Food!

There are all types of bees and wasps all over my garden, as well as little white butterflies.  Clearly the flowers worked to bring in the pollinators!  Success!  I love finding these furry bumblebees covered in pollen.  Totally tickles me!

And I really love how rich and beautiful these sunflowers.   I planted so many from seed from so many places, I have no idea what I'm looking at, but I like it.

There are roughly 3,291 tomatoes out there, and about a dozen are nicely showing this lovely color.  I don't know what to do with 3,291 tomatoes, but I'll figure it out later.

The "pumpermelon" turned out to be a butternut squash.  Last night I picked it, sliced it, baked it in the oven with some butter and a bit of brown sugar, and ate half of it.  Tonight I'll have the other half.  It was delish! 

This is the first ripe tomato of the 3,291 on the vines right now.  I had it with cheddar cheese and scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning and it was fantastic.  I can probably eat the same thing every morning until October and not get tired of it.  Thankfully I have enough tomatoes to do so.

Wild!

There are tomatoes everywhere!  I'm going to have hundreds!  I don't know hundreds of people to give them to, so the dozens I do know are going to get scads!  Holy guacamole!  And holy salsa!  And holy tomato sauce!

In some areas they're cropping up 6-10 on a single stem, like grapes.  I don't remember buying grape or cherry tomatoes, but this whole process has been a big bucket of surprises and things I didn't know I planted, so perhaps I'm looking at cherry tomatoes.

There are pear-shaped tomatoes, and they could be San Marzanos, which would be awesome.

These big, beefy tomatoes just look so delicious, I don't know if I can wait until they ripen.

OMG, BLTs!

So many little guys.  There are going to be a lot of salads in my future again.

Peek-a-boo!  Cauliflowers are coming up!

Imma eat the hell outta you guys, with cheese!

ONIONS!  They're coming right out of the ground!  I understand I am supposed to leave them in until the greens start to wither and go brown, and they are still strong and green so the onions will continue to bake in the dirt for a while longer.

Yellow onions are a couple weeks behind the red ones, which makes sense because I planted them a couple weeks behind too.  I guess they don't play catch-up.

BAM!  So many red onions, it's amazing.

My bro has dubbed this a "pumpermelon", because what I planted in this space was watermelon, pumpkins, cukes, and what I thought were cantaloupe but turned out to be yellow squash.  They are definitely not cukes or yellow squash, so they must either be watermelon or pumpkins.

And they're crawling out of the beds and growing across my lawn.  So eager to spread!

Yesterday I woke up and found that the tomatoes had grown so much that they uprooted the tomato cages and pulled them over.  I had to pound some stakes into the ground to help prop up the cages, with the hopes that they'd keep the tomatoes upright.  Makes no sense because these were all supposed to be determinate tomatoes, limited in growth.  They lied.

Here's a stake holding up the cages, with millions of tomatoes coming out.  Was it a mistake to fertilize these guys a couple weeks ago?

This is two tomato plants, weighed down heavily with tomatoes.  The cages should've been quadruple the size and maybe then they may have been able to contain these plants, but the ones I have didn't stand a chance.

From behind, with multiple stakes propping them up, they're still heavily leaning and wanting to take the cages out again.  I feel them.  I know their struggle to grow and thrive and bloom with all their heart.  I get it.  I don't want to hold them back, but they'll break and rot if I don't.

What a crazy adventure!

Surprise!

Let there be cucumbers!  This is a tiny one, actually, about an inch and a half long.

Look how tiny they start out!  And what's with the weird, pokey spikes?  So odd.

My cantaloupe turned out to be yellow squash.  Interesting.  I'll take it!

There are many more yellow squash to come!

And even more!

The baby peas are just so darned cute!

I need nitrogen, though.  The leaves are yellowing from the bottom up.  Poor things.

The tops of my lettuce are neat, which are probably 3 feet tall, lying on their sides, though.

The spread.

The sunflowers are catching up in height to the tomatoes.  Good job, guys!

And I had to buy trellises for the cukes, which is when I also discovered there are pumpkins in the yellow-squash-that-used-to-be-cantaloupe bed.  This is the ultimate surprise bed, I guess.  What fun!

Butterflies, Tomatoes and Beasts

These little white butterflies have been all over my broccoli lately.  I planted wildflowers that were supposed to attract butterflies, but they completely ignore the wildflowers and spend all their time on the broccoli.  It's interesting.  I never thought of broccoli as something to draw in the butterflies.

So cute.  Okay, so this one is on the wildflowers, but it was only briefly and it went back to the broccoli.

It's a miracle!  There are baby tomatoes!  They are everywhere!

But the real beast in the garden was this obscene zucchini.

For scale, take a look at that monster. 

And I ate it!  With another zucchini, baked with tomatoes and cheese.  This is my new favorite dish.  The other thing is a pork cube steak with green tomato slices and red onions.  It was okay.  The zucchini was to die for!

Lush

Shit has gone wild.  Wild!

The onions are huge lining both sides, the sunflowers in the back are doing well, the wildflowers in the front are starting to bloom, and the damn lettuce up the middle is feeding all my friends and coworkers.  Some marigolds are hiding in there and little nasturtiums.  I think the flowers are blocked from sun.

Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage and peas in the back.  Next year, more peas!!

Extra broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage.  And weeds.  Screw them.  I'm tired.

The tomatoes are up to my shoulders!  I can't even imagine them getting bigger but I'm sure they will.  Do you trim back tomatoes?  These are supposed to be determinate varieties.  How do I keep them under control??  I can't find the peppers anymore and I'm not too concerned.  Whatever.  The basil was good in a caprese salad the other day, and it'll rock in some spaghetti sauce.

These are my insane zucchinis and pumpkins.  The zucchinis aren't doing well because the fruit sits on the wet ground (I can't remember a single day in the last 2 months when it didn't rain) and rot, so that's not cool.  Hopefully adding some more mulch today will help.

Cantaloupes and cukes.  I still have to trellis up my cukes, but they're growing happily across the bed regardless.

It's a lush garden and I'm quite proud of how successful it's turning out.  Really exciting!

Confession

I went in the garden, picked a pea pod off the vine, ate it right there.  It was sooooooo good and sweet.

That is all.

Pea Pods Paradise

They've gotten tall and they bloomed flowers, but I hadn't realized they also grew pea pods!  So exciting to find them!

There is one onion about to bloom a flower, too.  I can't remember if I'm supposed to leave the flower on or take it off so the plant can concentrate on growing the onion instead of the bloom.  I'll have to look that up.  For now, it's kind of like something from War of the Worlds.