My Garden is Huge

Last week was mostly raining here, with some storming in between. My garden has loved it! Especially after a week of super hot weather.

I have been trying to go out to my garden everyday and keep the tomatoes and cucumbers tied up. With being out of town and the rain not letting up, my garden went a couple days without any maintenance. I spent at least 2 hours just tying up the cucumbers on Saturday. Yes, really. This includes extending the trellis too.

This is a picture of the tamed cucumber plants. The picture on the right shows the two additional pieces of trellis I added. It's hard to see it through all the plant, but I added a wooden panel and a green wire panel on the sides of the bed.

There are lots of baby pickles growing! I'm so excited! There is going to be a lot of pickling in my future. I'll probably start out with sweet gherkins (which is my favorite pickle), so I can pick a bunch while they're still small. Then I'll do dill, bread & butter, relish, all the pickles.

The tomato plants are getting really big too, and there are a lot of green tomatoes. We may have to build some overall support system for them, in case the cages aren't strong enough.

The zucchini plant is getting really high, and the butternut squash is starting to branch out. I put up a short trellis around the butternut to help keep that untangled.

My stevia plants didn't do so well with all the rain. I think the pots were too small, and they were just getting water logged. So I bought some bigger, better draining pots and replanted them. They seem much happier!

I planted some cilantro seeds in the big pot and lavender seeds in the small pot. The cilantro has sprouted, but nothing with the lavender yet.

I started some microgreens and they are doing really well!! I just used empty spinach containers from the market and poked some holes in the bottom for drainage. I'm growing broccoli, spinach, kale, and romaine lettuce. Look at how cute the broccoli and kale sprouts are!

And here is my herb harvest from the weekend. I plan to dry almost all of it - we used all the basil to make pesto and I use some of the fresh orange mint in tea. All pictures are in a 2 quart glass bowl, to give you an idea of the volume.

 

basil (ready to be pesto!) and chocolate mint

 

orange mint and oregano

garlic chives and sage

I have more herbs I need to harvest, but this is about all I can dry at one time. Once these are dry I'll harvest more.

Today I harvested a zucchini and a purple pepper. We used the purple pepper on our pizzas tonight, and I was very surprised to see that the pepper was green on the inside. I expected it to be like red or orange peppers, where it's the color through out. So I was kinda disappointed with this. It tasted like a green pepper, and the purple color went away when I cooked it. I just saw the word "purple" and decided I had to plant it. Oh well, now we know.