The progress

May 7th:

May 21st:

May 31st:

June 10th:

June 19th:

July 2nd:

This morning:

Wow. Last night, dinner was a giant salad with steamed beets, potatoes, radishes, and more of that green goddess dressing. The only ingredients not from the garden were a dollop of yogurt and a squeeze of lemon. 

The peas are almost finished, and will be ripped out probably tomorrow or Friday and replaced with a big fat bed of carrots, beets, and parsnips, for fall and winter eating. The broccoli is still cranking away. The raspberries are coming in. The ZUCCHINI, holy crap. I picked the first eight at just a little bigger than thumb-size, and threw them on the grill the other night, to circumvent the tidal wave of behemoths I know is coming. Time to sharpen my food processor blade and shred, shred, shred.

Something is definitely eating my peppers: little unsuspicious-looking brown leaf-hoppery guys. They gut the leaves then sever them from the plant, and make all the flowers fall off, too. I'm looking up row covers as soon as I publish this.

Half my tomato plants, and most of my cukes and winter squash, are stunted-- and the only thing I can think is that I shouldn't have tilled in those hickory leaves. Hickory leaves have a biotoxin, like walnut leaves, that keeps other plants from growing around it. It's an anti-competition strategy. Some plants are immune to the toxin, and some aren't. Last fall when I was swamped with leaves and trying to figure out what to do, I decided to chance it. Obviously, the green beans and broccoli and potatoes have no sensitivity to the stuff, but other crops do. The good news is, the toxin gets broken down by soil microbes, this fall I'm not putting any hickory leaves on my garden, and next year everything should be okay. 

A garden is always a win some, lose some proposition. Fortunately to me, whatever winners there are make up, in spades, the disappointment of the losers.
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