How our garden grows!

Apparently weeds and garden plants can grow in harmony. Perhaps slightly off key, but hey, they all seem happy enough! The problem is, we had a couple really good rains. It made the garden grow like crazy, but alas, it made the weeds really take off too. I keep hacking away at the weeds, but I fear it's a loosing battle. This is a first year garden, so I anticipated some weed issues. It'll be better this fall and even better next spring. I keep the weeds pulled back away from the plants. Everywhere else they are growing I've started referring to them as my 'cover crop' of 'green manure'. Uh-hum. Sounds better than 'rampant out of control weed problem'.

So far we've gotten a couple gorgeous bell peppers, lots of radishes, lettuce, yellow summer squash and zucchini.

The tomato plants are HUGE and covered in green tomatoes. The bell pepper plants have 3 or 4 peppers each. The green beans have little green beans and the corn plants have little ears growing! The cucumber and watermelon vines are trying to take over. The various squash are of course flourishing. Carrots seem to be doing well, but aside from admiring their nice green tops it's hard to tell. Potato plants are up and growing well and the onions are getting very tall. It's too hot already for things sensitive to the heat. I didn't get an early spring garden in because of the stupid pig on the loose. Will grow a bunch of cool weather stuff this fall. I grumble about the Texas heat, but I'm already appreciating our long growing season in a whole new way now that I'm avidly gardening.

Soren loves stomping through the garden, it's like a jungle from his perspective. Here he is in front of the tomato plants. This was taken about a week ago, believe it or not the plants are even bigger now. How big can a tomato plant get??

I'm getting ready to can/freeze anything extra the garden produces. This year is a bit of a test run. Hopefully next year I'll have the kinks worked out and will know how much of various veggies to plant to provide enough for the growing season and food storage the rest of the year. We're growing 100% organically from the seed up. I really like the idea of knowing just how the veggies my kids are eating were grown!