Time for another garden update!

The weather has been a mixed bag for us lately, but let me show you where we are and what has happened.

I hope to use the grass clippings to mulch the pumpkin plants as they grow.

First of all- the corn - it’s looking very decent.

I will be working on weeding the corn this week - both in the rows (the black plastic) and between the rows.

Here are all the rows I have - three double rows. Looking good. I need to fertilize it soon now.

They look like kind of a mess, but the corn growing in the plastic is doing well. Hopefully by the end of the week the weeds IN The plastic and between them will be gone. It’s a cycle, however, as they come back.

Almost all of the garden is set up with soaker hoses.I have two more arriving today (Tuesday) and should be ready to hook up. At that point, I should be able to just go around turning on hoses at the faucet and that’s all. I shouldn’t have to individually water anything. I’m hoping so anyway.

My beans didn’t come up very well, They are very spotty. I think I’ll pick up some more seeds and replant. They don’t take all that long to grow so there should be time. I’ll just plant them in with the ones I already have as they are so spotty. I tried to get a good photo but after weeding, I saw that I only had about 10-15 plants. I’ll replant. That’s a crazy bad germination rate.

If you follow the hose, there might be 6 bean plants along it. I guess it was just too cold when I planted. I’ll keep weeding and it will look nice.

Seriously - beans normally for me are easy to grow. I guess the ground was just too cold when I planted.

I have some pole beans here - they are coming along nicely.

Along the hose on the ground are planted some tall, long green beans. I need to get them going up a pole soon. They are still small but will probably grow fast.

Everywhere needs weeding and I’ll be trying to get an hour a day in just to keep on top of things.

I planted pumpkins all along the fence line - mostly the small Jack be Little ones and Sugar Sweet because I grew so many last year and the year before that my freezer is still FULL of pumpkin. So, I’m going to focus on decorative ones as they actually cost a lot here in the fall. I did plant some sugar sweet ones as well, which will be great for pies or cakes.

I then have some zucchini plants

Some sunflowers

Some hot peppers which I got a late, late start on so I doubt they will do much. However, if we have a hot July, August, and September, I might get some green hot peppers from them.

If my zucchini comes through - I will have a tremendous amount of it. We’ll see.

Right now it all just looks like weeds and no sense. But as it grows bigger and I weed this week - it will begin to look more like a garden and not just a bunch of weeds. Some of the sunflowers are much taller than the others. They are the ones that self-seeded. I also planted some in a row.

Sunflowers growing well - I did weed this after I took the photo.

It’s very early in the garden season so everything looks very small. Except the weeds. They manage to grow 3x as fast as the things I want.

I’ll try to do another update in a couple of weeks. Last year when I did one a month, it wasn’t enough, IMO.

My cement ring with flowers is looking nice. I’m hoping by the end of the year that they will fill it in almost entirely. There are 20 plants in it. All begonias.

My yellow flowers beside the fence are quite small this year. I’m not sure why. I may throw some fertilizer on them and see if I can help them grow a bit taller. The flowers also seem later. It is all so strange since it was so warm in April. However, May was not particularly warm (which was fine by me!).

I do have some plants on my back porch. They look nice. I even BOUGHT one sweet snack pepper plant. It has some ripe peppers on it - because it had them when I bought it. I’ll try to keep an eye on it and keep it watered and fertilized.

I focused on begonias of various types because they are tolerant of a bit of neglect AND they seem to do very well in shade - which is what I have back there.