True leaves and other growth, and mud

The lettuce decided to start growing true leaves after today’s watering.

However, they are leaning a lot to reach the light since we only have one:

But it’s enough to grow things so I’m happy. More celery is coming up, the onions are all showing green stems and we now have tomatoes sprouting:

They look a little pale and weak I think, I’ll watch them carefully.

I thinned out a few lettuce and cabbage, even as thin as my fingers are I still managed to get too many seeds in a couple spots, one had 6 in the same spot. Oops. I should have used the tweezers like I thought of last year!

In other news, we got a wicked rain storm that knocked out our DSL for a few hours yesterday and all night til after noon today, but my 2 year old didn’t mind a bit:

Oh to be 2 again :lol It took me 20 minutes to get all the mud off the kitchen floor when he came in, and we stripped him right at the door and took him to a nice warm bath!

Tomatoes & the inevitable salsa

I really did mess up with the tomatoes :lol They’re all falling all over the place and planted so close together that a lot are falling into the middle of the whole mess and ripening and I can’t see them. There’s hundreds of tomatoes. It’s insanity.

Here’s the first group of tomatoes. About half were on the vines, ready to pick and the other half were on the ground. Most are Romas, but there’s a few Early Girl and a small Beefsteak or two in there. I made salsa and froze it today with the ripest ones :bounce

Don’t eat the apple in the Garden of Eatin’

Bad stuff’ll happen….weeds will take over so badly you can’t catch up and all you can hope for it to clear little areas around the still producing plants so they aren’t choked out. Tomatoes will grow so insanely big they’ll all fall over and you were dumb and planted them so close together you can’t untangle them (I’ll be canning tomatoes here soon though!). Cucumbers will be so thick and thorny that is a risk of death to pick anything. One squash plant will completely take over the onions.

Yeah, I’m keeping Earth Juice around :thumb But laying down better weed control next time! It’s really bad, I’m not kidding. Maybe I’ll take a picture if I think I can deal with the embarrassment :lol

What a bounty! Woohoo!

Wow. I haven’t even set foot in the garden in 3-4 days because of the heat then rain and I was thrilled by what I found. Our first red roma tomatoes, crooknecks and zucchini, lots of corn and more. Check it all out :thumb

And the crookneck squash siamese twin that wants to be a porn star:

General growy-ness

Just a general update on how things are going in the Garden of Eatin’ today.

The weeds are taking over. I need to get out there and attack with the weed whacker, it’s that bad. It’s not stopping things from growing, so that much is good! But it won’t happen in the next few days…yesterday we had 100F+ temps, today we’re due for 105F and tomorrow is supposed to be 100F, and Sunday 90F…temps should be back in the mid 70s on Monday, so I’ll plan on going lots of work in the garden then, with before after after pics.

The tomato stake experiement has literally been a giant FLOP. As soon as the tomatoes started getting big, the plants got so heavy and thick they’ve tipped over, breaking the stakes and I have lots of tomatoes on the ground at risk from bugs…trying to keep them UP but they just keep growing and falling more :help

The corn is nearly 7′ high with lots of ears. I think we might have some grilled steak and corn for dinner tonight.

The lemon cucumbers are finally growing, well….like taking over their corner of the garden. I definitely planted too many. And the little vines have built in protection to keep me from picking too early, their thorns leave me bleeding when I try.

The strawberries stopped producing fruit all together after giving us hardly anything and are producing runners like crazy. I tried stopped that to see if it would encourage fruit, but it didn’t.

I’ve gotten 6 gigantic zucchini now and there’s lots more growing. I’ll be shredding and freezing it this weekend. Those suckers grow fast!

The crookneck is finally starting to grow fruit, but only after the plant grew to “Little Shop of Horrors” porportions.

Out one pumpkin is about basketball sized and just starting to turn orange.

Potatoes will finish being harvested tonight, there’s 3 plants left and I want to make potato salad. I forgot to write down the ingredients I used last time, I’ll do that this weekend and post the recipe :D

Zucchinis and crooknecks and tomatoes, oh my!

Yes, I do have a “thing” for using the Wizard of Oz themed titles :p

Crooknecks:

Zucchinis:

Roma tomatoes:

Beefsteak tomato:

Corn:

Green beans:

The thyme is FINALLY growing!

And the parsley is ready to get cut again: