I love watching the garden grow. In just 2 weeks, the garden has made great progress. Much of the seeds we planted have come up. It is a little difficult at this point to sometimes distinguish between a weed and a plant! We had pulled out a whole row of rosemary last year, thinking it was some kind of weed — the adventures of gardening never end, especially if you normally do not plant a certain plant or herb like us! And as always, the weeds flourish and need to be picked often because otherwise the weeds will take over and choke out the vegetable plants. Weeds can be quite invasive, so we pick them and discard them in the organics quite often.
What’s a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me take you on a garden tour!
Here, our potatoes have come up nicely and are leafing out and growing.
Here our cucumbers have come up as well. I see there are lots that have not come up, so we re-planted a few, just in case!
Look at all that lettuce! Our skinny pigs (hairless guinea pigs) love lettuce, so we planted extra just for them! Fresh garden lettuce is my favorite!
Dill. My absolute favorite herb! I planted extra so I can dry some and have lots for making dill pickles with!
The onions are looking nice. We have started eating some of the green onions. It has such a great, strong green onion flavor at the start of the season! I add it to eggs and salads. So yummy!
And our garden update, 20 days later from the pictures above…. as you can see, the potatoes have grown quite significantly! It is amazing to watch the garden progress. It seems slow, when we pick the weeds and water it and tend to it every other day, but it really does grow quite quickly, especially in our short gardening season here in Alberta, Canada.
Not only can you see the progress of our garden growing, but the weeds as well. It seems they grow no matter what the conditions! We of course spent an hour and picked all of the weeds! Our fellow gardeners’ gardens are growing wonderfully as well! I always like seeing what other gardeners are growing. A lot of gardeners are growing cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage this season.
Our tomatoes are flowering and we have a few tomatoes starting to grow as well. My kids do not like tomatoes, but I love tomatoes, especially homegrown! My daughter ‘H’ is tending to this year’s tomato crop.
It is now June 28 — in just 4 short days, the potatoes have begun to flower. Let me show you the rest of the garden!
You can see how well the green onions and shallots are growing. Next to the onions are the dill and parsley which have all come up nicely. Then is the beans, assortment of lettuce, our mint, cilantro, rhubarb and strawberries and the squash and cucumbers are at the far end.
Green onions are ready to enjoy! Now is the time to pick them and use them up while they are young, tender and tasty! When they get too large, they tend to be woody and not as flavorful. I have planted multiplier onions which are mainly used for the green onion tops. The red onion and yellow spanish onion also produce green onions which we eat, but they can be left so the bottoms of the onions grow large.
Here is the dill. I have planted 5 rows so we have plenty for making dill pickles with as we ran out of dill last year! No chance of running out of dill this year!
Some beans have come up and some have not, so I will replant them. The assortment of lettuce is up and some will be replanted as well. It was windy when we planted, so the wind could have very well blew our lettuce seed away!
Look at that beautiful lettuce! It could be eaten this small as “baby greens” but I like letting it grow a bit more.
The mint is growing wonderfully. With the hot weather though, the cilantro is already going to seed.
Here is a look at the garden from the opposite end — you can see the cucumbers and squash, the strawberries, rhubarb, cilantro and mint, the lettuce, beans, parsley, dill, onions and the potatoes in the small planter. We will need to plant more cucumbers. The ground is very hard and dry, and this spring has been very cold so seeds took a lot longer to come up than usual, but now with the hot weather we have been watering lots and will be watering again! Each summer’s growing season is never the same as the season before it!
The tomatoes are growing well. We water twice a day because the pots they are in dry out quite quickly. They sit on the porch so they get the morning sun and then shade for the rest of the day. It is neat to watch the tomatoes grow and how the tomato forms from the blossom — such a great learning lesson for children! I highly recommend gardening for kids — even if it is just in a flower pot.
