Yet another rotten day so all I can do with the garden is tell you about it.
It's far enough into the season that I can start to contemplate my mistakes, and too far in for me to fix them.
Mistake one is that, despite being a vast improvement, the giant eight foot fence is insufficient for the pole beans. The only year I didn't run out of fence was a year I lived in a first floor apartment and they grew past the fence onto a second floor porch.
That said, we're starting to see baby beans already. It won't be long till harvesting becomes a chore and we get beans with every meal.
The beans and cukes are starting to form that wall of green.
I'm not much of a flower gardener, but veggie flowers have a beauty all their own - both in their appearance and in the anticipation of the harvest they promise.
Here's a cucumber flower; I picked the first small cuke this week. I need to pick them faster this year for pickle purposes.
Nothing says Iowa like a corn field, and my little patch is starting to look like one. I had a little bad luck with weather and was unable to weed right around sprouting time, so I lost a few plants to being buried in weeds and a couple more to my own stupidity ("oops, that wasn't a weed.") But I still should have plenty.
While I note my failures, I'm having better luck with a couple things. My okra's been eaten the last couple years, but I have several intact plants. I also have two watermelon plants growing; the trick is not to plant them next to the faster growing pumpkins.
Speaking of which...
The patch is looking quite sincere. Not to mention aggressive. I need to angle it a couple inches each day so it doesn't invade the zone of peppers, eggplants and tomatoes.
The peppers are an incomplete success. They're planted outside the fencing and some of them are getting nibbled. But the funny thing is, one will be chewed and its neighbor is untouched. (The two litters of baby bunnies seem to have avoided becoming owl food.)
The first eggplant is close to eating size. I'm waiting till the first 8 ball zucchini (basically a regular flavor zook only round) is bigger too. It's growing at a bad angle for photography.
There’s something magical about planting tiny tomato plants the second week in May, and they're taller than the cage in late June. In the background is the now-blooming bee balm. The reddish color also attracts hummingbirds. I didn't have the camera with me, and it would have been an uncooperative model anyway, but Thursday I got to watch a hummingbird for a couple minutes.
The saucy Roma tomatoes are doing well. I don't even remember or know how many kinds of maters I have; the volunteers from past years will be a surprise.
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