Summer gardening

It's summer and the garden is in full swing. Please ignore the mess on the driveway! We were in the middle of putting some additional supports in for the tomatoes when we took these. Yes, that doesn't explain the apple tree piece sitting there - tough!

We've almost completely finished up our harvest of berries for the year it seems. We've got a very few blackberries left, but the raspberries and strawberries are done. We didn't get nearly as many blackberries this year as last, but we can't complain as we have more than 3 gallons of raspberries frozen right now! And that's not counting what we picked and gave away or didn't pick while we were on vacation. When Megan gets back from CA (she's there with her mom currently), I'm going to make up some raspberry chocolate ice cream. I guess I just spoiled the surprise, so if you see this before you get back honey, just pretend you didn't! You might also notice the grapes in the background (okay, seriously, how could you miss them?). We might get some edible grapes off them even.

As you can see in the image above, we've got a few slightly healthy squash plants. Ugh. There are 4 mounds there and you can't even hope to see the 4th in this image as it's a pasta squash and not nearly as tall as the others. The tomatoes are off to the right here as are the various peppers (some of them hidden by the squash). We had ripe tomatoes on the 4th of July, but haven't had any more until today. I guess it wasn't hot or sunny enough?!?! Whatever, we'll have plenty this year, but not as many as last year. That's fine though as last year we were just overwhelmed with them. Apparently this year we chose to do that with squash. Off to the left of this image, is our row of beans. We have 2 kinds of bush beans and also some black beans - the bush beans are about ready to start being picked. We've already harvested all of our potatoes. For the first time ever, we're getting a really good carrot crop. Previously we've had very poor luck with them, from just getting the seeds to germinate to having the few that did grow reasonably. This year has been much more successful for some reason.



Here's our corn. We have two types growing here. One is a new hybrid and supposed to be the sweetest corn in the world. The other type is the same as we've grown successfully before (sugar something...).



Finally, the flower garden is growing well in the back. One problem we had was stuff seeding into our path (or growing really tall and falling into and blocking the path). We've put in a fence on the right-hand side of the path to keep the California poppy out of the way, but we clearly need more! The stuff in the path is particularly obnoxious this year because while we were gone in June, lots of stuff (non-weed even) came up in the path. This should be painfully obvious in the above image. Most of what's growing in the path is basil. Yes basil. I transplanted probably 6 plants when we returned but some of them were just too big to easily transplant elsewhere. And I'm not joking when I say that there were 20+ basil plants in the path even after transplanting. We've somewhat given up this year on getting it out and are just planning on having lots of pesto. This isn't bad as we have lots of garlic. I've used one garlic bulb from the garden (center tall things) and it was great - spicy and about the size of my fist. We'll get some more to overwinter again this fall as that seems to be really key.

Well, that's it for now. If anyone needs basil, beans, or (PLEASE someone) squash, let us know. Or just come take it from the garden. Seriously.