Garden 3.0

I feel like I have still yet to make up for my terrible blogging habits over the last few months (an overflow of posts and then... nothing).  Case in point:  It's 11 days into June, and I have yet to let out a peep about our summer garden that we planted two months ago.  Well, I'm making up for it now!

Here's a layout of our garden this year. 

Last week I counted 23 tomato plants, 5 mystery squash fruits, and 20 tomatoes waiting to ripen.  Mmmm!  See the bottom of the post for a picture of our mystery squash.


I mentioned last year that we used homegrown compost to amend our soil, and we did that again this year.  Here's my awesomeincredibleamazing stepdad tilling our soil in early April to loosen things up for us.  Did I mention his birthday is Wednesday?  Happy early birthday.  :-)

I then added our compost, which I need to write up a post about.

And put our soaker hoses back in (one bit the dust thanks to a little weedeater action, so we had to buy another hose).  You can see the compost bin (and some eggshells that hadn't yet broken down) in the background.  That's oregano in the foreground that my stepdad was able to salvage and replant.  It's again taken over that corner of the garden.

Here's our garden after about a month:

Tiiiiiny plants!  Just a week later, here it is again:

Courtesy of this post on Dollar Store Crafts (I also pinned it here), Mr. Great Indoors and I decided to try something new with our tomato cages this year.  Our first garden used the clothesline twine as horizontal supports and tied the heavy tomato branches to multiple vertical twines.  Last year, we tried tomato supports that were basically just straight pieces of metal (I can't remember what they were called, but we weren't impressed). So we took the bamboo tomato cage and ran with it. Here's a cage in our tomato bucket (also trying this for the first time since we don't have enough square feet in our garden).

And our tomato cage in the garden, which we modified to a square to cover both plants.  I should mention there's a place where we hike on a regular basis that has a stand of bamboo.

(Take a peek at all those volunteer tomato plants to the left of the cage-- I counted twenty-one plants there last week!)

Here's a close up of the ties.  Mr. GI just used jute twine (thanks again to our redneck chandelier) wrapped around the vertical and horizontal supports.

We'll probably have a million tomatoes this summer, since we're growing tomato plants like they're weeds.  Like my bouquet o' tomato plants?

Enjoy some other highlights of our garden so far.  Our first harvest!

This was literally a handful of green beans.

Tomatoes, hurry up!!

This is our mystery squash.  Any guesses?  We're thinking (and hoping) pumpkin.

Week 9 (last Wednesday) in the garden.  Of course, Mr. GI mowed the next day but I didn't think to get a picture of the freshly mown (mowed?) yard.

What sort of harvest are you expecting from your garden this year?

Visit our garden page to read more about how our garden grows.