Grow, garden, grow!

We had a gorgeous afternoon, so I took advantage of the sun and snapped a few pictures of the newly planted garden.

Here's the whole garden -- with the new compost bin my dad built. And that corner of the garden is perfect for it because it often stayed too damp for the veggies. We also tried putting down some material to block the weeds. This one is a recycled paper-like product that we can just till into the soil in the fall.

This is the back half of the garden. The cages on the left side are for pepper plants, and the three taller ones in the back are the tomatoes. The four plants in the back right corner are Brussels Sprouts, and the one in the foreground on the right is a sunburst squash (related to pattypan squash).

And here's the front half of the garden. On the left the first plant is zucchini (just one plant this year, thank goodness), and then there are four broccoli plants. The trellis in the middle is for the two cucumber plants, and then behind the trellis (or below, depending on your perspective), will be lettuce, if it comes up. The lettuce plants we bought ended up looking a little raggedy before we planted them, so we added some lettuce seeds for good measure. On the right side is the rhubarb and then the two bean towers.

Here are our crazy strawberries. Last summer I planted strawberries in the two large pots sitting outside the garden. This spring the pots are filled with just weeds, and the strawberries planted themselves in the garden. So we let them just have that corner (along with a few pots of herbs). The large bush in the upper left corner is raspberries, so that will be our berry patch.

We already have a few good-sized strawberries. There were actually a few berries I was looking forward to picking in May but some of the local fauna enjoyed them before we could.

The two strawberries I picked today probably could have used one more day of ripening. But I was worried that I might not see them again if I waited.

Fresh strawberries. Yum!

I also put out some fresh bird food in the backyard, and one of our chipmunk friends wasted no time filling his cheeks. (How they cram all that food in there I'll never know.) He was too busy to even care that I was taking pictures.

I'll try to post a few garden updates over the summer so you can see how things are progressing. Thanks for stopping by!