Garden Update

So, here is an update on our garden.  (For a reminder of what our garden looked like a month and a half ago, click here).We have held the slugs at bay for the moment, though with the wet rainy weather, they've started coming back out, and our garden is flourishing.   As you can see from our pictures, the squash and zucchini are doing wonderfully.  We've harvested some small yellow squash and zucchinis (we like them small so they don't have very many seeds).  We've just started to get string beans last week, but we've had sugar snap peas for a few weeks now - they are just about done now.  The girls absolutely love the sugar snaps, especially Liliana.  She would go outside to help Heather pick some for dinner and would eat more than she would pick.  

The cucumbers are just starting to produce and have just gotten tall enough to put the netting up so that they will climb.  The cucumbers and squash just love to climb (as evident in our first picture.  The last picture shows our tomato plants, which have taken off!  We have loads of green tomatoes - we planted 4 different types - cherry, and then two other kinds that I don't remember the names of, but Heather could tell you.  The green peppers, which are just in front of the tomatoes, have little tiny buds that are the beginnings of peppers.  The neat thing is that we started all of these from seeds ourselves.  We do have a couple of seedlings that Heather bought at a farmer's market in town that have a head start on our plants (I didn't include pictures of these).  We've already picked a ripe tomato and there are several small peppers on the pepper plant.  Just a note, one the last picture, the front box is just about empty because we just moved and replanted it with lettuce, carrots, and onions.

Our one failure is our potato patch.  The spot where we put the potatoes is much too shaded and potatoes (as we later read and witnessed ourselves) really need full sunlight.  We'll see if we get any potatoes from them, but we're not holding our breaths and will probably chalk this one up to a learning experience, and thankfully a fairly inexpensive one at that.

So, that's where we are about a month and a half after our first garden post.  The nice thing about our raised beds is that there is very little tending/weeding, mostly because we used fresh compost.  We do have to pull out the occasional maple shoot, thanks to several large maples nearby.  We definitely recommend this type of gardening to others, especially those with limited space.  The only thing that we would do differently is to put mulch around the boxes to help keep the slugs away, which was what one farmer at the farmer's market suggested.