July 18, 2009

The garden is looking pretty good considering it has been 108-115 degrees out on a consistent basis. The new sunflowers, pumpkins and watermelon seeds we planted are doing excellent. We have various types of lettuce seeds that we are planning to put where to skewers are. The spaghetti squash and cucumbers are growing like crazy, but we don't think they are getting pollinated. They haven’t produced anything yet. The corn is pretty much through. It just can't handle the heat. We are still getting tomatoes although they have slowed down. I agree with the plants though. Who wants to live in this heat!!!!

Because of the extreme heat, we have cleverly put up this trellis between a couple of chairs to help block and diffuse the direct sun rays. It seems to be working. Everything has looked better since it went up.

The palm tree continues to grow and it's got us a little worried. It is pushing up the sidewalk around it. Either we cut the sidewalk so it's narrower, or we cut down the tree. I'd hate to see it go, it's so pretty, it's just gotten too big for it's little area.

Stay cool.

Baby Corn

Well, it's not supposed to be baby corn, but it sure didn't grown very big...
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Tomatoes and Onions!

June 26, 2009

Below - We dug up all of the onions so we could plant the pumpkins and watermelon in it's place. These guys were done growing anyway. They are small, but the flavor is great!

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Summer is here...

The worst part of summer has officially hit... my car thermometer actually read 115 degrees over the weekend and our little garden is feeling it. Our corn is becoming dry and yellow. We have decided that it is too cramped and too close to the retaining wall. All the heat is radiating off that wall and killing the corn. We had to yank out a couple of stalks, but the others are still hanging in. We dug up all the onions a little while ago. James shared them with some friends at work, but we still have quite a few. They are small, but the flavor is great! In their place we have planted pumpkins (planted on June 30) and the sprouted after just two days!

June 14, 2009

Check out that corn!!!! It's taller than the wall!!

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We've even got little stalks of corn growing.

A bird's eye view of the ground crawlers.

We picked this pepper last week, and didn't even know we had one of these plants.

We thought it was a bell pepper plant.

June 1, 2009

It's been a while since I gave a thorough update on the garden...

We get about 5-8 tomatoes a day and they are so yummy...

Everything is so green and doing really well, with the exception of the peas. Both the snow peas and the regular peas took a trip to the compost pile a little while ago because they were totally dead. The corn is growing like crazy. There are cucumber plants back between the corn and the tomatoes that have now attached themselves to the corn and are growing up right along with it. It's weird how the cucumbers throw out these little curly arms and grab onto what ever it's next to. The spaghetti squash does the same thing, so there's a tangled mess of cucumber and squash up in the front.

These are what the onion seeds do when you don't pick them. It's beautiful!!

The spaghetti squash was a slow starter, but now it's really taken off...

The Corn is developing "tassels". These are what pollinate the plant so corn will grow... I think... that's what James says anyway.

May 25, 2009

May 21, 2009

Today we cooked the first "meal" from our garden... Garlic Bok Choy...

We spent all this time and energy growing one head of bok choy, only to go to the store the next day and find the same thing for 69 cents. What's wrong with this??

I've never cooked Bok Choy before, but it was DELICIOUS!

May 12, 2009... The garden gets a haircut.

Today we gave the tomatoes a haircut. There were so many leaves that the water could barley get through to the dirt. James says we don't really need those anyway, they just drink the water. We also have strings going over them to support them and hold them up.

Look at all the tomatoes we found under those leaves!

This is our first harvest and it is very exciting.

May 10, 2009... Another update.

On May 10...

We forgot to water one day and look what happened...

it's ok, the dill is fine. We were just testing it's survival skills.

We also found a surprise... A yellow lilly growing by the palm tree...

I didn't even know we had lillies!

May 2, 2009... The Garden update.

It's been a while, so I'm blogging in retrospect...

These are the seeds that form on the top of the onions. When it bursts seeds are spread everywhere. We picked them like this so we could dry them out and plant them next year.

The onions are still pretty little. We had to pull some because they are so close together and don't have room to grow.

Saturday April 25, 2009

Onions

There's not too much to report. Things are growing niceley. We stirred up the dirt today to get some air to the roots. The tomato plants were getting a little heavy, so we put in some stakes and string to help hold them up.

We also moved the strawberries to the top of some plaster pillars that we had. It looks very nice.

The Snow peas are growing like crazy!

An the regular peas are doing well

Now that the tomatoes are supported the corn should get more sun.

This is a blossom from the spaghetti squash.