Lettuce and tomatoes and beans! Oh my!

We are having some crazy thunderstorms here today, but a couple of days ago it was beautiful and sunny - perfect for a few quick garden pictures.

This time around I only took close-up shots of a few plants in the garden so you can't see how weedy it is. Keeping up with the weeds is not my favorite thing to do, especially when the garden gets full sun for most of the day. The sunshine is great for the veggies, but not for me and my fair skin. (I've never understood how people can just lie out in the sun and bake. Ugh.)

At any rate, the bibb lettuce seeds have sprouted quite nicely. I did thin them out a little bit, but I've discovered that it's hard to thin plants when they're growing. They're just sitting there minding they're own business and becoming tasty vegetables when someone comes along and yanks them out of the earth. How mean. I know it's technically no different than pulling weeds, but it seems different. Maybe it's because I don't plan to eat the weeds. Who knows.

The shadow to the left of the lettuce is from the red leaf lettuce. Only one of those plants survived, but it's doing well.

The cucumber vines are plugging along, too. I love their pretty little yellow flowers. This one is the Marketmore cucumber, and we also have a bush crop cucumber. I don't think I caught any of the baby cucumbers in this shot, but my sister says there are at least a dozen between the two plants.

And here is a zucchini blossom. I never really think of vegetables as having flowers, even though I know they do, so it's always a little amazing to me to see the flowers blooming on our vegetable plants. They're just so beautiful. (I just found a very interesting article about flowering vegetables in Gardens Illustrated online. I wouldn't have ever thought about using vegetables to make bouquets.)

We have three different types of tomato in the garden, and all three plants have tomatoes growing. This one, a Nyagous tomato, was the first one to sprout. The tomatoes will be a dark color and are supposed to have a sweet, smoky flavor. I haven't tried them before, so I can't wait to taste them. We also planted a Moskovich tomato and a Brandywine tomato.

And the beans, the crazy beans. This year we're trying French Gold Pole Beans, and they sprouted just days after we planted the seeds. I would love to watch some time-lapse video of the beans, because there was one day that I swear they grew about six inches. We have two bean towers, and I'm going to try to keep track of how many beans we pick this summer. Last year it was in the hundreds, but I don't know more than that. (I just asked my sister how many beans she thought we harvested last year, and she said, "Gobs and gobs." Ha.)

And a couple of shots from the flower garden. The flower on the left is a giant marigold, and on the right is milkweed. We try to let as much of the milkweed grow in the garden as we can (yay! a weed I don't have to pick!) so any monarch butterflies that happen by can enjoy it. It's also coming up in some rock beds on the side of our house, and we let the landlord know what it was so he wouldn't come by and pull them out.

Speaking of monarch butterflies, this guy just happened to pass by while I was out with my camera. He did not want to settle anywhere for more than a second or two, though, so I couldn't get a great shot. This one is pretty good -- at least his wings are open -- but you can still see that he was moving. He checked out a few of the milkweed plants, so they must be working.

Overall it looks like we'll have another successful garden harvest this year. (Assuming these storms don't wash everything away. Sheesh.) I'll try to focus on the other garden plants (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, mini sweet peppers and sunburst squash) in my next so you can see how they're doing, too.






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