Growing slowly

Several of my most faithful readers have asked for an update on our garden. I'm sorry it has taken me so long to finally meet your requests. Honestly, after I replanted my garden, I was a little sick of it. I had spent a lot of time out there, and it all looked pathetic. Over the last several weeks I have gone out there every once in a while to water it, and maybe spend 5 minutes spraying some weeds. It wasn't until this morning, that I finally really got out there to do some more work on it.

I am happy to report that most of my plants are still alive, and slowly growing. I did loose both my cucumber plants, and 2 of my zucchini plants. I found the seeds leftover from last year, and planted some of those today. My beans are also finally big enough, so I could mulch them. They had by far the most weeds in my whole garden. After the frost I thought for sure that I had also lost my cauliflower and brussel sprouts. Luckily I didn't yank them out of the ground, because apparently only the leafs died, but the core survived. I only lost 1 of each plant.

Speaking of weeds, I have a silly confession to make. When I put the goat-poo hay and the leafy mulch down, I believed that would result in no weeds. Oh was I wrong! Grass is especially hardy, and came right through the hay. Also, in some spots where the hay is decayed a bit more, grass is growing straight out of the hay. The upside: only relatively few weeds, and most of them that do come through, are pretty easy to pull. (except the grass that was already there and now coming through). There is also one kind of weed, and I have no idea what the name is, that came through just like the grass, and seemed to be thriving on the poo in the hay. Those got the roundup treatment! And then there are some spot where I evidently didn't put enough hay/mulch down, and as a result many more weeds were coming up. I pulled those weeds, and added more mulch.

Also, I am so happy to say that I saw the first flowers. There's a beautiful yellow one, on a squash plant. Several tomato plants also have some little flowers. While looking at my tomato plants, I had to do a double take. It appears that my roma tomato plant actually has a tomato on it!! It's still really little, and green, but that's major!

I have discovered that onion plants prefer to have leafy mulch over hay mulch (I used leafy mulch on almost everything, but I ran out, so switched to clean hay). Half of them have hay, and half leafy mulch. The half with the leafy mulch are clearly bigger and greener than the other half.

The garden still doesn't look very impressive to me, but at least it's not dead. I thought it would be fun to mark where everything is located. Maybe, when the plants get bigger, it will look more green, but for now you can seen some of the plants (click on the image for a larger view)