The Garden

You know I love my garden. Several times a day I walk around and check on everything – probably one of the most watched gardens around!

There’s one lettuce plant still living among the sweet potatoes. The lettuce will probably be bitter in a few days. We’ve been eating a few leaves off it for sandwiches. I have more lettuce growing inside under grow lights but this one is the last of our outside lettuce til cooler weather.

This year’s garlic is going to be the best I’ve had in years. I put the Sharpie in there to help judge the size of the garlic. I pull up a stalk every few days to make sure it’s ok with all the rain we’ve had. I’ll probably pull it all out by the end of next week.

They won’t all be huge. I pulled up what appeared to have the smallest stalk in the whole patch just to see how small it really is. It’s big enough to harvest. With the ground staying so wet, I surely don’t want the garlic to start to rot in the ground.

The funny thing is that every year potatoes pop up that were not planted. Several years ago I stopped putting potato peelings in the compost bin because they kept sprouting but I grow most of my potatoes in grow bags and at the end of the season, I dump the dirt into the compost bit and I’m guessing there’s always a baby potato or two that gets left in the dirt.

This is a brand new bed – first time I’ve used it. The only thing I planted are peas and look at that – a potato plant growing right in the middle of the peas!

In this bed, I plant garlic in the fall, pull it out in early June, add a bit of compost to the soil, and plant okra. Then I pull the okra out after the first frost, add a bit more compost and plant garlic again. And . . this year there’s a potato plant in the middle of the garlic!

I have 12 bags of potatoes.

I also planted a few potatoes in one of the above ground bins and they’re doing good too.

The tomatoes in this spot have zero shade. Last year they were scorching so I put shade cloth on them and that helped a lot. I went ahead and did the same this year.

Above you see a container of sunflowers.

This is the first one starting to bloom. They produce black oil seeds and the birds love them. I place the bags around the yard once they produce seeds. If they produce enough, I can save some of the seeds to put out during the winter for the birds.

And, we have raspberries! A couple of years ago we planted two new raspberry plants. We had about 12 that we had already planted but they aren’t producing well at all. We weren’t expecting the new raspberries, which are blue, to produce this year. Vince walked by a couple of days ago and saw them, came inside and got me to come see them and we’ve been feasting on raspberries. We’ve picked a couple of cups of them and there’s probably that many more. Vince said “I wish we had 100 plants of these!” I thought . . if they spread like most raspberries do, you may get your wish. They are so delicious!

I think the only thing missing from the pictures are the tomatoes, onions, peppers, horseradish, asparagus and rhubarb!

Yes, I love playing in the garden. By the end of September, I’ll be saying “I may not plant a garden next year” but it won’t be long til I’m ready to start seeds for the spring garden. I’ll probably always have a garden!