Garden Update

I hadn't talked about the garden (as a whole) lately. It's going really good! Sometimes, almost too good if that's possible.

Anyways, the only thing that has stopped growing is the spinach. Not sure what happened there. But oh well...it's not much of a summer thing anyway.

Here's a pick of the entire garden (you can see the 'hole' where the spinach used to be).

And a picture of the biggest bell pepper we've gotten. The picture doesn't do it justice but I swear it's the size of two of my fists put together. And it's finally turning red so I suppose it'll be ready in a couple days.

Also our jalapenos and banana peppers are really flourishing. For some reason the jalapenos we have are hot hot hot! All of them...doesn't matter the color. But here's a pic of one right before I picked it after it turned red. And the neverending tomato plants. Brad compares them to a box of tangled Christmas lights. And that's pretty much what it is. Though they are all staked well and in some kind of semblance of order...it doesn't look like it. And harvesting the tomatos isn't as difficult as it may look like it would be. I just always water first which weights down the plants/leaves and opens up holes to pull the tomatos off. I loose some that just fall off. And I am NOT crawling all in the garden to get a 4-5 lost tomatos when we have the abundance we have.

Here's the pic of the tomatos I picked off just this morning...And the collection from the last 4-5 days, after I filled up 2-3 ziploc bag fulls to give away...Here's a pic of the other side of the garden. Basically I see our garden as having three parts. There's the neat and orderly side on the left, with cute little strawberry plants, onions all lined up in a row, spinach and lettuce neatly aligned as well and some herbs and the peppers. Then in the middle there are the tangled web of tomatos. Then on the right side is the viney stuff - beans, squash, watermelon and cantaloupe.

We now have several squash almost ready for picking. And even more watermelon growing good (maybe 5?). I'm trying my best to keep the watermelon off the ground. I thought they'd make it to the chain link fence behind the garden to sling them to the fence, but so far the vines haven't quite made it that long. So I am using some of the kids padded floor puzzle piece thingys once a watermelon shows sprout...I place a pad underneath it. We'll see how that works for now. The rest of the vines are really close to the fence, so my future watermelons should be able to get a sling.And the fruit trees are producing well too! The orange tree...

And the keylime tree...

I still don't have anything on the apple trees, but both of them are green and leafy and I'm a happy camper! I don't expect any fruit the first year - I just want them to thrive and survive!

Now, usually I do my gardening while Brooke is at school. But you may ask what I do with Brenna during this time? Well, she is safe and secure in our gigantic outdoor playard. :)

And I thought I'd also share this picture of Brooke protecting her food. Everyone around here knows how much Brenna likes her bread products. So I had given Brooke a small piece of bagel for after she finished her cereal. She built a wall around it (notice the tiny piece in b/w all the 'walls'?) so Brenna wouldn't see it. Haha!