I realize I have been slightly remiss in my garden posts this year. I mentioned what we had planted, but haven’t given any updates on how things are going. (Thanks for reminding me, Alexis!)

We’re midway through the growing season, and its going pretty well. So far, we have had a good crop of strawberries, lettuce, and our eternal chive plant.

As we expected, year 2 of the strawberries was much more productive than year 1. We got somewhere around 100 strawberries, and it seemed like we never failed to find more every time we went over there. Unfortunately, the ants also learned of our wonderful strawberry bounty, so we had some stiff competition for those berries. It’s actually kind of interesting; the ants locate a ripe berry and then mound up dirt all around it and sort of suck it into their home, whole. It seemed like it was going to be disastrous, but actually, the ants didn’t really get all that many berries. So we didn’t really do anything to try to control them, but it worked out okay. Maybe next year we might put some straw down so they can’t suck the berries underground. Overall, it was a very successful crop!

A few years ago we planted lettuce, and we had more than we could ever possibly use. This year is the same, however, we have one major improvement: no slugs! Our last lettuce was so sluggy, that it discouraged us from planting lettuce after that. However, this year is totally different. I don’t know why that is exactly, but there are a number of things that are different: we’re in a different location now (the other lettuce was at the old garden), we’re picking more in the heat of the day, rather than dawn or dusk, we have a different variety of lettuce, and it’s just simply a different year. The year we had the slugs really bad we had heard that everybody was having a slug problem. Maybe it was just a little more damp, who knows. Anyway, this year’s crop of lettuce has been amazingly successful, and we’ve been chowing down on some awesome salads.

Our other plants are looking good. Our tomato plants are growing out of control, and our peppers and eggplant look like they’re going to do well. Unfortunately, we did lose one tomato plant (that Mortgage Lifter I was so excited about). I’m not really sure what happened there, it just never took off. Maybe we didn’t water it enough right after we planted it. I think we were gone for a few days around that time.

We hadn’t gotten around to planting the pole beans, even though we had the poles in place for them to climb. We lost the seeds somewhere and never did find them. Finally we bought some new seeds and planted them. We were worried we were planting them late, so we used my grandma’s trick of soaking them for a few days first to get them to sprout before planting them. They are just coming up now, so hopefully we weren’t too late on that.

The only thing that didn’t grow were the sunflower seeds we planted all over the place by the train tracks and the fence in the back. We figured it would be a cheap way to spruce the whole place up. We planted two packets of seeds worth, and I don’t think a single one came up. Certainly plenty of other enormous weeds came up, so it’s not like the area is infertile. I don’t know what happened there, but it doesn’t look any worse than it did before, so I guess we’re not out much.

So, with the exception of the sunflowers and one tomato plant, everything is going well!

(By the way, I know a garden post is a little lame without pictures, but I don’t actually have any! The garden pretty much looks the same as it has the past few years, so it’s not exactly inspiring me to take pictures. I could have gone over and taken some for the post, but it just didn’t get done in time. Sorry! Maybe I’ll post some later.)