Finally a garden!

Every year, Farmer Doc gets a little excited about our garden. It is always huge, and it always gets overrun by weeds. Last year, with the drought, the garden was a total loss. He spent a lot of time this spring getting the ground ready, tilling in more cattle manure (good thing we have plenty of that!), working the ground, and getting everything ready to plant. As always, we got a late start.

So, while I’m jealous that everyone has lots of garden-fresh produce right now and we don’t… everyone will be jealous of me in late September when we still have fresh off-the-vine tomatoes and no one else does!

Here’s our late garden… believe it or not, it is a lot smaller than it has been in the past!


We’re trying something new this year to deal with the weeds. The great thing about cattle manure is that is makes amazing fertilizer. The terrible thing about cattle manure is that is also grows weeds like it’s going out of style. We have a giant weed battle every year, and most years the weeds win. This year, we put cardboard down around most of the single plants, and we spread a thick layer of straw around the rest of the garden. So far, this is helping a ton!


The squash and zucchini plants are just starting to bloom. (I think there are eight of these. Eight. We’ll have zucchini coming out of our ears soon!)


We also planted some butternut squash and spaghetti squash. We tried these two years ago, and the squash bugs got ahead of us and ate everything. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep ahead of the bugs this year.

We have lots and lots of tomato plants. Most of them are just barely starting to flower. We did plant one cherry tomato plant (in my herb garden) and one yellow pear tomato plant. The yellow pear is taking off like crazy – it’s as tall as my waist and still going!


The bell peppers are actually headed somewhere already. I’m looking forward to these in some fresh salsa!


We planted watermelons, cantaloupes, and honeydew melons. I don’t remember which one this is.


We tried planting peas this year. We got them in late, so they didn’t come up very well, but the ones that are there are looking pretty good!


Sadie is helping the cucumbers climb their fence.


Here’s our first stand of green beans. We haven’t ever had green beans that looked this good, and Farmer Doc is pretty excited about this one!


Our sweet corn doesn’t look quite as good as the beans, but we’re still pretty happy with it so far this year.


And back here? A later planting of more green beans and sweet corn. And the little blue flags are where Farmer Doc planted pumpkin seeds. We’ll be growing jack-o-lantern pumpkins, crazy-huge pumpkins, and lots and lots of pie pumpkins. (There is really nothing better than a pumpkin pie made with real, from the garden pumpkin!)


In other news, my herb garden is doing much better than I thought it would! If I’m not careful, that cilantro is going to take over the world! I need to do a little research on how to harvest and store some of these herbs…


Our blackberries are also doing great this year. We’re going to have a bumper crop! The branches did have some trouble finding the fence this year, so everything is in a big clump on the ground this year. But that’s okay.


(Don’t worry, there’s a fence between that cow and the blackberries.)

These should be coming ripe any day now. Which means lots of homemade blackberry ice cream and blackberry cobbler this summer!


Do you have a garden this year? How is it coming along?