The Garden

I'm loving my birthday gift from John this year: my garden doubled!

So, about half of my plants have something wrong with them, but I figure in about a month they'll all be mostly dead from the heat anyway and I've already harvested so many cherry tomatoes, yellow squash, bell peppers and green beans that I can count it as a successful year!

My green beans have some disease that's causing the leaves to get spotty and eventually yellow. I think the three meals-worth of beans I harvested are about all I'm going to get this year.

(If anybody has any tips for organically controlling whatever these diseases/pests might be, please leave me a comment. I'd love to have more knowledge!)

Another addition to the garden this year has been a drip irrigation system. I don't know why I never pursued this before! We thought it up Saturday, watched a YouTube video about it, went to the big box home/garden store, thought through all the parts we needed, and purchased everything in only one trip! Sunday morning before church we got up and installed it in about an hour!

I think my pepper plants came with a virus. Even so, they've produced some good sized bell peppers.

I am pretty impressed that all the flowers in the garden came up from seeds! Never tried that before.
Anybody know what kind of flower this is? I found some seeds in a tiny ziploc bog in the garage, planted them, and this is what came up.

Look! A watermelon! It actually has doubled in size since two days ago. (And yes, that is a roly-poly in the picture. They plague me. As do the aphids that LOVE the watermelon plants.)

The tomato plants are going crazy! Once it gets hot and humid and I have to cover the plants with bird netting, I give up on pruning anything.

There are also zucchini and yellow squash plants there in the middle of the garden next to the tomatoes. I've gotten lots of yellow squash, but just a few zucchini. I think the squash plants have blossom-end rot or something.

So, there you have it! I'll keep everybody updated on the watermelon - I'm so excited about having watermelon. I only hope it tastes as good as the expensive ones from the farmers market!