End of June Harvest

Just a quick post—I was away for the weekend and came home to a nice lot of ripe veggies:

That's one last snowpea, but paired with my very first yellow pear tomato. The bush is loaded with them, so I predict a lot more! I also picked six banana peppers, eighteen cherry tomatoes, and two medium sized tomatoes that will be good for slicing. And my black-eye peas are producing pea-pods too! I only saw two pods with peas big enough to pick today, and I've got to admit that I just ate them raw. The peas, I mean, not the pods, lol

How does YOUR garden grow?

Easter Garden Update

Hope everyone had a good holiday! I was off Friday, had to work Saturday, so it was a short weekend for me, but I did get a little gardening done. Here's my peas on 4.20.11, snow peas on the bottom and black-eye peas on the top. Too many people have been telling me that that's too many to grow in a windowbox.

Here's the same peas 4 days later, to me that seems like a HUGE difference in size of the leaves. I love watching them grow, lol. The snowpeas are vines, and I'll put up a cage for them to grow on, I'm not worried about them. But yeah, I had to agree, the black-eye peas being bushes, they were probably going to quickly outgrow the planter.

So I bought ONE more container, a cheap dishpan from the dollar store, punched some holes in the bottom—to be honest, I cracked a big split in the bottom when I went to punch the holes. I guess I was either too enthusiastic or the dishpan was really cheap! Anyway, I transplanted three of the black-eye pea bushes in there, and put another in the wading pool, in an empty spot next to the cauliflower.

Here's my Husky Red Cherry tomato plant. It gets blog space because it has the most blooms. ;)

I don't know if the recent cool nights we've had (chilly, but all above freezing) will mean these blooms will set fruit or not. Have to wait and see!

And last, the picture above is the current state of the cantaloupe. I know four plants per big container may be too much, but I can always hack one out later, right? Perhaps eliminate the smallest one, or the one with no cantaloupes on it? But I saw online where I can get a trellis to train the vines on, then hang the cantaloupes from the trellis in net bags or pantyhose sections, and that keeps them off the ground, too. Supposedly less chance of mildew or mold.

It's snowpeas and squash!

I was so surprised to go out and look at my garden and discover that I don't just have foliage, I have veggies! First, here's my snowpeas - I picked the one in the middle and I'm going to eat it right now:

*crunching noises*

Yup, mighty good! The other two I plan on leaving until tomorrow night's salad, let them get just a bit longer.


And squash! Cute little ones, but still, more than I got last summer:


These are doubly precious to me since there's so many of them - I guess it's the difference between regular dirt and planting in Miracle Gro potting soil.


Here's the biggest. Still smaller than my little finger, but bigger than the others:


The grape tomato bush is full of blooms and little tomatoes too - want to play dot-to-dot with teeny tomatoes? Click on the picture to enlarge, lol


And there's peppers on both plants now. I'll put this last so you can easily compare it to the picture taken a week ago ... look how my pepper is growing!

Rainbows and Tomatoes

We had quite a storm come thru Memphis this past weekend. I was without power for two days, and there are some 30,000 folks in the city who still don't have any. I took these photos immediately after the storm:


It was just before the sun went down, and there were still some pretty dark clouds in the sky. It was a lot prettier in person, really. ;)


And here's what I picked tonight from my little container garden:


I was going to save the snow peas to have in my salad, but *blushes* I crunched them raw while I was uploading the photos. Five to seven snowpeas each night seems to be my average, so it takes 3 to 4 days of resisting the temptation to gobble them up fresh in order to be able to save enough to cook. I just ate that reddest cherry tomato too... lol The other red one on the right, from the early girl plant, WILL make it to the salad tonight. :) The two bigger ones in the back, still orange, are from the better boy plant.

Garden Update for Beginning of June

I'm baaaack. ;) and wow, am I glad to have internet at home again. On the right in the picture below, my new modem. Now to catch you up with my garden! This is my first little crop. One tomato (between ping pong ball and tennis ball size) and eleven snow peas, on top of that snack sized baggie there. I'm really trying to save them till I have enough to stir fry, but it's hard! I like them raw too.


Here's the tomatoes still on the vine, another Early Girl just starting to get orange. The Better Boy tomatoes are in the foreground, but I think they have some growing to do still.


And here's the status of the crookneck squash. The kitty litter trick has worked, and no more gobbled blooms.


Last, my snow peas. I almost wish I'd planted more of these, instead of just 20 plants, they're really delectable. I've eaten only four of them, so far. But the package directions say they don't do too well in the heat of the summer. Instead, I'll wait till August and put in a new crop for fall.



Anyone out there know when the squash blooms open? I'm worried that with fewer bees, I'm going to have more of a crop if I go pollinate with a q-tip. But every time I've been out there, the blooms are twisted shut. Healthy looking, but closed.

Snow Pea update

My snowpeas have their first bloom. :) You can see one cherry tomato on the bush behind it, if you look close.


My banana pepper plant is producing more leaves. getting bushier and greening out, but nothing exciting:


The squash didn't like the transplant to the pool. Think I must have broken some roots? Some of the leaves turned yellow, but now they are finally producing more green leaves, so I didn't kill all of them off. If you look at this pic, then scroll down to see the first squash-pool pic, there's not much difference in the size.


But you can see the double leaves of the 4 new squash I planted when I transplanted the older ones to the pool, right there in the middle. They look nice and healthy, at least! End of this coming week, first of June, I'll plant 4 more, I think.

Letters and Growing things

Free pieced letters anyone? I'm in the midst of making a new header for my blog, and who knows, it may be a small wall hanging when I get done. Many thanks to Tonya of Lazy Gal Quilting for all the tutorials on the letter making. Jane will be added under the Forest, with the J starting right below the high spot under the OR in Forest. I'm worried that the S looks too big, what do you think?


I've also promised Tonya that I'd do a SNARL for her Halloween letter quilt she's making, and I have the fabric picked for it, and some definite ideas, but you won't see it here until I've sent it to her. :)

And then, because my last post had no pictures, I have to make up for it by adding a couple of garden pictures. Here's my whole setup... 5 containers and two window boxes, out on the washed pebble slab that serves as my patio.


And a closeup of the snow peas. Everything's really green with all the rain we've had for the last 4 days, and weathermen predict 2 more cloudy, rainy days here in Memphis before the sun comes out.

Veggies and Tomatoes

Anyone ready for a status update on my tomatoes? Here's the Early Girl. I read a couple of reviews online after I bought this one, that said the tomatoes were early, but not as good as the tomatoes from plants that ripened a couple of weeks later. If I'd known that, I may have gotten something else, flavor is the most important reason I am growing my own.


Blooms on my Cherry tomato plant! Last year I got Husky Cherry Red, and enjoyed them very much, we'll see what difference there is between the two. I almost got a grape tomato plant too, I can buy a container of those at the store and eat almost the whole pint in one sitting. Maybe next year.


Here's the Better Boy, and I've heard only good reviews about this one. I'm actually thinking, if they all have blooms right now, don't you suppose all three of these plants will end up having tomatoes at the same time?


And I posted this one last, so you could easily see the difference between the previous week and this week - what a difference only a few days makes on my snow peas! A trellis that I bought for the peas is around the front of the house, holding up my peony bush. Those blooms get so huge that the flowers usually get too heavy for the stalks and arc down till they touch the ground. Now, watching these grow so fast, I'm hoping their blooming time will end before my snowpeas get tall enough to need the support!

Veggies and Flowers

Well, ok, they're not veggies quite YET... :)

But these will be my snowpeas:

And these the crookneck squash:


This is what Toby was watching from the front window, some yellow iris I planted ten years ago. I love stuff that comes back year after year that you don't have to keep planting, don't you?



As for my three tomato plants, the Early Girl has big blooms, the Better Boy has smaller blooms, and the Cherry tomato nothing yet, but it's still early. I'll try to get pictures of them later this weekend.

Are any of you planting container gardens?

Container Gardening Again

Well, here I go again - pictures of my little excuse for a garden. I enjoyed growing three tomato plants last year, so THIS year, I'm doubling the size of the garden, adding several more containers.

I'm trying some snow peas in window boxes. I saw online where it's supposed to work... :) When they get big enough, I have a trellis thing I'm going to put between the boxes, for the peas to climb. The package says you can usually get two crops, start one in Spring, and start one in late Summer.


I'm also going to try a couple of containers of crookneck squash - I know there's not much dirt in here, after they come up, I'll add some more - I may even move them to something bigger, like a kiddie plastic wading pool with some holes drilled for drainage.


Here's the three tomatoes I decided on. An Early Girl, this one already has teeny blooms about to open:


A Sweet Cherry Red. There were two plants in the same pot, but they were planted so close together that I hesitated trying to separate them, I was afraid I'd tear up the roots for both. If it gets to be too much for the container, I may have to cut the smaller one out later.


And last, a Better Boy. They all look a little short now, but the instructions on the pot said to plant them deep, so I did.


And just for the regular readers of my blog... remember when I put the whole raw egg under all my tomato plants last year? When I dug out the old dirt from the pots this year, I was especially attentive to watch and see how much of the egg was left, and what had happened to it. All three eggs were flattened, you could see grayish bits of shell in almost a deflated water-balloon shape. None of the three eggs were surrounded by especially dense concentrations of root. I didn't put eggs in the containers this year, so I'll see if there will be a difference.