How are your gardens doing?

[arabella]

I am so excited! we have all sorts of baby tomatoes, yellow squash, jalapenos, bell peppers, and zucchini! We are already eating the boy choy and the basil. The delicata squash has some wee almost-flowers, as does the eggplant. The other squashes are growing nicely and I expect flowers soon. The watermelon is still pretty small, but looks healthy. The seeds from Figwit that went in late are behind the ones we started indoors, but totally growing!

I took some pictures but I am home with the slow internets so I can't upload right now. I feel kinda funny having basically a greenhouse (with gopher wire and netting instead of plastic or glass) on the front lawn*, but it's worth it to have all these fresh yummy vegetables steps away!

How are yours doing?! picture updates please!!!

*There is hardly any flat land at our house so the front yard, which had been terraced by previous owners, is really the best place for it. And since we live in the middle of Critterville, we had to do 360 degree protection from gophers, rabbits, deer and raccoons, hence the gopher wire and netting.

[midnightsky1686]

Mine's on a balcony and really only has plants that are alive (past a small tree and the rosemary, neither of which I've yet to kill) only because I just planted them.

Garden a week ago.

A couple days agowith new plants.
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[IrmaVep]

It's getting pretty cold round here, and we've had a few frosts now, so we're not eating much from the garden right now. But we do have spinach, brocoli, silverbeet, cabbages and bok choy quietly chugging along, and there's still herbs of course. Oh, and I think our first capsicum is ready, only about 5 months later than it should be!

I'm hoping for some nice weather this weekend: it's shortest day on Monday, so I need to get some garlic in, and I really should get the flower bulbs in too if we're to have colour at ground level in spring.

[Chiquita]

My garden is really showing the stress of already 100 degree weather, a little early even for South TX, and extended drought. So all cooler weather veggies are gone but we are deep in the middle of lots of tomatoes (picking them nearly every day), zukes which sometimes hide from me so I don't see them until they are HUGE, lots of peppers so we are giving them away, eggplant, and we even have cucumbers.

Best find in our garden - we have fruit on our papaya plant! The papayas are renegades from a friend's compost heap so they were free. Only the biggest has what looks like fruit, they are kind of tiny so I am not 100% sure right now. Oh, and a neighbor gave me extra cantaloup plants so we even have one of those getting big.

Usually my patience for gardening peters out in mid summer when the weather gets too hot, this year I am trying to be better about that despite the 100% and water restrictuons. I am starting to see some sort of bug on the tomatoes so heading to find an earth friendly insect soap later today.

[casiep]

We had swiss chard and zucchini from the garden last night for dinner! Other than the herbs they are the only things we've been able to harvest so far. But, the tomatoes and the sweet peppers are on the vine and ripening - can't wait!

[snoopy]

Our cilantro and mint are great! Carrots look to be doing pretty well, although they were planted next to the tomatoes which are now very tall and bushy and blocking the light to the carrots. There are all sorts of green tomatoes growing now, which is pretty exciting. And our peas are starting to get bigger, as well as our walla walla onions.

We have one strawberry plant, and there are still some flowers on it. No fruit yet, although our neighbors' strawberries have already started to bear fruit.

[arabella]

[casiep]

We started kind of late for this area....Mid to late April I think? We purchased them as plants. The zucchini is growing like crazy. The crookneck squash is a little slow but has a couple of tiny ones on it. We didn't do any seeds this year. This was our first go-around with the vegetable garden and I wasn't feeling 100 percent when we planted everything (it was right around the time of my last surgery) so it was all kind of rushed. Just throw stuff in the ground and see what sticks. I'm hoping to be more timely, do more planning, and work with seeds next year. But for now we're getting some stuff so that's good. Swiss chard is awesome because you can keep picking it and it keeps growing. We originally planted arugula with it and it flowered quickly and was done. We pulled it out and planted some lettuce which is doing so-so. We planted five tomato plants and one is HUGE, one is kinda big, and three had to be replanted (two kind of late, hope they grow). It's all a huge experiment at this point.

[neurochic]

My deck container garden is getting totally flooded - way too much rain lately, almost no sun. It's mostly herbs, though, so I hope it will be okay.

pics from a few weeks ago: tomatoes and other stuff.
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[DogsAreCool]

Ohh everyone's garden seems to be doing so well!

This is the first year (of the past 3) that our garden hasn't flourished as well as we had hoped. We have only one Roma tomato that survived but there are a ton of little guys on there. The cucumbers are are doing great, we have had at least 10 huge ones. We have a crazy mass of beans and our strawberry patch is flowering now for the second time this year (year 2, so we are starting to get bigger, tastier berries). We also have some sunflowers and a pink hibiscus that are doing really well.

Cucumbers & strawberries & the hibiscus!

[Chiquita]

I went to one of the local farmer's market a couple of days ago and bought a few yummy things and got great advice. A farmer heard a friend and I talking about zukes not doing well, she told us that we can pull up the current plants and replant and they will do better. Apparently the squash beetles become less of a problem later in the year, at least in this area, and she said she planted zukes about 3 times during the summer. That's great news since we eat lots of zukes.

Harvested this morning: a couple of ichiban eggplants, LOTS of cherry tomatoes and a couple of Romas, one largish zuke. We have lots of little cucumbers on the vine, another vendor said to keep an eye on them because once they start they only take a couple of days to mature. Spent $6 at the market and got more than my money's worth of advice.

[artichoke]

A couple of our tomato plants are up to my elbows! I don't really know how tall that is, but I'm 5'3" - my parents have one around 6 feet and a couple over 5. hmph. BUT we have tons of baby cherry and grape tomatoes - the best boy isn't flowering. Elsewhere, we have a baby eggplant and basil out the ears. The peppers are hanging in, but no flowers yet (do they flower?) and nothing on the zucchini or cantaloupe, but we just planted them a couple weeks ago. We found a random squash in the front yard (??) and tried to transplant it yesterday, but I don't know if it will take.

[neurochic]

This weekend I noticed I have little teeny-tiny baby green been pods! I don't even like green beans, but I'm happy that I haven't seemed to kill them!
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[caropop]

[SlipperyShade]

My garden is a bit haphazard this year - we expanded our plot to 11x11 feet, which was a significant growth in space. I've got several varieties of tomatoes (though none ready yet?), cucumbers (for pickling - I don't like cucumber), a LOT of varieties of peppers (bell, cayenne, chili), and beans. Up on the deck in pots I've got some garlic, more tomatoes (cherry - my brother planted too many seeds and gave us excess), and some radishes. I've also got a strawberry plant that is thriving (YAY) but already flowered and the squirrels ate the few berries I got...and I've got a blackberry bush that is getting a little out of control. I'm not sure how to care for it, so I'm just letting it grow like crazy.

There are tons of other things I wanted to get into the ground, but never did - mostly herbs and things, but corn and other tomato varieties (I'm trying so many to find my favorite, last year's variety was mealy and bleh). I also never got my spinach in - maybe in fall, as it's too hot now...
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