I have been really really late to get started but got 6-SIX-herb plants-for fifty cents apiece. They were a bit bedraggled but nothing that a little TLC won't fix. I'd been wanting to plant some lavender, plus I got a rosemary seedling and some basil. Normally these things sell for two fifty apiece. Yay me!

Everything but our peppers are doing well. They're a bit stunted. That's what I get for trying to start my own seeds.

Corn should be ready in a week or two. I've got a nice pint of cherry tomatoes on the counter that have been snack food for the past couple days. No big tomatoes yet, but they're a-comin.

I'm positively SICK of zucchini. I'll head over to the garden later today to see how many more of them grew overnight.

Cukes are so-so. The one pickling cuke plant is going great guns, but all the rest are slow and don't look terribly healthy.

Beans are producing well, but they're disappointingly stringy. Bummer.

The garden this evening:

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Snap Peas

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Tomatoes (Cosmonaut Volkov)

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Potatoes

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Strawberries

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Blueberries

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Apples

And I can take no credit at all for the garden. My SO does all the work.

My garden is in a window. The kitten ate the dill. The sage keeps "dying" and springing back. The rosemary is sparse. The spicy basil and thail basil are beautiful, as is the mint. The cilantro died an ignoble death, but the thyme is taking over. Violets are lush green and split, but still not blooming. Peace lily is beautiful (and where kitties can't eat it and swell up their tongues). Random succulent is in its second round of blossoms. Bathroom ivy looks good. Avocado pit has not yet sprung roots.

I wish I had the right amount of light for container tomatoes. Next year.

Tomatoes are getting ready. Picked the first ones (cherokee purple) yesterday morning. Well, the first big ones after the sungolds got going, which was a couple of weeks ago. Cukes are just getting big enough to pick. The beans I got in WAY late, so they'll be a late harvest. The other day I picked my first peppers: two yellow and one purple. Very cute.

I'm having so much fun with my garden. I put some things in really early, and other stuff I put off for a long time. So I have some irregular harvest times coming up. Good thing our growing season is long!

The community garden is even better. Last week we harvested three LONG rows of the most gorgeous garlic you've ever seen. They've sent me home with at least a bushel of plums so far, some of which I used to make jam.

You guys are doing better than me. My roma tomatoes look good, but still very green. I grew Basil from actual seeds this year, so that's a win. My zucchini, I've been told, I put in too late - the plants are growing, but the flowers don't make fruit.

And the returing cilantro comes so early and now is going to seed.

But yay gardens!

My tomato plants are suffering a bit from all of the rain we have been getting. They're about done. With the mixture of intense heat plus rain everyday they can only last so long but I've been getting some great fruit. I'll start new tomatoes by seed in July. Herbs are going strong, as always. I pulled out two eggplants that were suffering from bug damage.

Rainbaby, there are two kinds of flowers on squash plants: Male and female. Sounds like you're getting male flowers only, and that the female flowers (which are attached to little miniature squashes) just haven't formed yet. They will. Just give them time.

Alternatively, if you *are* seeing female flowers but the fruit isn't maturing, the flowers aren't getting pollinated. You can do this by hand. When a female flower is wide open and smiling at you, pick a male flower (it's the one on a long stem) and rub it all over the inside of the female flower. Don't feel icky about having steamy squash sex -- just consider yourself a marital aid for cucurbits. (This is best done in the morning, by the way.)

We have been bested by cilantro. There is simply no way that we can eat it and, hey, it's turning into coriander. It's been a cold, wet spring but the tomatoes are better than our friends thanks to a hoop house. Peas are coming along nicely but our pole beans are languishing for reasons that I do not understand. The potatoes are about waist high and need some serious hilling. The onions are doing better than they have any right to do. Carrots and radishes are struggling but that's what we get for planting them in our rocky, unimproved soil. Lettuce, mustard greens, kale, and chard are growing faster than we can eat them. Anything that's less than perfect goes to the chickens and ducks (they'll be back on a dandelion and dirt clod diet when the garden stops producing for the winter). This is especially nice on account of the price of feed has *tripled* over the past couple of months. The asparagus is doing well but it won't be ready for harvest for another year or two. Plus, I planted it on an area that has deep, loose soil, but had a bunch of bulby plants and blackberries on it. The result is an epic battle of the roots that result in me spending weekends up to my shoulder in the dirt chasing down tiny, tiny roots with tiny, tiny plants on top of them that are connected to massive, elder-god style cthulus of thorns, roots and vines.


And we just put in some raised beds to supplement our in-ground garden. We've put in a bunch of green and cole crops for harvest in the fall. Over the winter we'll build cold frames and eat lettuce year round. Carrots and radishes will go in the raised beds as well. The fancy store-bought dirt will give them a fighting chance to not end up the stunted, misshapen little veggies that the first batch seem likely to become.

Best of all, we haven't run afoul of any deer yet.

*crosses fingers*

The poinsettia still has red leaves and it's getting weird. The mum popped out 10 big, pretty leaves after several months of just two straggly leaves. The sprouted onion we planted is very happy, and the mint is back after a mysterious die-off.

A second (third?) round of purple basil seeds is starting to sprout. I love the two tiny seed leaves. They look like little purple lips. But they keep dying and we don't know why! I just got a ton of seeds from one of my friends: snow peas, chard, lettuce, and arugula. Is it too late to plant them? How do seasons work again? :) In L.A. you stick stuff in the ground when the impulse strikes, yaknow? :)

tomatoes are a little slow, weeds are taking over.

the returing cilantro comes so early and now is going to seed.

Cilantro is so annoying to grow. Round here, if I start it in spring, it is ready way before the tomatoes - which is, like, useless, since anything I'd put it in (salsa, gazpacho, pico de gallo) also has tomatoes. In the end, last time I grew it, I think I just re-seeded it every 3 weeks so there was a fairly constant supply.

And it's kind of cool that you get coriander when it goes to seed! It seems extra fragrant when it's from my garden, maybe just because it isn't sitting around in storage for years as I suspect the McCormick's coriander does.

What plinth said.

Well, this spring I dug up my front garden and tore out the few ancient rose bushes that were left. Then I planted seven rosebushes, all of which seem to be healthy, and four of which are currently in bloom. There was one huge wild rose bush, really a tree (over 6' tall AFTER a severe pruning), in the front garden that though I didn't want it in the front garden I thought I really had to try to save, so I hauled it through the alley to the back garden and replanted it. After an iffy phase it's green and healthy and loaded with buds.

In the back garden things are mostly doing pretty well. The hydrangea bush my mother gave me for my birthday last year is doing very well. My raspberry bushes have a few berry buds on them - not bad for first year growth! My rhubarb patch is doing modestly well. Not very many cucumbers have come up from the packet I planted. My strawberry plants are a terrible disappointment because all their many blooms withered up when they became berry buds. My lavender and basil are doing okay. I planted some packets of seeds (butterfly garden mix, hummingbird mix, forget me nots, poppies) and now I can't tell which are the weeds and which aren't. The other things which were mostly transplanted from my mother's garden have taken hold, and I'm pleased about the shamrock that was a former houseplant. It's come back from nothing to be a good-sized plant.

I let mine go to weeds during the hectic two weeks of working with no time off and aunt with stroke's arrival and all that. Besides, I was fed up with battling the groundhogs who keep blithely going through the fence, past the theoretically groundhog scaring whirligigs, and feasting. Last weekend, though, I hoed up all the weeds and put down a bale of straw and now I have tomatoes and peppers coming, maybe some squash and eggplants and cucumbers, although the groundhogs may yet get them. The groundhogs ate most of the sunflowers, all of the beans and some of the corn, so that I don't think the corn will pollinate - - there's only one row. I planted more but I doubt it will take in time if at all. Groundhogs will not eat basil, though, so last week I had the first batch of pesto from the garden. And in the front yard the pumpkins I have in containers with the herbs are happy and spreading out and on the deck the container tomato is going along wonderfully and the windowbox I planted with gourds and moonflower vines looks like it might actually spread up and cover the ugly shelves and be cool after all.