2013 Timeline - Let's play catch up, shall we?

So we know where we started, let's catch up a bit.  It's only mid-June, so this won't take too long. 

First Update: May 2013

We had some really hot days in May, and that's pretty good for my garden.  The positioning of the garden has turned out to be really beneficial this year.  It's in the narrow space between the house and the neighbor's concrete wall.  It's about 6x20, and it gets shade in the late afternoon, when it's so hot here.  It gets soft morning sun, and noonday sun. 

 

 

Here's the May rundown: 

5 tomato plants: yellow, early girl, beefsteak, mortgage lifter and one other that I can't find the tag for, so I don't remember. 

Pole beans: 5 pots, trellised with string and wooden poles.

Berries: 4 thornless blackberry and 3 raspberry

Bush beans:  about 8 plants in various containers. 

Strawberries: 6 plants in two round containers

 

I also had an herb pot (shown below when first planted), but I lost most of it early on.  I don't know why I ever bother growing cilantro.  It barely waited until I got it into the pot to die.  We have a fantastic farmers market here in town, and I can get 4 (sometimes 5) for a dollar, so why bother trying to grow it when it's so temperamental?  In that herb pot were 2 cilantro, a boxwood basil, a rosemary and a pineapple sage.  The boxwood basil also died.  I think it was the case of too much water and not enough sunlight.  I had it outside the back door and it gets too much shade there.  It started out looking like this...  I loved the little tipped pot in the middle.  I knew it would get overrun but I figured it was cute for now.  The nasturtiums were started from seed and I thought they would put a lovely pop of color in an otherwise green pot.  Well, it didn't go the way I'd planned at all.

 

 Within a couple of weeks, it looked like this.  Dead.  The rosemary and the pineapple sage endured with no problems.  The nasturtiums had to move to a higher point, because The Trampler decided that they were yummy.  There's a bean plant in the middle, I know.  It was temporary housing, and it's not like anything else was growing in there.

I knew this was going to need an overhaul, but I didn't get to it right away.  May got really busy, with Mother's Day, my parents moving, my son's graduation from high school, and the general chaos that is my life. 

The Guy's peppers were coming along nicely too.    We got several in May, and we enjoyed stuffing them and grilling them on the BBQ.  The Pipsqueak (pictured above) is all about gardening.  She loves to help her daddy out whenever he's weeding, cleaning or picking.  Maybe she's really all about Daddy, I'm not sure, but it sure seems like she likes it.  My other daughter, the Garden Diva, loves it.  I'll have to get some pictures of her in here later.

May was busy for my half of the garden, too, although I didn't get the harvests that he did.  Patience, grasshopper...  So, I had to be content with tinkering, weeding and hunting for caterpillars  (which is always a fun chore).  The Early Girl tomatoes gave me a few here and there, which is why they are called Early Girl, I suppose.  I had my first tomato by Mother's Day, and I gave it to my grandma, along with a handful of beans.  I thought it was kind of cool to present her my first harvest, since she is the inspiration for four generations of gardening in my family. 

I got bored with tinkering, so of course, I added to the garden.  New tenants!  The peas that I had planted along the back trellis weren't doing very well.  It was just too hot and sunny for them. Yanked 'em.   I planted some spaghetti squash, a crookneck squash and a half dozen Black Beauty zucchini squash into these pots, and they made themselves quite at home there.  Mom said that the pots were too small, and I've come to realize that she was very, very right...  but they are doing ok so I'm not going to disturb them.

These little blossoms are from the blackberry bushes.  They are so pretty.  I am eager to see what kind of harvest we are going to have.  These bushes are only two years old, so they are relatively young, and although they are healthy, well fed, and well watered, my understanding is that I can't expect too much from them this year.  They have a lot of maturing to do. 

I'm still hopeful.



This is what it's all about in the pepper garden. 

This was May 19th - -our first real pepper harvest.

We cut the tops off, take a piece of cheese wrapped

in pepperoni and stuff 'em.  Once they are stuffed they go in the rack and on the grill.  The Guy is the grill master.  These little red ones, the Fresno Chiles, are H-O-T!!!  He eats them like they are candy.  I usally eat one or two and that's it for me.  The green one is actually a Marconi Red, and it wasn't really ripe - hence the green color - but it got a sunburn spot and it was eat it or throw it away.  So we ate it too.  It was yummy. 

That's May in a nutshell - - Green thumb out.