June 13, 2010 After the Honeymoon

The wedding was a whirlwind of good food, good friends, and good beer in two beautiful locations followed by a relaxing few days at the beach. We couldn't have had a better time! Everything was perfect!  Now that were trying to get back to real life (and a full work week starting tomorrow) I spent some time in the garden and now getting a chance to update the blog.

One of our wedding presents was a drip irrigation system from my friend Tom.  He had it all set up, all I had to do was to unfurl the sub-main and add attach the drip line. So the Sunday after the wedding I weeded (it was much needed) and installed the irrigation system.  You can see the system in a couple of the pictures. It couldn't of come at a better time as a few days before the hose was ran over by the tractor making it a huge pain in the ass to water the garden.

Cucumber damage...

Purple and green beans damage...

While we were away the electric fence was left off. I had initially turned on Friday (6/4/10) to make sure none of the nephews zapped themselves. And then with wedding on Saturday and getting ready for the honeymoon at the beach I completly forgot about plugging it back in. Sometime in the last week a deer must have tested the fence, found it off, and then munched on every exposed leaf  hanging on the trellis.  Nothing else was touched, but all the beans and much of the cucumbers on the south side of the trellis were devastated.  I'm guessing that he only came through once because some of the plants have already started sprouting new leaves.  Needless to say, I'm going to be more vigilant about plugging in the fence for the rest of the season.

 

Peppers are looking great!  Although the peppers on the left are much smaller then the plants on the right.  The closest tomato plant near the shortest pepper is the Matt's Wild Cherry plant which has grown well outside the cage.  I'm pretty sure that it is shading out the closest pepper plants despite my best efforts to increase spacing.

Even the smaller pepper plants are already larger than the best plants from last year.  No peppers yet but all the plants have begun to flower.  Each plant has between two and three times as many flowers as last year.  It's a good sign!

 

After not being in the garden for a week I think the greatest difference that I immediately noticed were the tomatoes.  All of the plants have grown significantly and have flowers and green tomatoes. 

 

The first red tomato is on the Matt's Wild Cherry.  Even for cherry tomatoes the fruits on this plant are small, roughly the size of a nickle. I'll give this red one another day or two before I'm going to test it out.

This the big fruit on the Green Zebra plant.  You can already see the stripes forming.

I decided to pull the peas and lettuce today. The lettuce had bolted and tasted pretty bitter. We got quite a bit off of the pea plants and cooked them up for a delicious meal, but the plants have begun to yellow and remaining unpicked pods are better for seeds than for eating at this point.  The timing of the weather this year really messed up my spinach, peas, and lettuce.  That's how it goes I guess!

And finally a couple of cool pics from the garden...

Some bug posing inside a cracked scallion

One of the scallion flowers