Growing!

Today we enjoyed our first salad from our garden. I cut black seeded simpson and a wild lettuce mix to go along side nice thick t-bones for Father’s Day.

We had family over for the day and so I walked them around the property showing them our garden’s progress…

We have started to cage up the blueberries, aronia and autumn olives. The deer obviously have ignored my cease and desist letter. My autumn olive is really doing well since treating it with an acidic fertilizer. If a deer gets it…well, let’s just get those cages up. For the deer’s sake.

The roses and strawberries are still doing well. Ray and I tried the yellow strawberries today and can’t wait to get more of those pineapple flavored berries. YUM! I battled it out with the soaker hose on the ground and finally got it twined around most of the plants. I just need to cover over with mulch. I’m a little afraid that if I touch it again, it will coil back up and I will have to start all over.

The bamboo is not thriving as much as we’d hoped…or, at all. We are going to try amending the soil with sulphur to see if that helps green it up.

My grapes! They are doing so well and have already grown a good six inches higher since we planted them.

I remember how fast the hops we planted in Michigan grew but these two are putting our Michigan hops to shame.

The last of the peppers that I started from seed getting ready to go in the ground.

Most of the tomato starts I bought have doubled in size and my heirloom plant gets bigger by the day.

My kitchen garden, complete with cilantro, dill, chard, lettuce, spinach, parsley, basil, thyme, oregano and tomatoes. The black is a flat soaker hose I am testing out…much more cooperative than the traditional hose.

Peas! Out of control!

My future dill pickles.

This is our compost pile and what, you may wonder, is the squash plant doing there? It grew from squash seeds we had composted. There are also a few volunteer tomatoes. Crazy!

Pole beans…reaching for those strings!

To the untrained eye, this may look like a pile of broken boards and doors, but it is actually the makings of a sweet greenhouse. We have great aspirations to put it up this year. 🙂

It’s fun to see the garden every day, but it is almost more fun to see the garden after a day off. Those sneaky little plants shoot up when you aren’t looking!