Ides of March

Above is the main garden bed.  By all accounts, this group of veggies is going wild.  The first tomatoes are growing and looking great.  A few little bean pods have made their presence known, the vanguard of many more to come.  The corn is looking strong.  Early on, some slugs were having their way with the sunflower leaves and the bean leaves.  They seem to have consumed their fill and moved on.  I’m hoping that the sunflower recovers.

The Pea Patch above.  This plot has been slower coming along as many of the first plants were choked off at the base and withered.  Some kind of blight got hold of them and right as they were transplanted.  The first little pea pods are coming along on the most mature plant. 

Pumpkin Patch.  This is the plot that we created this year and now have planted both little pumpkins and full size plants.  Both years that I have gardened, some type of plant simply gets planted in outlandish numbers.  Last year, it was 17 tomato plants.  By the end of the season, it was laughable how many plants there were.  If there had been time for the fruit to come in, we would have had enough tomatoes to kill a horse.  This year, it’s pumpkins–I have 13 pumpkin plants.  When I was seeding and transplanting these, it never occurred to me that this would be a lot of plants.  Now, I am beginning to wonder.  I just have a hard time plucking a good plant and sending it to its death.  But, I’m imagining this tangle of pumpkin plants once they all start to spreak out and do their thing.

The North 40.  This small patch next to the house contains some green beans and a pumpkin plant on each end.  We took a few odd-shaped bricks that were laying around to spruce things up a bit.  The  soil is pretty poor here and the amount of light is limited by the large pine tree in our yard so this plot is more of an experiment to see what will actually grow.

Well, there is a garden this year. After a late start due to us moving in June last year, I threw together some tomatoes, green beans, peas and a sickly green pepper plant. Since then, I had been composting like a madman, doing lots of reading and fantasizing about what could be this year. I even began preparing a new garden bed during some nice weather in April. All of this would soon be interrupted by a construction company that buried electric cable. They brought this bright yellow dream-wrecking backhoe and dug three of my garden beds right out. They were supposed to put things back the way they were, but instead placed sod where the bed across the sidewalk was. And, since these were fairly shoddily constructed raised beds, once they had been torn up there was hardly anything to put back in place. So, only one of the beds was put back and it was filled with some really crappy fill dirt full of rocks. Needless to say, this was a real dent in my hopes for gardening. Due to busyness and also the repressed anger at have my garden plundered, I shelved my gardening for a few months. Eventually the spirit caught me again and I got some seeds going for sweet corn, green beans, tomatoes, peas and even some pumpkins. I wanted to document the progress this year so i took pictures of the four beds.

This bed has the corn, beans, tomatoes, one dwarf sunflower and the frog standing guard.

These are the peas. I transplanted them after starting them in cups. I have since sewn some more seed in the rows. Peas have proven themselves to be pretty hearty in the past.

We just made this bed using a railroad tie and some bricks. This replaces some of the square footage lost when the cable was buried. This will either be pumpkins or more green beans.

This had a few plants in it last year. We’ve already spruced it up some with some bricks. Trying to make the place look a little better.

All of these pics were taken on June 20. I’ll post a late July update. Things have already grown quite a bit as we have had wonderful sunshine in the last week.