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.

How Does My Garden Grow?

Following up on my first garden post & pics with some updates! Well, with Pittsburgh's crazy onslaught of rain and thunderstorms, some of the garden is exploding with growth while some is, well... struggling. The storms and downpours have made for a lot of cleanup in the garden, and for hours I've picked little weeds, removed sticks ond rocks, and pruned demolished leaves on the greens. Some of the pics I'm sharing are pre-pruning and cleaning up from the storms.














Week 4

The tomato plant has grown a lot in height and has gotten it's first flowers! Yay! I think we'll need to trim it back a bit so that it is less spindly and more bushy. The cucumber plants are nicely building up. They are vining, but no flowers yet. We expect them soon.













Cukes and tomatoes.

The beans are growing, too! We saw our first sprouts the very day I last posted about the garden. Been training them to vine up the poles. The carrots are getting their *real* carrot leaves- woot!

Green beans (above) and carrots.

Urgh. The lettuce plants we put in the garden are slowly growing, but have taken a big beating by the storming. :/ So many leaves were tattered and buried in the mud that the plants seemed shrunken when I was done pruning. None of our own lettuce in salads yet because of this.The baby lettuce and spinach were totally pummeled by the heavy rain, smushed and flattened into the soil. Pruning was more like lifting the tiny leaves out of the mud and brushing them off (what was left) so that they can hopefully revive.

Pummeled greens. :(

Wildflowers? Eh. Also ravaged by rain and by the rain streaming off of the roof of the shed they are planted beside. I don't have high hopes for the explosion of flowers I initially hoped for. I added more seed and fertilized, so we'll see what happens.

Wildflowers. Sparse and beaten down or washed away. Come on little sprouts- you can do it!

Guess what? We have a rogue pumpkin plant in the garden, a surprise product of either last year's planting or the compost we added to the soil. :) So cool!

More later...

PUMPKIN!

Sophie is an excellent helper.