I planted about 80 feet of radishes in about 6 feet of space

Turnips – June 12, 2008
The turnips need to be thinned as well

Beets – June 12, 2008
The beets need to be thinned as well

Carrots – June 12, 2008
The weeds are getting so big and so numerous that it’s hard to tell there are any carrots here at all

Cucumbers – June 12, 2008
The row of cucumbers is doing nicely. The grass clippings along side it seem to be keeping the weeds at bay.

Peppers and Brussels Sprouts – June 12, 2008
The peppers and Brussels sprouts starts made it through the wind and the cold

Green Onions – June 12, 2008
The two small rows of green onions at the front of the garden are doing well

Pumpkin Hills – June 12, 2008
The seven hills of pumpkins, which were planted earlier than anything else in the entire garden, are still failing to impress me, but I’m not giving up on them just yet.

Blackberry – June 12, 2008
We may not have a way to water the blackberry bush, and it may be tiny for a few more years, but it looks like we’ll get at least a couple berries this year anyway.

After 2 years of talking about it, we’re finally to the point where we can plant fruit trees. Unfortunately, it seems you’re not allowed to buy fruit trees that are big enough to actually produce any fruit. From the looks of these twigs, I’d say we have another 4 or 5 years before we see any fruit.

The Scene
This is a shot of the side of the house where the fruit twigs will attempt to grow large enough to produce fruit. I think we’re going to learn patience from this.

Lemon Elberta Peach

Apricot

White Nectarine

Thornless Blackberry

It’s been almost exactly 3 weeks since we started the planting process. I was starting to get a bit anxious that it had been this long without any signs of life from so many areas, but then we had a really good rain storm the last couple days… and almost everything has sprouted now. There are still a few notable exceptions, and most the things that we transplanted from starts inside the house have now died, so we’ll have to replant those, or buy starts from the store. For now, we only have 1 zucchini plant and 1 yellow squash plant from the 10 we had (5 each). Charmaine picked up new bell peppers and Brussels sprouts starts at the store and we’ve planted those in place of the ones we grew inside that died.

Garden Area – June 5, 2008
The garden area is finally starting to look like it’s being used for something.

Bell Peppers – June 5, 2008
We gave up on the bell peppers and Brussels sprouts starts that we transplanted. Charmaine picked up these new bell peppers starts from the store and planted them this week.

Corn Row 1 – June 5, 2008
We now have 4 rows of corn planted, with two rows sprouted. This first row is looking really good… almost as good as the weeds behind it!

Pole Beans – June 5, 2008
The pole beans aren’t doing as well as I would like. They’ve been slow starting and I question if some of them will ever pop up. And one of these days I’m going to have to build something for them to climb.

Cucumbers – June 5, 2008
We’re going to have a lot of cucumbers this year. We have this large row of them, plus a second row of Lemon Cucumbers, plus 3 hills of cucumbers up by the house. We didn’t plan to have so many, but the pack of seeds went a long way!

Beets – June 5, 2008
I haven’t had beets since we grew them when I was growing up. I wasn’t particularly fond of them back then, but I’m giving them another chance.

Turnips – June 5, 2008
As far as I remember, I haven’t ever had turnips. With this many of them growing, I really hope I like them.

Squash Hill – June 5, 2008
We decided to plant squash and pumpkin plants all over the yard. Most of these places don’t have the highest quality soil. Here’s one such area. I’m amazed that the squash was able to sprout through this hill that has basically turned into cement.

Pumpkin Hills – June 5, 2008
Last week I was getting worried that all the things we planted outside of our vegetable garden area (the good soil) were not going to grow. But we had a really nice storm this week and now we have sprouts coming out of all 7 pumpkin hills in this shot. We’re going to have a lot of pumpkins this year.

Jack-Be-Little Hills – June 5, 2008
Here is another non-traditional area to be planting vegetables, where we’re growing Jack-Be-Little pumpkins. They are supposed to be these super tiny (useless in my mind) pumpkins. They’ve sprouted now, so we’ll see how it goes.

I thought it may be interesting to take some photos along the way. We took these May 29, 2008. That’s about 2 weeks after we did the initial planting. As you can see, not much has happened yet.

Garden West

Garden East

Pole Beans

Corn – Row 1

Pumpkin Hills