The June 22 Garden

Thanks to the early spring and warm (hot!) weather we enjoyed this spring the garden is ahead of schedule. I’m beginning to wonder if I overplanted in some areas but it will all work out in the end. Thought I’d take on on a tour of the garden this first day of summer.

Seems like you can almost watch everything growing. Certainly, every day there is noticably more growth than the day prior. I’ve got eight tomato plants in this garden; they’ve all set fruit and they’re getting bigger every day. They seem to appreciate the vermicompost tea I feed them with regularly.

The rainbow Swiss chard and two varieties of kale are almost out of control! I picked a bucket of each this afternoon to make a couple of salads for supper later. You can hardly tell I picked anything.

The bush beans are covered with flowers!

We’ve been eating lettuce for months. The nice thing is that it’s cut-and-come-again and so it regrows. There’s a lot of salad being eaten around here! I’ve been thinning the scallions and tossing them in salads too. The carrots are doing well.

We’ve enjoyed feasting on beet greens and a few baby beets already. I love this new bull’s blood variety–it’s pretty and delicious too!

With the even-hotter weather on the horizon I think it’s time we started enjoying this mojito mint in–you guessed it–mojitos!

Hard to tell from this photograph but there are teeny tiny green peppers forming on these plants.

I can’t wait to try the first sunburst squash–a first in the garden this year.

For some reason I’ve had poor luck with radishes in prior years. This year they’re surprising me! I keep picking them for salad, sowing more, and they just keep growing.

The peas are finally doing something. They better hurry up though as I need the space they’re in for the delicata squash plants that getting bigger every day.

As I tend the garden and survey the bounty before me it’s easy to forget that I actually spent a few restless nights a few months ago worrying about how the garden would do this year. We’re in a new plot and I heard from a few people who say the prior plot stewards weren’t big on nourishing the soil. It appears that the early spring compost and steer manure we applied, combined with the vermicompost tea I apply regularly, is feeding the soil so it can feed the plants so the plants can feed us. You’ve got to love that.

In other garden news we delivered five tomato and two pepper plants to our daughter in Prince George over the weekend. That leaves two plants that I’ve kept here at the house just to prove to the naysayers that one can grow tomato plants here. The little deer-proof garden we put in the back yard is doing what it intended as the onions, squash, and herb continue to do well. More on that project later.

The weather prognosticators are telling us we’re heading to an extreme heat wave later this week. Awesome. Seems like the old-time scorching-hot-and-dryKamloops summers are returning and we love it!