Garden Tuesday

As I think I've mentioned before, we garden.  We garden year-round, actually.  Tuesday seems to be the day on my summer schedule when I do my garden maintenance.  So, here are some very green scenes from Garden Tuesday.  It's looking a little puny thanks to the absolute lack of rain at my house.

Some things are just sprouting for a second round--damned grasshoppers ate all of the beets and spinach!  But we have our first muscadine berries on the vine and that puny cucumber vine in the front of the pic is working on 13 more perfect-size for pickles cucumbers. We have 23 tomato plants that need to hurry up and grow something! Blueberries are in the back by the tomatoes, and there's this monster gourd vine that sprung up from nowhere growing behind the tomatoes and into the back yard.  Of course, when this plant was planted and coddled in the garden, it wouldn't grow jack.  Now I have three or four lovely gourds that could ultimately become little bird houses growing wild. The sweet potato vines that have taken over the garden had also better put out some awesome sweet potatoes--grew those from "seed" from last year's sweet potatoes. 

 

It was also a good day to harvest some herbs (rosemary, sage, oregano, and German thyme across the back of the pic).  No lemon thyme this year, and the lime basil is struggling,  The cinnamon basil and Thai basil are doing very well, though. In the front yard, the pineapple sage is going wild.  I might even, after planting #3, get some carrots.  Funny how one year you can grow more of something than you ever wanted to grow, like carrots, but the next year you have nothing.  Beets are sprouting, too.

 

The gardeniing "experts" all said that calendula, which is a lovely daisy-looking flower of many colors, told me that grasshoppers wouldn't come near the garden if it had calendula and cilantro growing throughout.  Uh, newsflash!  I killed 3 of those suckers in the calendula this morning!  My daughter and I harvested our first-ever crop of calendula seeds.  I know, they kind of look like a pile of worms, but I'm so excited!