Garden Update #3

This summer, whenever I’m in town on Sunday I’m going to give you a peek into what’s happening in my garden. I admit, this is partly for me to keep a record of how the garden is doing, inspired by Farmgirl’s brilliant garden blog In My Kitchen Garden. Here’s what I found when I went out there in my robe this morning, camera in hand. School is finally out, so now I can start to actually take care of the garden. Right now there are weeds everywhere, and little chores that need to be done.

I didn’t plant green beans this year because last year I had such a hard time keeping them picked, but there are a couple of pretty healthy looking volunteer bean plants. Where they are now they will get buried by Brandywine tomato plants which I’m growing without cages this year, so I may try to transplant them.

The tomatoes I planted as an experiment in one of my flower beds are doing well and need to be tied to the stake again a little higher up. (It’s rather unorthodox, but I use those plastic/wire twist ties to stake plants and it works well.)

Snails are still alive and well in the garden and don’t seem to mind being photographed. Now that I’m home every day I can put out some boards and see how many I can find every morning. I’m pretty ruthless about killing them.

Red Hot Pokers are starting to appear. I just wish they would last longer or bloom more than once!

Curly parsley seeds have finally sprouted and are peeking up. The saying is that parsley has to “go to the devil and back” before it sprouts, and it’s the slowest sprouting plant I’ve ever tried growing from seeds.

One tiny baby zucchini has appeared. I had to zoom in very close to get the photo so that’s why it’s a bit fuzzy. Many, many, many more to come. (Do you know why people in Utah lock their car doors in the summer when they go into church? It’s because if they don’t, when they come out the car will be full of zucchini. Ok, so that’s an old local joke, but it is true that zucchini grows very well here.)

One of the first garden tasks I need to get working on is thinning the arugula, which seems to like the new location on the west side of the house. I’m going to plant a second crop of arugula and more swiss chard to fill in the empty spots this week.