Garden Update July 2015

This happens every year.  I take a lot of pictures of the garden early in the season.  At that point, it's all about hope, progress and anticipation.   Then, we may get a few pictures in of the first of the crop.  This stage is all about vindication and success.  The phase that I rarely document in blogs is the point in the season when we are so over-whelmed with produce that we can barely make it out to the garden to pick what's ripe, much less photograph what's going on.  This stage is all about shame, regret and self doubt.  There are starving kids in Africa and what am I going to do with all these cucumbers!!!

Well, I'm picking about 2-3 lbs of green beans a day, and 13 cucumbers every 2 days, give or take, but I want to make an actual effort to document the rest of the garden, so here we go.

1 of 2 walls of green beans.  So. Many. Green beans.  

Wall 2 of green beans, and melons.  I also have let some dill and cilantro flower so that I can save the seeds.  There's a few volunteers potatoes in there, too.

These are sweet peppers.  We don't have many that have ripened yet,
but we've been using the green ones in fajitas and gazpacho.

Check out these little melons!

I'm also saving celery seeds!  They are the little brow specks!

Remember when I saved radish seeds?  2 whopping radishes have sprouted from the batch.

The little dude, snacking on sun gold cherry tomatoes after swim lessons.

The 2 pumpkin plants are unimpressive so far.   Bummer because I left them so much space to have a wild pumpkin patch.

Oranges coming along.

Stunted zucchini plants, because I'm the only gardner who can't grow these very well. 

So, 4 tomatillo plants in the background and they are looking kind of weak compared with last year.  Meanwhile...

... dynamite volunteer tomatillo plant which cropped up amongst a bunch of garbage.  The gardening gods are funny.

Sunflower taller than our house.

Grapes coming along nicely.

Fueling our mojito habit with this mint.

The cucumber jungle overtakes all.

The basil is largely a casualty in the cucumber jungle, but this one variety is doing ok.

I'm pretty happy with the tomatoes so far!  Some giant ones back there.

This eggplant has only one destiny. Baba ghanouj.

Best looking onions I have ever grown.

The carrots are suffering in this heat.  I've let the lettuce go to flower so the bees have some food.

And, peeking inside the bee hive, this is what we can see from the top.  It smells amazing!