In the Garden

 It is so hot today! We have heat advisories again. I was used to this weather when I lived in Georgia but since I have been here in Ohio for nearly 9 years...the heat gets to me a bit.

I have been doing a little bit of work in my garden beds when the sun goes behind the clouds.

In garden bed one, I pulled out my zucchini plants. It seems they have some vine borer problems. I left the squash plant because it has two squash on it that still need to grow. I have watermelon and cantaloupe growing up the trellis. Around the beginning of August I will plant more sweet peas and carrots in this bed for a nice fall harvest. I'm hoping to get enough sweet peas to can a few!

Garden bed two looks bare and dry despite my watering. I have 5 tomato plants in this bed. The ones on the trellis are doing well but the Mortgage lifter ones I transplanted from the buckets into his bed hate me. They are setting fruit now so I hope they will do much better. I pulled out the pumpkin vines from this bed as well. The heat killed the vine but I was able to get 2 medium sized orange pumpkins and a tiny little ghost pumpkin and a little orange jack be little pumpkin. I am happy with that. Oh and we have been enjoying yellow onions from this bed. They grew to between baseball and softball sized!

Bed number 3 is my favorite so far! It has my wall of green beans and cucumbers. I intermixed them and they LOVE each other. I have gotten so many cucumbers and several messes of green beans. I am one happy momma! This bed also contains 2 eggplant plants...neither of which have set fruit! 

I will be planting a fall crop here too. I plan on doing spinach, lettuces, and broccoli.

This is just past my garden beds. This MESS is blackberries. Since this is the 2nd season for these two plants I haven't really gotten much from them. The birds tend to eat most of the fruit. I think I will trellis them this fall!  I need some order here!

Here is what is left of the herbs and such I had on my back deck. We had a bad storm last month and it blew most of them off the railings. Luckily I still have some of them. I also have two long deck boxes. One I just harvested green onion from and another is empty.

Here is today's garden harvest. The green onion I spoke of above and some potatoes. The heat killed my poor potato plants so I decided to dig around and see what I could find in my containers. I have enough here for a little sampling and I am surprised I got that much!

Now that I'm cooled down, I am going to plant some lettuces and some carrots in my deck boxes outside. I love having fresh produce right outside my back door.

I also have big plans on transforming my whole back yard into a beautiful gardening/ entertaining area. I want to make a patio area with my fire pit raised in the middle. I also want to build tall raised beds to plant in with benches attached to them. I also have a strawberry tower in mind and some ideas on some homemade patio furniture....Now if my finances would balance out...oh that is another post entirely!

Back to the garden,

Erin