Garden Harvest & Update June 18, 2012

I've been a bit neglectful on the blog the past couple of weeks. Life got in the way of blogging! The end of the school year meant of lot of activities going on here has kept us VERY busy!

The garden is moving along ahead of "typical" schedule. Our lack of winter & very warm spring (which killed off the majority of MI's fruit crop, sadly) has meant my garden is growing like CRAZY!

I've been harvesting spinach, strawberries and herbs for the past month, and dutifully weighing them. Our strawberries were awesome this year and I'm thinking maybe I should plant more for next year. The spinach has been great, although it has been bolting pretty quickly. I have managed to do a succession planting so we have had lots of young leaves for salads, burgers, etc.


Total harvest as of June 18: 9 pounds 1.5 ounces. Not too shabby considering last year at this time I'd harvested NOTHING.


Bryce & I harvested the first carrots of the year today:

That's 5.5 ounces of carrot-ness. I count the tops when I weigh them since I use them in bone broth =)  We enjoyed them and Bryce wants to pick MORE. Of course. I've tried to do a succession planting of carrots, too, so we'll see how that works out.

Here's what the garden looks like today:

It's really filling out! The melons (honeydew, cantaloupe, watermelon--grew 'em all from seed) are all flowering and vining out nicely. ALong the back fence are my snap peas. They got stunted by our 90+ degree May/June and they didn't really produce much at all. I've got cukes growing up under them.

A nice view of my brassicas. I have no idea what they all are. Well, I know which is the red cabbage, but not anything else. I neglected to write down what I put where. I figure when I start seeing broccoli or cauliflower or brussel sprouts or cabbage, I'll know what they are, right? I grew them all from seed with the exception of some of the broccoli, which came from a friend.

This bed holds watermelon & cantaloupe. I'm going to grow them on the rabbit fence and also up on the chain link fence which worked well last year. It'll mean I can grow more stuff in those empty squares. Last year I had 8 cantaloupe plants and 8 watermelon plants. This year it's 10 watermelons, 12 cantaloupe AND 8 honeydew plants. What can I saw, we love our melon around here.

We had huge bushes here at the corner of the deck; Brad & I ripped them out last Fall and replaced each of them with a pear tree. Click here to see what this used to look like. (and please don't mock me. I know those shrubs are HUGE!) This bed is a mix of annuals, perennials, and herbs and is new garden space for this year.

This is the other new pear tree, right next to the deck. I've planted some zinnias around the base of each tree to make sure I water the tree regularly. You can see my daisy is starting to open up, my Sweet William is about finished, and my Rose Campion is just starting. At the very end of the deck is a VERY happy dwarf Russian Sage. Ooo---behind that are my giant miscanthus. They are just now the height of the chain link fence, so four feet, and will grow 10+ feet tall by August. They are amazing!


This post linked to Daphne's Dandelions.