How has another month passed already? Time flies when you're ridiculously busy. However, @dksart and I did finally take some time this week to get away for a bit. It had been way too long since I had a vacation, so even just a quick trip to the beach was more than welcome. Coming home was welcome, too, especially to check on the progress in the garden!
This time of year, things are finally starting to come along as the weather warms up (mostly) and many of the seedlings are in the ground. I loved having the greenhouse to get a lot of my seeds going, and even now I'm still using it to start another round of cucumbers after the darn slugs ate all the seedlings I had planted in the garden before we left for the beach! Darn bugs. If only they'd share. Luckily, I should still have plenty of time for cukes, though, and with even warmer weather coming they should germinate quickly. I also plan on waiting a little longer this time around to plant them when they are big enough to withstand a little nibbling.
On the setback front, we may also lose our 3-year-old fig tree. More bugs. Apparently ambrosia beetles are the little buggers that bore into the trunk and branches, leaving behind what looks almost like a long cigarette ash. There's new growth coming at the base of the tree, but most everything I read about those beetles says to cut back and burn any impacted parts of the trees so that the larvae don't get a chance to hatch and move on to other trees. Older trees may bounce back from an attack, but I'm not sure if ours is established enough given the signs are all over and not isolated to one spot.
I'm quite disappointed about that one since we had a good harvest of figs last year, so I was hoping for an even better harvest this year! As always, successes and failures in the growing front. The good thing is the plum trees don't seem impacted, though they won't produce for a few more years. The elderberry bush that @dksart's mom got us is in the ground and seems to be happy, however. So I'll take that as a success!
From there we'll keep rolling with the positives...
In addition to the new seeds I planted this season, we have volunteer tomatoes popping up EVERYWHERE. Just about anywhere we've used our compost and in the bed that we had them in last year, little babies just keep sprouting. I've pulled some of them from places where I don't want them crowding out other things I've planted, but some I'm just letting go and we'll see what we get. Fingers crossed for an abundant harvest of all different varieties!
My snow peas exploded while we were gone! I harvested a single snow pea before we left for the beach, but came home to a small handful more, with lots of lovely little blossoms hinting what's to come.
I also came back to see more of my corn sprouted. This is the first year I decided to try corn, so we'll see how it goes. It's a small-eared variety with cobs about half the size of standard plants. Each plant is only supposed to give two ears, so we might not get much but at least we'll see how it goes for this first attempt.
And of course...there's always squash!
Multiple patty pan babies are really starting to grow. I also have at least one golden zucchini that I directly planted in the bed before I started the other seedlings in the greenhouse. The bugs of course got the other few that I direct-sowed, but this guy should be producing soon from the looks of it...
Finally, I've got a few pumpkins and Candy Roasters coming along, too. I also put one or two of the prolific Zucchin Rampicantes in the ground, but I've been a little fearful of doing too many of that variety after being absolutely inundated a few years ago, haha.
Overall, I think more successes than setbacks! I love getting closer to seeing the fruits of our labor. Still lots of patience to muster up as everything takes time to mature, but it's starting to get to the really fun part of the year! Thanks as always to @riverflows (latest official garden journal post Here) and the rest of the gardening community for giving me some motivation to pop back on here and keep up with at least sharing our gardening adventures. It's always a blast to see what everyone else has going on in their own soil!
