This year’s garden, as of early July!

I noticed a quick spurt of overcast sky a few days ago and took advantage by photographing my garden!  I planted most (from starters) 3 weeks ago, and most are doing very well!!  With the hot, sunny days we’ve been having this week, they’ve actually grown quite a bit since I shot these – it’s so much fun to see them every day, how much they’ve changed from the day before…

It’s my second year attempting to grow food, and last year resulted in mostly fail (due at least partly to the terrible weather last summer); I am still very much learning and don’t expect major success, but things are looking healthy so far at least!

So, let me give you a tour.  Starting at one end, with this planter – 2 tomatoes and some garlic chives over there in the corner:

There’s an early girl tomato plant, a sweet 100 cherry tomato, and then I’d thought I could squeeze 3 tomatoes into this planter, but I didn’t want to hurt them by putting them too close, so I stuck the chives there instead.  (The upside down boxes are to try to stop some neighborhood cat from using this planter as a litter box! Dumb cat!)

Next is the cucumber planter:

I have 1 burpless, 1 pickling, and 1 slicing…

They are already doing extremely well compared to my cucumber experience last summer – I have high hopes that I’ll get to try some picking this year!

Next to that one are these two big pots (all the planters and pots were left in our yard by the previous owners) – I have an eggplant and one more tomato in there:

The eggplant seems healthy, though I don’t really know how it’s supposed to be looking at this point… and this tomato plant – juliet grape tomatoes – is crazy super leafy, especially around the bottom.  I might try pruning a little once I see where the flowers are starting to pop up.

And lastly are these 3 narrow planters:

The long one is full of mostly lettuce – “gourmet blend” – and I know it’s closer together than it’s supposed to be, but I had very limited space to work with, and the lettuce came in a box of 6, so I just put them all in there:

One of the above pots used to be filled with tons of oregano, sage, and tarragon, and a tiny bit of thyme, from the previous owners – I was keeping it until I decided it was a waste of a nice pot for me, since I rarely used any of the herbs last year and I didn’t see that changing this year.  So, I took out most of them (left a couple bags of them free on the corner for neighbors to take), and attempted to transplant some of the oregano (since I do use that occasionally) and the tiny bit of thyme that was living.  That was a few weeks ago, and they are both still living, so I guess the transplanting worked!  Those 2 are on the sides of this planter, and I put a new sweet basil plant in the middle:

And then my strawberries!  These two strawberry plants (quinalt and another variety I don’t remember) in the small planter popped back to life from last summer and have been doing okay, but not great.  And then I added one more, a bigger plant (tristar), in the same long planter with the lettuce:

Does anyone have advice for growing strawberries?  My main problem is that they’re ripening when they’re still bitsy:

Most of my ripe strawberries are the size of large blueberries.  Might I be giving them either too much or not enough water?  Or maybe there’s a problem with the soil?  I really don’t know what I’m doing, so any tips would be much appreciated!  Thanks!

So that’s my garden so far… I can’t wait till I get to start eating the tomatoes!  And I may get to have a whole salad from my own yard, if all goes well!  If I do end up experimenting with pickling, I’ll let you know how it goes!  Ok that’s enough excitement for one post!