Here's How Our Garden is Doing Today.

Sorry that I haven't posted for a little while, but we had a family crisis come up and it needed to get resolved. This time of year we aren't having many harvests, but there's plenty of activity in our garden just the same.

Remember those shallow "diggings" we had a problem with a few posts ago? We're attributing that to raccoons. A couple of nights after those holes appeared, our puppy Molly brought it to our attention that there were three raccoons raising a ruckus in our neighbor's tree, having probably climbed over the intertwined branches of the maple tree in our back yard to their pecan tree. It was apparently a raccoon love triangle. The way reality shows are popping up, it may be made into a new series!

No additional holes have appeared since then.

A big change in our garden is the addition of our Jersey Giant asparagus bed on April 29th in the west plot. I put it in the area I used to use as a turn around space for my large tiller. Since I have the small Mantis tiller I don't need to use that area for turning the big tiller around. It's twenty feet long with sixteen healthy asparagus roots properly positioned in a trench and covered up. I have enough space so that the row can expand to be five feet wide. As hoped for, the new shoots soon popped out and I covered them with soil blended with cured compost, filling the trench completely and then some, in order to have it shed some of the rain water they will get in order to prevent rotting.





Here are some pics of our Fortex green bean vines. Even with the alternating chilly nights and warm days, these seem to be doing well!

The tops of some of the vines are already reaching for the sky... a welcome sight!

Here are a couple of Park's Whopper tomatoes hidden in the vines.

Here are a couple of La Roma paste tomatoes shaping up nicely. Actually there are three now that the picture is larger.

Here is a shot looking down into one of the tomato cages I made from "field fencing". As you can see in the area surrounding the cage, with the family issue that came up I haven't had time to mini-till. That's going to take place this week!

Here are some absolutely delicious Tomatoberries. We grew these in a container in 2010 and from one plant, we harvested 342 tomatoes weighing in at 5.42 pounds. We bought what was supposed to be a Tomatoberry plant from a nursery center this past year, but it didn't even come close in appearance, taste or production. What a disappointment that was!

Here are six little Yellow Pear tomato plants in a half-barrel. They are delicious and contain lower acid than regular small tomatoes.

Here is a look at the heritage raspberries we have growing between the house and the concrete driveway. They're doing great!

Here are some sorrel plants my mom gave me three years ago. Winter or summer, they still produce.

This is some two year old horseradish growing in a half-barrel. It spread so much when it was in the ground that I put it in a barrel to control it!

Blueberries!

Here are some pictures showing the anticipated yield from our blueberries.

I can hardly wait!

Here are the seeds still on the butter crunch lettuce plants. They resemble dandelion seeds that blow away in a puff.

The grapes are forming even after the chilly nights! See the cold damage on the leaf below the center of the picture?

Seeds!

Here is a picture of the Swiss chard that has gone to seed and you can see the butter crunch lettuce plants in the left top corner. The green Swiss chard plant at the far right in the picture is fifty-three inches tall!

Here is a close-up of the celery plant that is flowering in preparation for developing its seeds.

Green Onions.

These are the green onions I bought at WalMart last year. After using the green scallions I planted the bulbs last spring. I picked scallions all year and this year it went to seed.

Beauregard Sweet Potato Slips

I read up on how to produce sweet potato slips and I decided to give this a try. These sweet potatoes came from North Carolina, and I found them here at a local family farm stand less than six miles from our house.

I must have just bought them at the right time. Ten hours after I put them in the water this growth appeared. It hasn't continued at that rate, however.


That does it for catching up on current garden activities at our house. I hope the warm weather continues to stick around and not confuse the vegetables with these cold snaps.

Thanks for visiting and I hope everyone is having great success with their gardens this year!

Have a wonderful vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK