Garden update: Three months

It's been three months, and our garden is still going strong. It really is a little insane to see how big everything has become. (Check out my first garden post, one-month update and two-month update for comparison pictures.)

The garden at three months.

It looks like we'll finally get some strawberries.

Purple pole beans. We also have green and wax
(yellow) beans growing on the towers.

In the last month we've picked the rest of the lettuce, almost all the carrots (we left two that still seemed a little small, so we'll pick them later) and one pepper; enjoyed a second round of broccoli; eaten several tomatoes; picked quite a few zucchini; and harvested I don't know how many cucumbers and pole beans.

It's been fun trying out new recipes with our produce. (Well, my sister does most of the trying since she's more of a cook. But I enjoy the final products.) We've had refrigerator pickles; cucumber salsa; a veggie lasagna with zucchini noodles (as well as spaghetti-style noodles on another occasion); and stir fry with broccoli, beans and carrots. And I've made at least three batches of cucumber salad so far.

A painted serpent cucumber. We forgot to measure it, but this one must have been at least two feet long.
When we set it on the counter it looked just like a curled-up snake with its head sticking up. I can definitely
see how this variety got its name.

A droplet of water on a broccoli leaf.

One morning while I was in the garden I spotted several broccoli leaves that were holding perfectly formed drops of water. I had to take a couple of pictures, and I love that you can see the sky and the neighbor's fence reflected in this droplet.

Flowers on the scarlet runner beans.

Our peas -- four different plantings -- never did come up. (Stupid peas. Pffft.) But the scarlet runner beans we planted seem to be doing just fine. I don't know if there's enough growing season left to get any of the beans, but we're enjoying the vibrant red flowers.

A watermelon. This is the biggest one we have right now. I wonder if it will be big enough to eat by the
end of summer.

Flower garden along the alley.

Our sunflowers are huge! The biggest ones are at least eight or nine feet tall (they're a mammoth variety, so they can get up to twelve feet tall) and are finally starting to get blossoms. We did have a sad event with our flower garden. One morning we came out and a bunch of the sunflowers, along with some of the milkweed and a few other flowers, were all pushed over in the same direction. It was very strange because the roots of several of the plants were coming out of the ground, so it wasn't like someone broke the stems. We don't know if it was an animal digging or what, but we ended up having to pull out quite a few sunflowers because they were dead or dying. We'll just have to get extra enjoyment from the ones that are left.

Thanks for stopping by!