It’s been a long while since I last did a garden update post. Mainly because the garden got a little (or rather, a lot) out of control. We were sick for several weeks and then went on vacation, and the grass and weeds just grew crazy and took over the garden. Not fun to come back to. We’ve also had a few issues here and there with some of the plants, leading me to have a good bit of anxiety over the garden in general; the garden was so bad at one point I thought about just cutting it down and trying again next year. But thankfully, a few of our friends came and helped clean things up one day, and they did a great job. We’re really grateful to them for helping us get on top of garden things again.

You can see the little plot above still needs a bit more weeding, but considering it was FULL of weeds and grass when we got back from vacation, it’s look so, so much better now. The California Poppies may be one of my new favorite flowers now. They’re just such a lovely color. And the rose bush has actually had a few blooms, which was a nice surprise. The rosemary is looking great, too, and my Maegan, my sister-in-law and the resident plant expert, says it might bloom. Sadly, though, it looks like the Bachelor’s Buttons failed to sprout.

(Please forgive me for the random and vast changes in exposure picture to picture. I’m using a different camera than normal and I also didn’t have much time when I took these pictures.)

Above, you can see Maegan’s row of sunflowers. They’ve been doing well and having those blooms just outside has been lovely. Sunflowers have a way of just making you feel happy. You can see some are a bit droopy, so we might tie them up to keep them from bending over.

We’ve had a few issues with neighbors not being very nice or courtious, and Tanner noticed a couple days ago while he was driving home that someone had broken off all the blooms from the road-facing side of the sunflower row. They even left one just laying on the ground. Frustrating.

This is a little row of hydrangea Maegan got and planted for us. Tanner and some of our friends added the mulch and the border of rocks.

I was most excited about having our own blueberries, but I think they just happened to produce the most fruit when we were away on vacation. A little sad. Since we’ve been back I’ve picked less than a cup of them.

And here’s the raised bed. You can see how especially the tomatoes got a little crazy. More on that in a bit.

Okra is finally growing and it’s looking really good. We did lose one of our okra plants because I accidentally uprooted it while dealing with the overgrowth of grass and weeds. We’re getting plenty of okra from the three remaining plants, though, so it’s not an issue.

When the weed growth was at it’s worst, we had issues with the squash plants getting what we think was wet rot. Since being de-weeded they’ve been doing better again. We have three squash plants now as my friend happened to pull up the sad little one that wasn’t doing too well, anyway, while weeding. Again, we’ve been getting plenty of squash anyway, so it’s not been an issue.

Our cantaloupe has been doing well and Tanner just picked our first one the other day. Although since I’ve gotten older I’m much more a fan of honeydew than cantaloupe, I still enjoy it and we’re excited to try ours and see how it tastes.

Now for our poor tomato plants, although maybe poor isn’t the best word because they’re kind of thriving too much, haha. They got big suddenly and grew like crazy and Tanner and I couldn’t think of any idea why. We’d never seen tomato plants get like this.

Well, the day everyone was over helping us out, Maegan realized why. And it was such a handface, “We’re idiots,” ridiculously hilarious-because-it’s-so-dumb moment. There are these things called suckers that grow on tomato plants, all they are is little side shoot that grow at the base of an already full branch. You’re supposed to remove these. We knew this at the beginning of having our garden but somehow forgot it completely. Oh well. The consolation is that most of the time leaving on the suckers will kill the plant, but ours are doing just fine and we’re getting plenty of fruit from them. So funny.

Our cucumber did really well for a while and we got some really nice fruit from them for several weeks. Although we’re still getting cucumber from the plants, it’s not as much as before and growth is slower with cukes sometimes being funny shapes and not so aesthetically pleasing. We think they might just be getting too dry (our backyard does get full sun most of the day) and Tanner thinks we might have damaged a few during weeding, as well.

Oh, and strawberries kind of got swallowed up in all the overgrowth and the tomatoes, as well, and though they are still producing, they never gave us enough to store any strawberries up or make jams or anything. We’ve also had a few peppers here and there, but they’ve been a little funky shaped, and again we lost a few pepper plants while people were weeding, but we still have plenty left (If you remember, Tanner accidentally got a bit more pepper than we needed.) :)

Also, our little bed around the mailbox still needs to be weeded, but the dianthus there is still looking good.

Hope you have a beautiful day!