Early Summer Garden Tour

Here's the garden plan which has helped me tremendously. No more impulse buys or super-crowded beds. Well, almost.

I hope this is as much a treat for you as it is for me! (GARDENERD ALERT.) I was so excited to get home to the garden last night and take photos, because I knew it was finally time to show everyone how the plants are doing.

They're alive. Which is fan-TAS-tic. And many of them are blooming!

You may notice a few strange things, like white dust everywhere and random logs in the garden beds. These are attempts at keeping pests at bay. The white dust is both DT (diatomaceous earth) and BT (bacillus thuringiensis), which are organic gardening bug deterrents and seem to be working for now, knock on wood! The logs are an effort to keep the cats at bay—they've been especially pesky in that one bed, since I don't have enough pine straw down to deter them. They love to dig in the beds at night. It aggravates me to no end. These are not our cats, mind you, they're cats that live near us. I've also sprinkled ground cinnamon in all the beds to further deter the kitties. Mildly effective as far as I can tell. It seems the best way to keep them out is to crowd them out.

While I tried to plant all of this from seed, many of my attempts didn't work. So from seed, we have cantaloupe, watermelon, pole beans, edamame (impulse buy, when I found out it was too hot for snap peas!), butternut squash, and yellow straightneck squash. The cucumbers, tomatillos, tomatoes, zucchini, scallop squash, and all the peppers are transplants.

Without further ado... the early summer garden!

And here it is in reality. Don't mind the overgrown grass, that's this weekend's project.

The first tomatoes on the vine—a cherry tomato heirloom variety.

Look how big they've gotten! See the comparison from a few weeks ago here.

A squash blossom early this morning.

Zucchini plants are about to start producing. But see the base of the stem? I'm concerned.  

The tomatillos are getting so big and are blooming like crazy! 

Tomato varieties: Purple Cherokee (3), Black Krim (1), Striped German (1), Roma (1),  Grape (1), Black Cherry (3).

The heirloom variety Purple Cherokee is doing really well so far!

Fin loves hanging out in the garden. Just last night, she stomped on a squash plant to get to a squirrel.

"And Finley, what do you think of vegetables?"

I planted edamame underneath the cucumber trellises; this is a first for me. Fingers crossed!

Look closely at exhibit B: this is a chicken-sized crater, aka proof that the chicken made it into our yard. And there used to be a cantaloupe plant there.

The Original bed, with the cucumbers (almost ready to grow up their trellises), edamame, and the last of the kale.

The trellises turned out so lovely. Pole beans will grow up (heirloom varieties in purple and green) on this side, and the butternut squash are on the other side (squash and beans are companion plants). Edamame take up the front row (which is the only place I squeezed in more plants than I'd planned to).