June in the Garden

I was looking back at the pics of the garden from a month or so ago and was surprised at how much has changed.  Our asparagus continues shooting up feathery spikes which we need to straighten up so they are not taking over the garden path.  The peas are finally starting to produce but it’s a bit of a slow start.  The snow peas are kicking butt in the production department although some of them are covered in tiny bumps and I don’t know why.  The garden peas are having some trouble.  They are an heirloom variety known as Thomas Laxton and the pods currently are maturing as mini-pods (they only have 1-3 peas in them) which is frustrating if you have to shell them to eat them!  I have to do a bit of research to solve these issues.  The melons have all germinated and are happy but not big enough to be climbing yet.  The cucumbers took us by surprise because they have grown by leaps and bounds and we’ve already had to put in tomato cages for them.  The strawberries continue to try to give us goodies but we know we have to yank off runners and flowers so we can have a good crop next year.  The peppers are doing well, we even have a blossom on one.  Unfortunately a few transplants didn’t make it, so we have to supplement by picking up a few more plants at market this weekend.  The lettuces are really taking off, so salads are completely doable for us now – although salad dressing is another story altogether.  The carrots are growing nicely and I have to figure out when we can start harvesting those.  The cauliflower keeps getting munched by bugs so we are spraying them with an eco-friendly product we got from Lowe’s but it keeps raining and washing it off!  We put some zucchini out which is doing well along with some sunflowers that are trying their best to survive the transplant.  I wanted to just grow them from seed outside but something promptly dug up and ate the seeds the one time we tried that.  The spinach has pretty much all bolted before we could even really harvest anything which is a bit disappointing.  I guess we should have started those earlier.  The potatoes are growing nicely, although we haven’t completely filled their squares back up because the tub we were holding extra dirt in filled up with water (lids are definitely the way to go!), so our harvest may be a little smaller than it should be.  The tomatoes are growing nicely as well.  The struggle we are having is with beans.  They just don’t want to germinate for us!  We should have about 15 plants for each of the three varieties and currently our dry bean variety (appaloosa) only has one plant! I’ll be doing a replant this weekend and keeping my fingers crossed (third time’s the charm right?).  The onions are looking happy as always but we have had some bolting so we’ve been cutting off the flower stalks and hoping the bulbs are not affected.  The raspberries have probably doubled or tripled in size and are producing berries now – the yellow ones are the best!  I find myself battling the Morning Glories on a regular basis to keep my raspberry bushes healthy though and we have an anthill that has decided to target one of the bushes so a lot of the berries we try to harvest there are filled with bugs – yuck!  The harvests aren’t huge (roughly an ounce at a time) but keep in mind that these are first year plants.  The bird netting we put over them seems to be keeping away the birds and neighbors so we are keeping our fingers crossed that we will get the most out of our meager harvest.