22/52: Garden Bounty

Apparently the only pictures I took last week were of the garden? Well, enjoy pretty pictures of produce! This week our CSA families got eggs, lettuce, kale (curly and flat), flowers (columbine, sage, and painted daisies), french breakfast radishes, herbs (peppermint, oregano, and sage), and nasturtiums and Johnny jump-ups to plant (since both have edible flowers). Our sugar snap peas are starting to be ready for harvest, though the vines are starting to dry up and I think we'll only get one good week of harvest from them now that the weather is so hot! This year we started them in planting mix inside half-PVC pipes so that we could give them a head start against the weeds, and it worked wonderfully! I think next year we're going to start them even earlier though, so that we have a better chance of a good harvest before the weather gets too hot.

I'm keeping an eye on the lettuce, which is still doing great but is likely to start bolting soon! Hopefully the romaine will form heads after I thin it out this week, because it's definitely looking like it's getting started. The cabbage plants are HUGE but don't seem to be forming heads quite yet... Broccoli is starting to form heads, cauliflower is showing no signs (this might be the last time we try cauliflower because this has happened before and I don't know why!!), onions and beets are coming along nicely, spinach has bolted... Some tomatoes and tomatilloes are flowering, as well as a few pepper plants. I'm so excited for our summer harvest!

We've got eggplant and squash under row covers to try to keep the bugs off and it seems to be doing the trick, thankfully! And this year we finally have enough asparagus growing that we've had enough to use for a side dish for one meal a week. Some gardening is VERY slow going, but it's worth the investment of time!

The kids helped me plant okra and sunflowers last week, with some lettuce around the okra to help crowd out the weeds and theoretically it will get shaded by the okra so it shouldn't have issues with the summer heat. We'll see, it's an experiment... Andrew has put in a ton of corn, melons, and winter squash, and every week we're getting more and more planted and TRYING to stay on top of the weed situation. But I guarantee that come July or August, we'll be drowning in tomatoes and weeds.