The Vegetables Are Growing Well In Our Garden.

With the warm days but cool nights, our garden continues to do well for us. The continuous warmth that we need to get the plants growing steadily hasn't quite gotten here yet. Nevertheless, things are growing nicely for us.


 

The tomatoberry plant is doing well. That one is almost ripe enough to pick! I can't wait for our first tomato of the year!

Half of the heritage red raspberries are growing very nicely. The other half has some type of issue and isn't growing nearly as fast, so I'm sending off a soil sample to the Cooperative Extension for an analysis to see what we need to do to get them going properly. Yesterday, our granddaughter Celie picked the first four red raspberries for this year from our garden. She really enjoyed them and we enjoyed watching her eat them up.

The yellow pear tomato plants are doing very well with good growth and many blossoms.

The sweet golden bell pepper seeds that my mom gave me from her seed collection from last year are very healthy looking. I was considering that I may have too many plants in this half-barrel, but I'm not sure if I want to disturb them to transplant a few. I'm thinking about that for awhile.

These are some of the feverfew flowers that grew from a root that mom gave me last year. The bees and butterflies really like them, so I hope they spread like wildfire!





The following are some pictures of some of my blueberry plants. All are doing very well, and it won't be long before I'll have to put up the bird netting to protect them.

Here are a couple of shots of the onion flowers in the process of developing seeds.

They sure are beautiful and look quite exotic.

The glenora seedless grapes continue to fill out even with the cool evenings. There are hardly many leaves on the vines, but these grapes sure seem to want to grow!






These are the black beauty eggplants we're growing this year. The plants aren't even a foot tall, but the development of the eggplants has begun.

The ruby red Swiss chard is still growing to produce seed for us. This particular stalk is five feet tall!

This is our asparagus bed. I just spread four inches of compost on top of it to keep the weeds down. The crowns were two years old already, so with this being their third year of existence, I'm hoping to have some asparagus next year. I admit that it is hard to plant something that takes so long to produce, but I know it will be worth the wait!

Beans, beans, beans...

We have nine rows of beans this year. Six rows of Fortex green beans, and three rows of willow leaf Lima beans, or baby butter beans.

This is my first attempt to grow willow leaf pole Lima beans. In the past years, I grew Henderson Baby Butter Beans, but each year I lost the majority of the crops to rot and bugs. This year I decided to try the pole version so the beans will stay off the ground and I'll be able to find them more easily.

Both types of bean are growing pretty good right now. I did have to resow about a third of the rows because the chilly night air returned, and I think that did them in. Thankfully, we're past that point now.

You can see all the blossoms on these Fortex bean vines. We'll have a good harvest this year. Last year I canned 94 quarts of green beans from my garden. Just think... that used to just be lawn that I mowed. I like using the area this way much, much better!

You can see that the vines for both the Fortex beans and the willow leaf pole beans are steadily reaching for the sky. Tomorrow morning I'll take the long vines and braid them into the fence material.

TOMATOES!

The tomato plants this year have quite an abundance of blossoms on them! I hope they all develop into beautiful tomatoes.

We're keeping our fingers crossed for a good crop.

I wanted to share some pictures of the tomatoes that are forming on the vines we have. They're really looking good!

This year we have plenty of tomato plants. We have 27 La Romas, 9 Park's Whoppers, 14 Celebrities and one tomatoberry. Fifty-one tomato plants in all.





Last but not least, in addition to the garden growing, Molly is also growing... quickly! She now weighs 39 pounds at just three and a half months old! What a smart, sweet puppy and great addition to our family! She chased her first squirrel the day before yesterday. YAY!

 Molly

That finishes up this garden update from our back yard organic vegetable garden. I hope you found it interesting, and I hope it encourages someone to start or expand their garden. Why not do it this year?

Have a wonderful vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK