Busy, Busy

We had lots and lots of rain last week, which was wonderful. My last okra plant lost it's ongoing battle for life. I've been picking broccoli florets about every other day. I'm also eating about one radish and one sugarsnap pea a day. Some of the tomatoes are looking like they've caught a disease, I snapped off some yellow and brown leaves this morning hoping it - whatever IT is - doesn't spread to all of the plants. My beets are getting huge, as is just about everything. Here's some pictures I took over this past weekend - or maybe it was the weekend before?


I love, love Tahitian Bridal Veil and can't wait for this plant to really start going nuts! We don't have many hanging hooks outside so I got creative and hung one of our wind chimes from the bottom of the plant. These particular wind chimes were a present from mom-in-law from a recent trip to Texas.


Here are the peas!

More Blossoms

My early variety, Swallow, of eggplant is already starting to blossom. I can hardly wait for the beautiful purple fruits!


I've been munching on the broccoli...


I already have some fruits on my Yellow Pear tomato plant. I tried taking some pictures this morning but they were too blurry, another day...

First Harvest

This past weekend I finally cut off the big head of broccoli since it looked like it was going to start flowering any day now. It was so delicious fresh from the garden, almost sweet.


The beets I planted from seed, on two different occasions, are coming up strong and happy.


I was so excited yesterday when I saw the first (yellow) squash blossom.


I think I've talked a little bit about the back plot we started. Next to the garage Jim had a makeshift compost bin and when we got the new compost bin this Spring he disassembled that old one. He spread out all the compost that was in there and we had this whole area in front of the new bin that was not being used...and, quite likely, has some very healthy and fertile soil. We weren't sure how much sun the area got and how well anything would grow back there so we didn't want to invest too much time or money in that plot. We planted, by seed, a couple different varieties of sunflowers and three rows of sweet corn. We also put in a couple of the pepper plants that Jim's sister gave us. The sunflowers started popping last week and the corn started coming up this weekend. A few of the sunflower cotyledons have been snipped off by animals, but it looks as if we'll have a fabulous crop of sunflowers this fall.


The picture I took of the rose bush last week didn't do it justice, so I went in for a close-up this time...


And I put in some arugula yesterday, too. One more plant to add to the list!