The 7′ of swiss chard has been producing very well.  I probably get 3 dozen leaves per week.  Beans and peas took me by surprise yesterday.  I wasn’t watching them very closely and now found about a dozen beans and a dozen pea pods ready for picking.  Plenty of flowers on the cucumbers now, so hopefully that will amount to something too.

My dad and I took two tree stumps out of my yard last weekend so Connor and I put the sawdust/chips around the plants this past week.  It looks real nice, but there wasn’t quite enough to cover everything.

I staked the pea trellis today to make it a little more sturdy.  It was getting pretty heavy and blowing all over the place in the wind.  Note to self:  planting a row of peas and a row of pea pods right next to each other and letting them climb the same trellis is a bad idea.  You can’t tell which pods are pods and which ones will be peas.  I tagged all of the pod plants today with a little string so I can tell the difference.  Next year if I plant both again I will put the pods at one end of the trellis and the peas at the other.

That’s all for now.  I’ll get some more pictures up soon.

It’s been a couple weeks since my last update and I got a request for more pictures, so here you go.

It’s been a very productive couple of weeks.  Nearly everything is in bloom.  I have more lettuce than I know what to do with, even after distributing some to the neighbors.  My corn (I’m told) is farther along than the farmers’.  ”Knee-high by the 4th of July…”, but mine is mid-thigh.  Okay, no more rhyming, I mean it… (anybody?)

I finally got a good number of nice-size radishes.  I noticed a couple weeks ago that a lot of them had red root up above ground level and were pretty much just growing long and skinny.  So I piled more dirt on them and that seemed to do the trick.  They’re all plumping up now.  Live and learn.

I’m really impressed with the tomatoes.  They’re a little bit behind my parents’ (that they bought from a greenhouse), but not a lot.

Here’s the two half-rows of beans:

Full row of carrots with radishes on the left and onions on the right:

Full row of corn:

I really love my wall of peas.  This is two half-rows with the string trellis down the middle:

On the mounds from left to right — squash, zucchini, pumpkin:

Finally, the full row of potatoes:

That’s not everything, I guess I left out the beets, lettuce, cucumbers, and watermelon.  I’ll get those next time.

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Well, we did it.  The kids and I spent 5 or 6 hours in the garden this weekend, cleaning up the weeds that grew like a jungle while we were in Florida for two weeks.  We thinned everything, set up the tomato cages and the pea trellis.  Still a little work to do this week, but we worked really hard.  Grow, baby, grow!

I harvested a ton of lettuce on Saturday and a couple of the radishes.

I also did another pesticide application on Saturday.  The bugs had done a pretty good number on the beans and squashes.  Everything else seemed okay.  One interesting observation I made on Saturday was that the weeds were full of holes in the leaves, while my plants, for the most part, were untouched.  I think the reason was that before we left for Florida, I had cleaned up all the weeds and applied the pesticide.  So any new weeds that came up while we were gone didn’t have the pesticide, and were fair game for the bugs.  That makes me really glad I applied it before I left.

Here, compare this picture to the one from Friday:

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We just got back from two weeks in Florida.  Apparently, Wisconsin got some rain while we were gone.  I guess my dad made it over to water a couple times, too.  There was definitely a jungle waiting for me when I got back.  This is going to take me all weekend to clean up!

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