Garden Updates 6-28-09

Just a few little garden updates I would like to share with everyone. These were taken last month and well, we all know that I'm a bad, bad blogger for not posting them till now! Maybe, I will get this months photos up before the end of the month:)

The fabulous Turkey Foot Fig. I'm not sure how well this little tree will take KY winters, so I have it in a pot on the back deck. Makes it easy for me to bring it into the garage for winter. BTW, the fig pictured was eaten a few weeks ago, but don't worry! Fig trees give you fruit twice a year:) Once in the middle of summer and again in late summer!

This is a little over a month ago of our tomatoes. Since this picture, our vines runneth way up and over the tall cages. Tomatoes pictured are Goliath, Hawaiian Pineapple, Mr Stripey and Cherokee Purple.

Bill's big summer project. He built this lovely deck all on his own. He does beautiful work, but dang is he ever so particular about everything being absolutely PERFECT!

I'm not a big fan of buying Wally-world anything, but my Granny gets her prescriptions filled there and when I walked by these unique echinacea plants.... Well, I just couldn't resist!

And our wonderful and rapidly producing cucumbers! We have encouraged our cucks to weave in and out of the lattice. Makes picking time that much easier:)

Our Garden Groweth Over!

Yes, indeed it does.

This morning, my neighbor came over and said his wife told him that we must be doing a whole lot of fertilizing. I laughed and said nope. With a sly little grin in told him all about the dirt mix I had going on. Some of the dirt is of course dirt we have dug up from around the yard, but the trick is to add several different kinds of dirt to your soil to improve it. Especially if you live in a subdivision like we do.

See when a subdivision is developed, not only do they smooth the landscape to make it easier to divide up the lots and build houses on, but they also cart off all of the lovely and wonderful topsoil that help our sweet and tangy green things grow! For this new house, I used equal parts of bagged manure compost, topsoil, sandy drainage soil and potting soil to fill the raised bed Bill created for me.

Our cucumbers have been growing like wild for quite some time now. Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of our fabulous yellow squash as it has been attacked by an army of vine borers! Luckily though, we are becoming a tad tired of butter fried squash, steamed squash and several other squash-a-licious recipes, so there won't be too many tears shed when this last plant keels over. But, they will be missed.

But our prize and joy, the lovely tomatoes just started to ripen in the past few weeks. Shown in the picture are, Brandywine, Hawaiian Pineapple, Persimmon, and Goliath. Some of these tomatoes we started from seed back in late January. Let me tell you our mater plants are well over 5 foot tall and pushing to 6 feet! I am disappointed in the Bonnie Purple Cherokee that I bought at a local store. So far, it has not performed any where near as well as our maters. There is one mater which should be ready to pick tomorrow or the next day, but the plant as a whole is so dang small! Barely 3 feet. Perhaps it will surprise me by the end of summer:)