Saturday, June 21, 2008

Garden 2008: Summer Solstice update

Today is the first day of summer, so it is only fitting that I update exactly what is going on in my garden.

This week has been a bit hectic, but I did take time to look over the non-vegetable plants and noticed that the oleander in the back yard has put on blooms. This is a big event because this particular oleander came from a cutting I swiped off of a tree in Florida during a trip to Destin in 2001. The package I had it in had several cuttings from different colored oleanders, but by the time I got home, I couldn't remember which cutting was what color.


Mystery revealed after 7 years- it's pink! This must be a sign to bloom this color at this particular time, since pink is the color of breast cancer awareness (an update on my mom will be Monday when she finally decides what course she is going to take).

Now, the vegetables and fruit...
I picked this basket of tomatoes yesterday morning.
Here is a close-up of a Green Zebra.

The potatoes are not doing quite so well. I'm not sure, but they may be ready. The saddest of them all is the Purple Peruvian above.


The most prolific greenery would be the German Butterball.
But not too far behind would be the Austrian Crescent. They are supposed to be harvested 90 to 100 days after planting. I'm going to have to go back and look in this blog to see when I uploaded those pictures!


Here are two of my watermelons. I've found at least 6 globes on the vines, so I'll have to see exactly how many will actually grow to maturity. I'm trying the "no till" method on these since I really did not have a tiller available at the time of planting. I'm cutting the grass back away, but I've heard that using this method helps retain the moisture for the plants (I don't see how, but oh well!). The corn is not doing as well using this method. I'm going to clean out the grass around them either tomorrow or Monday to help them out.


I have three cantalope all about the size of my fist.

This extremely tall sunflower planted itself. I make it a habit never to cut down a sunflower that grows on it's own. There is such determination there.
This is that crazy tomato and bean garden as of today.


Finally I have several purple-ish tomatoes on the Cherokee Purple (about 7).
The Green Zebra is producing so many, I can't even count now how many are on this vine.


This is my one and only tomato on the Mortgage Lifter bush. It keeps producing flowers, I keep shaking the plant, but this is it so far.

Nope, there are no pictures of tomatoes on the Boxcar Willie, because there are no tomatoes on the bush at all. The thing grew straight up, about 6 feet, puts on flowers, but like the Mortgage Lifter, nothing. I'm debating on trimming it down to about 4 feet to see if it will have better luck then. It might kill it, but hey, like it's doing anything now except suck up water anyway.