Summer Garden Progress

I have to admit, it's been rather relaxing not running for my camera before I sit down for every meal...but I never have anything to share with you now either!  Instead, here are a few photos of our first attempt with a raised garden.  My sister has been asking to see pictures for weeks, so I thought I'd just post them here in case anyone else is interested. 

We have a small area on the side of the house that we had planted with a few tomato and basil plants in the past, but this summer we added four 4x4' raised beds by the driveway.  With the extra room, we thought we'd experiment a bit more this year with a wider range of plants.  In that spot next to the house, I wanted to plant mainly herbs, but there are also a couple of squash and zucchini plants...and one "squashini" plant from Indiana :)  Half of the herbs are on the other side of the squash in this photo.

The small square of dirt on the right of the photo is the little patch set aside for the kids to plant and "tend to" as they wish.  Unfortunately, those seeds have seen a LOT of raking, watering, and general "tending", and haven't turned out too well.  That is, except for the sunflower plant that started out as a single sunflower seed in a little pot of dirt from a friend's birthday party!  Who knew it was that easy to grow a sunflower?!

See that "weed" right in front of the sunflower?  I knew it was a huge weed, but they were happy to have something else growing, so we left it there.  Guess what?  We came home from two weeks in Indiana, and it's now huge with pretty purple flowers all over it!!  That pretty much demonstrates the extent of my gardening knowledge :)  Audrey's quite proud!

As for the raised beds, they have seriously surprised us!  I would plant seeds, and see all of these little sprouts not even a week later!  We feel really lucky that everything seems to have grown so easily.  For reference, here's a photo of the raised beds that I took towards the beginning of June:

Not even two weeks later, I took one before we left:

I swear, every day you could see a difference!  Around that time, we were getting at least a couple of zucchini and sqaush every day, but that has kind of died off now.  The green beans were all picked as soon as we got home.  This week we're finally to the point where we can go out every day and pick at least a handful of grape and golf ball-sized tomatoes.  If we can keep the squirrels and rabbits away long enough, we should have the big tomatoes ripening any day now.  We've had a few bell peppers, a couple of spaghetti squash, a little pumpkin...and Daddy "found" (the basil was hiding it!) a jalapeno pepper plant over the weekend that had three inch peppers all over it! 

The garden looks nothing like this now.  On Sunday, we pulled out all of the green bean plants (no longer producing, according to G&G) and the dead squash/zucchini leaves.  We retied the peppers, and stood up the couple of tomato plants that did really well and were falling over with so many green tomatoes!  After this heat wave is over, I may go out and plant a few new things in the free space.  

I've learned a number of lessons this summer that I'll take into next summer.  Most importantly, I'll give the tomato plants much more room next time...I had no idea they'd get so big!  I hope that our not-very-big garden proves to you that you can grow a lot in a little space!  Laura is already planning to start their own garden in a couple of 4x4' spaces that they have by their patio.  One of my favorite things that I saw this summer was a potted herb garden at a friend's house - I'm going to have to steal that idea for next year!  They had all of these pretty stone pots scattered all over their deck, sitting in groups and at varying levels.  There were different herbs everywhere!  So simple, yet so pretty.

Hope you're all having a wonderful summer!  Happy gardening...and eating!