How My Garden Does (& Doesn't) Grow

Feeling pretty discouraged about our backyard garden today, so I'm gonna start out by complaining. :P Turns out it is quite disappointing so far. :( Updating on previous posts, my wildflower bed is a bust, our spinach is gone with most of our lettuce, we have no cucumbers yet, and the cuke plant is starting to lose pieces. *sigh* Since first writing this, I learned from a friend that the heat can be hard on lettuce, so I'm thinking that our big 90+ degree F heat wave over the past couple of weeks may have something to do with our sad lettuce harvest.

Despite meticulous weeding and verbal encouragement, it seems our garden succumbed to all of that super hard rain we had loads of just after we planted. It ended up pounding our soil into hardness, packing it down so that there isn't much aeration and room for the roots to grow down. Or we may have to continue our quest for the perfectly balanced soil in terms of nutrients.











Sad little lettuce that has never reached its prime.













Our spinach (bottom of picture) never grew past a few inches, and went to flower. The empty patch beside the baby lettuce used to be home to our butter lettuce.


On the plus side, we do have lots of Roma tomatoes growing. Looking forward to seeing them ripen and redden (they seem to be staying green an awfully long time)! And we have quite a few greenbeans- woot! I love garden fresh greenbeans in butter (vegan), one of the only veggies I prefer in a dressing rather than plain. Our carrots are growing too, and we're hoping there are little ones growing underneath the pretty leaves. :)







Hoping for a pumpkin!


Plans from here include loosening up the soil, fertilizing and composting, and trying again with the lettuce and spinach. Maybe we'll have a crop for late summer and fall. And hopefully, we'll be eating lots of greenbeans and tomatoes!














The happiest part of our garden: beans (cut off in pic on left), cukes, tomatoes, and carrots.