June 16th update to Mom's Garden 2011

Even though this is the June 16th update, most of these pictures and this post are from June 1st and June 5th and June 10th, I have simply waited until now, the 16th to post this part of the story as I have been busy.

 The leaf lettuce has been doing pretty good and is filling out.

The carrots also have been doing well. For some reason this year there has not been a varmint eating the carrot tops nor pulling them , nor digging them from the ground. All last year Mom complained as something was getting at them. I offered to build a chicken fencing frame that could be dropped over these patches to keep critters away but she shook her head and told me no to this idea.

Mom has added more of these tomato plant cages. I do not know if there is a reason why some tomato plants get these and others get the stake type.

The tomato plants are doing okay, we've been a little dry lately. Our next door neighbors got their tomato plants ine arly and they have one that is three times the size of these, but Mom hasn't mentioned it, mom has many, many more tomato plants and will be giving tomatoes away before too much longer.

These are bell pepper plants, freshly planted, I think a little late but they will do okay.

Zucchini. These sprawl all over the place. In a few weeks Mom will put plastic underneath these to keep the resulting zuchini from laying on the ground which can spoil them.

The big leaffy plants in closest to us are cabbage, and the skinny long plants in back are onions. She plants these near to each other as the roots of each help the other.

Here is the rainbarrel as promised. It stays pretty full all season long with the rains we get. It does collect some tar that runs off the roof and so it needs to be emptied out either in the Spring or Fall to get rid of that sediment build up. This gets extremely heavy when full. You can see how its weight is forcing the side of the deck it is on into the ground.

The front corner plot has been slow going. These pink flowers have bloomed nicely though.

The iris are in full bloom now. In about a week these will start to fizzle, and a week after that there will just be stalks with no flower on them.

The front flower bed has filled in, these are getting nice and big and will start to produce flowers in about 2-3 weeks. Hopefully next post I will be able to show you some blooms in this shot.

Lots of little blooms in the front flower box attached to the house.

This is also in the front flower box. Pretty pink.

I went and found the black raspberry plants. Here is one of them. The bees have polinated them already and the stamens are wilting and in about 3-4 weeks these will turn into berris. And today Mom has discovered she has wild strawberry plants in the same area. Apparently birds that have been grazing strawberry plants elsewhere have dropped seeds from elsewhere here and they have started growing. When I can I will post a picture of them. We've been eating storebought strawberries for about a month now. Mom will be chatting it up with everyone for the rest of this year how she has wild strawberries now.

Here raspberries are also doing pretty well. These will start to take on color over the enxt 2-3 weeks and will be ready for picking in about a month. Mom will gather as many of these as she can to make jelly with.

 

This is the end of the June 1st pics. The weather turned very cool after this and we had forecasts stating we might get freezing temperatures. I'll show you what happened in the next post.