Garden Progress

While friends and family in the South are already enjoying their juicy tomatoes and crunchy cucumbers, we are just getting cranked up here out West. We have harvested a few things already like radishes, green onions and small portions (pitifully small) of lettuce and spinach.

The white onion bulbs are not quite ready to be dug up, but we couldn't resist harvesting a couple that were beckoning to us.

Of my 40+ heirloom seedlings that I set out, I'm now down to about 20. They are really growing and spreading out and producing lots of flowers. I've been fairly diligent about picking the little sucker shoots that sprout between the stems, to encourage more nutrients and energy into the main stalks.

In this box below, we have cucumbers, a melon and several bell pepper plants, mixed in with some flowers and basil. I also have more basil planted in my tomato boxes. You can never have too much basil, can you?

Here we have two eggplants with Neal's long beans in the background. His original long bean seedlings that we started indoors bit the dust after we transplanted them. He planted more seeds directly in the ground, but I'm afraid we're not going to have a long enough growing season for them to produce. One thing we do have a lot of in this bed is weeds. Weeds have been easy to control in my square foot garden boxes, but in this bed they are rampant and we've lost control. Sigh.

Anyone ready for some homemade salsa? My pot of cilantro patiently waits for the tomatoes to grow so that it and our onions can marry into some yummy salsas!

When I lived in Louisiana, in prime gardening territory, I wasn't much interested in being a gardener. Now, here I am in the wild, wild West itching to become self sufficient and grow gobs of food. It's a good thing we're not relying on my gardening efforts for income and total sustenance. We would be awfully broke and starving.