Garden is In....Better Late Than Never Edition

We finally got the gardens planted about 10 days before the company started arriving last week. It was STILL May but just barely!
I am pretty worthless when it comes to digging and planting.  It's all I can do to harvest.
#1 Son wasn't here long enough to dig up my gardens this year and Hubs had been laid up with medical issues so we are late getting going this season.

I took this photo about a week ago.....

 It's green beans(vining)in the back row and radishes in the front row.
Hubs says the middle row is collards but I am not sure of that.  It's a 20 foot row and he planted it heavily.  I didn't think I had enough collard seed to have this much sprouting!lol

We'll see later on what he actually planted I guess.

No photo of the front yet but it's tomato plants, yellow squash and colorful bell peppers.

And here is what I've got going on the dog run.....

I've tried to get rid of this eyesore on Craigslist but no one seems to have the cash to take it off our hands right now.  Since the male beagle passed away, the female just doesn't want to be out there in the good weather.  So it sits unused taking up real estate in the backyard.
So I have hung gutters on it.

I'm copying my friend Brenda in Maine.....

These are the salad gutters hanging on her shed from a couple years ago.

I can't nail gutters onto my shed(besides, it doesn't get enough sunshine anyway), so I used the dog run and we wired them on.

And the greens are starting to come up now......

We've got a 3rd gutter piece to hang up yet and plant.  What's great about this is I can harvest without killing my back AND it keeps the resident yard rabbits out of my salad!
At least until they learn to scale chain link fencing....

So now we are keeping the dog run.
Might have to expand this gutter thing and hang some on the back end of the run too.

Sluggy

This Year's Garden...1st Update

I know I haven't blogged much(if any!)about our garden this year.
I don't know....I guess I am just not much 'into' the garden this year.

Here's a shot of the side bed from April 30th when we were just getting to cleaning out the beds and prepping the soil....

Usually we have nothing to harvest until mid July at the earliest because of our climate/zone.
Well, the 2 weeks of unseasonably HOT weather in early June sped up the rate of germination and growth a LOT!
We've been picking radishes for weeks!

I've got them coming out of my ears at this point.lol

And here is a shot of the same side bed taken two weeks ago....

A few tomato plants, some squashy/cuke type plants(I don't even remember what kinds....see what I mean about I'm not into it this year!lol) and a few bean plants.

We are having a devil of a time getting the bean plants to grow.  We've planted different kinds(bush and vine type)in all the different bed locations with little success.  Hubs sewed some into the wooden barrels also and those were doing great!
Until a critter found them and had a munchfest. bleh

 Hubs thinks one of the resident bunnies is decimating the bean plants since we know that the bunnies have jumped INTO the wooden barrels in the past.  But if the bunnies are doing this, explain why just the tops of the bean plants are being eaten, like someone taking a weedwacker to the plants and leaving the lower/bottom foliage and plant intact?  I think it's a taller animal, like a deer, walking through the yard and eating the tops of the bean plants.
Either way, our bean plants are not going to produce any beans this year.  *sigh*

Doesn't this shot look very lush and promising?
It is.
But it's all WEEDS not veggies!lol

And we got our first blossom on the eggplant plants 2 weeks ago.  See the lavender flower on the left in the photo?  I don't know if it will produce a fruit however since I haven't see any bees around yet to pollinate stuff.  The tomato plants in the backyard bed have golf ball sized tomatoes as of this week so I know the bees are around.
I hope I don't have to resort to playing bee and go from bloom to bloom with a paintbrush on the eggplant and squash blossoms. ;-)

Here's something I do that you might find unusual.
Lettuces are an early Spring crop.  You are suppose to plant it early and it dies back by mid summer usually.
Since we can't plant an early crop of lettuces/greens while the weather is still coolish here due to our climate, I sew the lettuce seeds among the cuke and squash plant seeds at the same time I sew the cuke/squash seeds.
This way, by the time the weather gets too warm for the lettuces(the hot weather that makes your lettuce wilt, dry up and die), the squash leaves have grown large enough to shield the lettuce from full sun.  The lettuce continues to grow well into August.

Here's my squash type plants....

 But move the leaves back and look closer....

 See my salad greens!

That's my diversity garden bed. 8-)

How is your garden doing?

Sluggy