This was our lovely little garden a month ago. Everything was green and growing nicely, although I thought it was taking much too long for anything to ripen. Besides the two pots of herbs on the porch, we planted yellow summer squash, zucchini, pole beans, beefsteak tomatoes, roma tomatoes, bell peppers, and two little pickling cucumber plants. Remember that we planted two little cucumber plants. Sickly looking ones. And Steve transplanted about 6 cherry tomato plants that keep popping up out of the flower garden compost we got from Steve's parents last spring (thanks, Mom and Dad, for our endless supply of cherry tomatoes!)
We supported our bean shoots with these little bamboo rods we bought for a couple bucks at Home Depot:
Our pepper plants seemed to be growing really slowly, and those two little cucumber plants started sending out runners all over the garden bed, and around the little pepper plants:
...and then the cucumbers started jumping out of the garden altogether. No big deal, it would just be harder to weed-whack the grass around the raised beds:
...and besides, what cute little cukes:
And here we've come to the end of July. The garden is INSANE. It's no longer neat and cute. It's ALIVE and it's trying to tear down the deer fencing we've put around it. Here are some pictures I took tonight at 8:30pm (with a very high ISO) to show you how things are progressing:
(The darker bushes in the back are not part of the garden; they're part of the landscaping next to the driveway)
The cherry tomato plants grew into a tangled bush that's taller than I am. They grew so tall and so wide that the stakes buckled under the weight of the plants and the squash and zucchini plants directly next door were crushed and started to languish...no sunlight could get through! Steve had to hack away a good portion of the cherry tomatoes this week. The zucchini and squash haven't been producing very well, I think we've picked maybe 5 or 6 so far. Please give me more, garden, I want to make some zucchini bread!
The pole beans have some little white flowers but no beans yet. They have also caused the cool little bamboo tee-pee support we built to nearly topple over, so Steve had to run string from one side of the fence to the other to give the vines something to grow on. The vines are trying to leap the fence and grow all over the bushes planted on the other side. Where are the beans??:
And then there's the cucumbers. They are mutants and they're out to take over the world. They cover all available ground inside the fence, are climbing up the tomato and bean plants, and some vines have even managed to escape:
Besides making our garden look like a bit of a mess, they're producing the largest, fattest, funniest cucumbers I have ever seen! Some of them are longer than my forearm and probably a little thicker, too. They're twisted into weird shapes and look like green winter gourds. This garden is out of control! I have pounds and pounds of cucumbers, some tomatoes, but not much else. I feel like we really haven't saved much on produce, which was the point of planting the garden. What should we do differently next year? What to do with all the cucumbers?!
I canned some sweet pickle relish yesterday. Tomorrow I think I need to make some dill pickles. 10" long pickle spear, anyone?
