How does my garden grow? Not very well, I am another one that has managed to kill mint. But I’m trying, I really want to grow my own veggies and some pretty flowers. I started some seeds, I may be kind of late for my area but as I said I keep trying.
I love watching seeds sprout. It’s a little exciting to see them grow visibly within a couple hours time. It’s the keeping them alive after that with which I have a problem.
I planted all my tomatoes, sweet peppers and hot peppers today. In pots I have herbs and did seed lettuce.
I am thinking of doing the pototoes either in a row in the garden or make a second attempt at growing them in a barrel. Though, I just found growing potatoes in a trash bag, so that is up for consideration as well.
UPDATES REQUIRED!!!
It has been rather cool at nights here in Michigan, so the tomatoes are really not ripening and growing like they usually do. I only pulled my first reddish tomato off the vine yesterday. July 30th. How wrong is that?
Everything is coming along nicely, except for the sunflowers, which I always plant at the end of every row for purtiness. The fucking deer at the tops off of all of them. GOD DAMN DEER.
The bunnies took care of some other plants and I have a nuclear strike around the perimeter of my garden is the only acceptable method of dealing with these damn evil creatures. ( I put a string with some tin foil - tin foil pie pans are too expensive for this tightwad - on it around the perimeter and run out side going " BooYA" alot. Thank god I live in the country or people would have me committed.)
My pumpkin plant hasn’t set fruit yet and I am not sure if I should be concerned or not. I’ll give it another week or so.
It’s been cool here too, but the tomatoes are ripening. The neighbors’ tomatoes have blossom end rot but ours are okay so far.
We’ve harvested all the kohlrabi – will plant more next year. We’re getting lots of cucumbers. The radishes didn’t do anything except make leaves. We must not know how to plant onion sets because they never get much bigger than when we put them in. The neighbors are providing us with sweet corn in exchange for cukes. I think we got the best deal there. 
I didn’t plant much, which was probably a good thing - it’s been cool here in MN. One of my container cherry tomatoes just now finally had two ripen - my husband will eat those before I get home. (We had a watering problem earlier this year, but it’s still alive, so we’ll see where that goes.)
The lettuce has gone off. Wow. The rest of my garden is mostly herbs - chives, tarragon, basil, rosemary, thyme, mint - and they’re going well.
I’m new to the thread (how did I miss it?!?!?), but I’ll share. I’m growing my first garden in 12 years, and it’s in Seattle, not Mississippi, so this will be my mistake garden. So far I’ve planted the tomatoes too close together and not trimmed them, so I have a tomato jungle. I planted corn for the first time, but I didn’t realize there were multiple corn plants in each blister from the store, so my corn looks like indoor corn plants. They are beginning to tassle, though, so it may not be a total loss. My Chinese cabbage bolted before it ever produced any food, so that was a loss.:mad:
My Brussels sprouts look like they’ve gone to seed, but there are still little buds growing on the stalk, so I haven’t given up on them. The zucchini I planted must be bush variety, which I never heard of, so the support sytem we set up for them to climb on is only being used by the cucumber plants. The spaghetti squash vines like a mofo, though, and I expect to start harvesting them in about a week. I’ve been harvesting zucchini and yellow squash for a few weeks, and the sugar snap peas and lettuce are about spent. Definitely gonna plant more peas next year, though - those were damn tasty. Oh, and in an effort to not be totally overtaken by zucchini and yellow squash, we’ve been enjoying deep-fried zucchini blossoms!
But why should I tell you all this, when you could simply take a look?
I had LOADS of green tomatoes on the vine since May. They only started ripening in the middle of July. I blame the constant rain that our area had from mid-April until the 4th of July. We broke records in days of consecutive rainfall.
The peppers, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind that much. Of course, we eat peppers green, so there’s that.
Early in the season my bush beans were very productive but now, even though they look green and fluffy and healthy, they’re not producing many beans. Something is eating my sweet basil leaving me very little to dry. The store bought garlic I stuck in the ground last October on a lark yielded a bumper crop of garlic. I won’t have to buy garlic for months now.
At first I was disappointed with the zucchini seedling I bought in May. It was advertised as compact and that it is. I saw lots of blossoms but no zucs. That was because I was looking in the wrong place. All the zucs are located on the original central stalk-- 6 at last count. One has been eaten by something. One day there was an immature zucchini and the next day there was half an immature zucchini. I hope the eater doesn’t come back to finish off the rest of them.
All of my early leaf crops bolted before we got much eating out of them. We didn’t get not even one dinner out of the spinach and the leaf lettuce grew loooooong and leggy searching for the non-existent sun without making many leaves. My husband was pissed because the few leaves we picked were fantastic on his sandwiches. I had to explain to him that it wasn’t my fault Mother Nature was being such a bitch.
I forgot to mention – we caged the cucumbers this time. Makes for much easier finding and picking. Cukes are the same color as the leaves and it’s a bit of a chore to find them when the plant’s sprawled all over the garden. The cages are about 4 feet tall and the plant naturally twines around the cage.
ETA: And the plants take up less space!
These are my veggie beds as of the weekend before last: Big and little vegetable beds.
Also in there is a pic of one of the sunflowers my son insisted on planting. He was disappointed they didn’t grow 12’ tall (as of now they are about 7’ tall). Me, I’m just happy they’ve decided to stay in the ground and not come and attack us in the middle of the night. Sunflowers are creepy.
But look at all the sunflower embryos we’ll be snacking on! The three plants we have have at least 3 flowers apiece. We’ll be pooping shells for months.
Chiming in really late … a technique to try to create more mulchy stuff to rototill in to help the soil is straw bale gardening it is really fantastic for growing potatoes! They are so much easier to rummage out when they are grown. They self deteriorate fairly quickly and are great to till in to loosen up a clay soil, or add organics to sandy soil.
I finally got my first BLT out of my garden last weekend, and have some more tomatoes for one this weekend - and for salads also. I’ve got tons, but they are taking forever to ripen.
We’ve already got tons of beans and snow peas, some zucchinis and eggplants. I’m having stuffed green peppers from my peppers tonight. We put in a weird pole bean, with pretty red flowers and beans, which is both an ornamental and edible. The beans have to get a bit bigger. The lettuce and radishes are over.
Our straw mulch has worked very well.
You would mean the scarlet runner bean.
I’ve had horrible problems with fungus since last years flood. The weather this year has been cold. Despite spraying the apple trees they have apple scab all over them to the point where many have split way in to the apples. The tomatoes grew large plants and set fruit a long time ago. They didn’t riprn and now the plants have severe blight. I picked the first two red tomatoes I was waiting for and they were rotten from blight.
Next year I will have to plant a very limited variety of plants that do not support the life cycle of these fungus. No tomatoes or peppers at all.The grapes had no fruit this year and almost died. Where they sprouted has about 6 to 12 inches of new vine, which normally would have been about 6 feet or more in new growth. I’ll have to haul away the leaves, apples and pruned branches from the apple trees this fall to try and control the apple scab. The spore happen in the spring for the most part.
I do have some nice pumpkins, zucchini, lettuce and carrots. The peas were doing good but are now gone. I tried the Hercules pumpkin this year and the variety is now my favorite. Last year I had squash vines grow no longer than 6 inches total all year.
That’s the one. Have you grown it? Any advice on how to prepare it? It’s growing just dandy - since I cleared out a bed by our front fence, I could hang string for it, and it has taken advantage of the string quite nicely.
It has been a strange year. This July was cooler and rainier than a typical Michigan year . I need some bright hot days to turn the tomatoes red. There will be a bunch of them this year. Radishes are gone already. Cucumbers are still flowers. But I have a lot of them. the melons look good too.
I grow some every year. The bright red flowers make a nice looking flowering vine.
I don’t have any special bean recipe. Do what you do with any bean.