Gardens are Pretty

I meant to post these pictures with my post on Monday. But I forgot. So here they are.

For some reason this is the only tomato that’s doing well. It’s a lemondrop (cherry) tomato. For no apparent reason, the one next to it, which is the exact same type, planted at the exact same time, in the exact same soil… is not doing well.

We have roses.

Squash (zucchini).
The whole view:

This is the start of our three sisters garden:
I just planted corn in alternate mounds, and when that comes up, I’ll plant pole beans around the base of the corn plants. On the other mounds, I’ll be planting winter squash. The idea is that the corn gives support to the pole beans (which you would normally have to trellis), the beans, being legumes, fix nitrogen in the soil (which corn uses a lot of), and the squash shades the soil, keeping moisture in, and also keeping away bunnies, who don’t like how prickly the squash vines are. It’s in theory a Native American method, but considering that beans, corn, AND squash are all from South America, I’m not entirely sure which native americans were supposed to use it. At any rate, I’m in theory a little late planting the corn, but because its been so cold and wet I don’t think it will be that much of a problem. Corn won’t germinate unless the soil has warmed up.

Tomatoes. Still the same size they were when I transplanted them on May 1. That, I believe, is because of the cool nights we’ve been having.

Oh, my beautiful peas. You can see my struggling lettuce below- that’s the purple stuff.



Believe it or not, this is a vast improvement over what it looked like before.

I love this lettuce. It’s the one I talked about before- forellenschluss. Trout butt. Apparently it actually means “speckled trout back”.


I don’t know if you can tell, but that’s our dog in the background. He likes to watch us garden. And then wander off when we’re not paying attention.

The carrots I found among the weeds (after pulling many of the weeds away).

Clearly I wasn’t done weeding when this picture was taken (have since used my new, magical broadfork to turn all that over, which made weeding a million times easier).

Oh look! Spinach! Definitely didn’t find that among the weeds either. Please ignore the weeds in this picture.

Pretty.

This, apparently, is ragweed, my mortal enemy. It keeps trying to take over the garden. Fortunately I am pulling it out before it flowers and kills me (I’m momentously allergic). However, it looks like carrots when it first comes up, so sometimes I have trouble identifying it. You can tell the difference in that the new leaves on the bottom of the ragweed are rounded, and the carrots are long and thin, more like grass.