Doesn't a mid-summer garden just make your heart and mind happy? It does us. Just look at all the abundant growth! Path mulching is helping tremendously with time preservation and is allowing plants to grow where they want.
Lemon squash is doing well and providing us with many fruits.
Melons are growing!
Steve's sister passed along garden huckleberry seeds to us and the fruits are setting now. We will see how they taste in some jam. Anyone else grown these before?
Interplanted amongst the garden are many flowers for pollinators. We planted tropical milkweed, an annual in Ohio, for monarch caterpillars and the many other insects that love milkweed nectar. Much of our common milkweed is setting seed pods due to the drought, but the tropical is just getting ready to flower so it should be a nice late season nectar source.
The cosmos is absolutely hopping with pollinators....and it makes us happy. So sunshiny!
Chamomile and salvia....
Check out the vining on this melon...wow!
Steve found this okra in our seed catalog this past winter and thought we should grow it for its awesomeness. It is incredibly beautiful...
and incredibly large. Who knew? Not us, as you can see the tiny garbanzo plants struggling underneath the massive foliage.
When do you harvest the pods? Anyone have great recipes for lots of okra?!
Soybeans grown to eat as edamame are doing well. The field behind us is in corn this year so we don't have to worry about GMO contamination. Another week or two and the beans should be swollen enough to eat. YUM.
Hmmmm....where did the pathways go?
Butternut squash are coming on. We hope they have time to mature before squash vine borer damage is too extensive.
It's nice to linger out here....
More melons...
Sweet dumpling squash...
Delicata squash...
Beautiful looking winter squash though they will probably not have time to mature due to squash vine borer. These vines look pitiful. We picked squash bugs, we removed borer larvae, but alas it is as it always is...the vines are not happy. SO...
we did another planting to see if we can disconnect our plants from the lifecycle of these pests. If they don't have time to mature, we will start seed indoors next year and set the plants out later than normal and will also row cover and hand pollinate. This situation is hard. The squash vine borer moth is so cool and we cannot stand killing them so the only option is to try to work around them.
Lemon cucumbers are growing quickly now. Jennifer loves lemon cucumber sandwiches and is anxiously awaiting their ripening.
Steve's sister and brother-in-law shared strawberry plants with us this year so we now have 3 beds planted. The plants are a bit peaked with this heat & drought, but they are sending up new growth so that's a good sign.
Leeks anyone? We have an incredible abundance.
Onions are growing well this season. We made it an entire year without buying onions, tomatoes, peppers and potatoes because we had our own and stored them through the non-growing season. That is incredibly satisfying. We've harvested one bed of potatoes for eating now and the rest of the plants are dying back to be harvested for storage for this coming winter. Just this summer, we've removed ourselves from grocery garlic and expect to last till next growing season on that too.
Jalapenos anyone? Yesterdays haul....
Happy gardening!
