Tomato Jungle

Lesson for next year's garden?  Plant fewer tomato plants.  A personal garden doesn't need 15-16 tomato plants.  The plants are so large and heavy with fruit that one row of tomatoes is literally laying on top of the next row of tomato plants!  Any minute we're going to be knee deep in tomatoes.  S'okay.  We're not opposed to canning homemade marinara sauce.

Speaking of tomatoes, we harvested our first today.  A few of the Beam's Yellow pear and five Black from Tula!  So.  Darn.  Tasty.  The cucumbers keep coming and they're beauties.  Pickling several jars is on tomorrow's agenda.  The Georgia Flame and Poblano peppers look great and seem to grow at least an inch per day.  The celery, leeks, beets and romaine lettuce are all doing well, too.  Overall, we're pretty pleased with our first official vegetable garden.  A number of tweaks will be made next year but mainly to the soil and incorporating individual raised beds within the garden plot.

Enjoy the latest series of photos.

Butternut squash

We're loving all the dragonflies that visit our yard.

Naked Lady lilies

Poblano peppers

Sunny sunflower with not one, but two bees!

Chewer!

See the little nubs near the stem and on top of each leaf arm?  Those are very wee Brussels Sprouts!

Leeks

Sunflower Row.  It's hard to capture the size of the sunflower that's closest to the fence.  It's at least 10 feet tall!

Hot July

Everything seems to be growing several inches per day this month!  The cucumbers are harvesting like crazy.  What are supposed to be pickling cucumbers have been growing rapidly and being picked and eaten like standard cukes.  The skin is a tad bit tougher than a standard cucumber but that's not a bad thing.  Crunchy and delicious!

Hundreds of tomatoes hang from the limbs of the plants and at any moment we will be knee deep in Ponderosa, Black from Tula and Beam's Yellow pear tomatoes.  Homemade salsa isn't far behind either.

The backyard is blooming everywhere and looking lovely.  The pictures speak for themselves.

Baby ants?

Blowing out a rainbow.

Garden friend

Garlic Harvest!

A 22 bulb harvest.  The garlic now hangs in bunches in our basement to dry for a week or so.  It smells like a godzilla sized bulb of garlic is down there.  Delicious.

Happy Independence Day!