Garden pics - ah ha!

Tried Blogger again this morning and it just wasn't being friendly with me uploading pics....odd. Decided to try Firefox (which I SHOULD use all the time), and while it didn't want to give me all the WYSIWYG edit icons to edit my previous post, I got them for creating a new one. Will try editing an existing post again later.

Annnnnyhow, back to the garden photos before I head out to the garden!

Here's a close up of the "pepper patch" - I don't have the list of all the varieties here on me right now. There's three to five plants of each variety, mostly sweet, plus some jalapenos and even Fooled You heatless jalapenos! The number of plants varies because some didn't survive long enough to make it out to the garden. Man, look at all the rocks. And all the little green spots in the ground? Weeds eager to pop up. Grrr...


A section of the looong stretch of beans. I really should do better about planning for succession plots with the beans!! Each year I think I'll do that, then I get so excited (!?) about planting everything that I just do a ton of beans and forget to leave empty space to put more in later. Maybe I'll toss some more in around the base of the okra in a week or two and see how that works out. I think these are the blue lake beans...


Freakish experiment of the year - I did a border of tomato plants around the back-half plot, figuring that'd give them better airflow and sunshine rather than doing rows, and then did two inside-rows of squash and pumpkins. Let's just admit it - I'm going to overcrowd the tomatoes ANYHOW, so what if I just stick to doing the overcrowding in one dimension? And hopefully they'll have gotten some major headway before the viney stuff builds up and takes over. Plus I HONESTLY intend to guide all those vine back to the center so they don't creep over into the neighbors' plots.

Problem - I'm getting gutsy and planting more tomatoes than ever before. I only have 9 of the heavy duty tomato cages dad taught me to build last year, and not enough stakes to accomodate the remaining tomato plants. I can definitely tell that caged tomatoes do better than non-caged. So I space out the use of the cages, will stake (and use overpriced storebought cages) between, and then as I did last year, I'll use twine between the heavy duty cages (at least at the higher levels) to support the tomatoes - that seemed to help trick them into thinking they each had their own cage.

So what you're seeing here is a close up of one side's caged tomatoes, the inside border of squash/pumpkins, and then the trench/walkway I dug. I did this to build up some of the soil for the viney stuff (cheating on the mounds), and also to funnel water down in case we have any major floods like a couple years ago. Another row of the viney stuff, and then the other outside row of tomatoes. Oh, and I capped off the end with five tomato plants.


More of a straight-on view of the same area. The wooden stakes you see are my heavy duty ones - I'll be turning those into teepees and/or the cucumber trellis today. They were there just to help make sure I didn't back into tomato plants, and to remind me not to plant TOO close to the tomatoes (ha!).

Between the various viney plants I tucked in the bok choy and nasturtiums I started from seed at home, plus today I figure I'll tuck in beet and turnip seeds. How long do those take to grow? Wonder if they'll be smothered by the viney stuff?

Ok, need to wrap it up here and head on out soon!