2012 Garden Update

Here we are in mid-June and the garden is coming along, slowly, but surely. My experiment with heirloom seeds, purchased two years ago, failed miserably for year three unfortunately. I tried to keep the leftover seeds dry, cool and in darkness, but I experienced very little germination from them this year. The first two years produced well for us, anyway.

We bought new seeds and planted cilantro, green pole beans, marigolds (they're a great deterrent for some insect pests) and some green onions. This was in addition to the peppers—regular green and Cubanelle hot ones—cukes, peas and two varieties of tomatoes in the ground.

Check out that monster raspberry patch beyond the veggie garden.
Someone had better do a much more thorough pruning job on them this Fall.

The good news is that we had fourteen "volunteer" tomato plants appear! Since we save all kitchen veggie scraps to add to our compost pile, obviously some tomato seeds survived from last year's crop. We'll see how well they do, in addition to the 8 plants we purchased, but so far they're doing pretty well, as evidenced by this little guy, below:

If most of the tomato plants survive and produce well, I may have to open
a little produce stand down on the street corner.

This little volunteer didn't like the way I dug it up and transplanted it to an open area in the garden. Oh well, you can't win them all. 

We have nice blossoms on our two green pepper plants.

I know my little sister in southern Texas is chuckling at these immature plantings. She's already harvested and canned green beans this year! What a difference 1,200 or so miles can make in one's growing season.