Mid-Summer Garden Tour @ Redwoodshire

We've already enjoyed Rhubarb, lettuces, & sweet peas, and are now into green & wax beans, blueberries and raspberries.  We picked our first zucchini this week and have many more coming!  Our bush beans are in full production, and the pole beans are just starting to flower- which means green beans until the Fall for this household.  Here are a few photos of the fruit growing on each of the plants.

CORN:  Our little plot of corn is quite tall- taller than the farmer's corn field across the road.  If you look closely you can see the corn tassels coming out of the top of some of the corn stalks.  The Laird tells me this is how they cross pollinate.

Close up of the corn tassels

SUMMER SQUASH:  The Laird planted the zucchini and summer squash in the same plot and mixed them up.  The two plants look very similar.  So until the flowers started growing their fruit, we were unsure which plants were which.

ZUCCHINI:  Here is a big juicy zucchini flower.  I have heard that they are edible- just fry them up.  We may have to look into it and give it a try just to see what they taste like.

Our zucchini & summer squash plants are quite impressive for size.  Due to the amount of space they have to grow (in contrast to our tiny city garden) and the abundance of sunshine each day, they are thriving.  We've picked our first 3 zucchini this week.

This photo was taken a few days ago.  Today I imagine he was one of the lucky ones to get picked.

CUCUMBER:  We've never grown cucumbers before, but we buy them for salads all the time.  The flowers have been blooming for a couple weeks.  This is the first fruit I have spotted for the cucumbers.

TOMATOES:  The tomato plants are huge!  We have beefsteak and cherry plants.  About 90% of the plants are cherry tomatoes, since we lost our first transplant of seedlings due to frost.  Our remaining beefsteak plants are smaller because they seeds were directly sown into the garden, a few weeks after the seedlings had already been growing inside.

GREEN BEANS:  Tons of green beans, that will continue producing for  the rest of the summer.  Currently we are picking from our bush bean plants.  There are flowers blooming on the pole bean varieties, so it's only a matter of time before the bean count increases.  We're already getting behind in our freezing, as we cannot keep up with the abundance of beans growing.

PEPPERS:  We have both sweet and hot varieties growing.  Here is a photo of the first flower on one of the pepper plants.  We aren't sure which plants are which, so it will be a surprise as we continue to watch them grow.  The plants look great!  Pepper plants are much slower in maturing and producing fruit, than so many of the other garden vegetable plants.  So be sure to appreciate the bell peppers you eat, they take time to grow.  

CANTALOUPE:  Our first set of seeds sown, were dug up by chipmunks.  Therefore, the plants may be a little behind.  Currently the plant is still growing, and flowers/ fruit are yet to come.

THE GARDEN:  Remember the early photos of the Redwoodshire "Garden Emerging"?  Well this is what it looks like in mid-summer.  Don't mind the weeds, they are super hard to keep up with.  The upper tier:  foreground going back- lettuce, peas, tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe.

lower tier: carrots, green beans, cucumbers, squash & zucchini, kale, peas, corn (Three Sisters)

Close up of the lower tier, where you can see green/wax beans, then squash/ zucchini, then corn

And this concludes this session of the Garden Tour at Redwoodshire.  Updates coming in a few weeks.