Enjoying My Gardens

This past week has been great. My little garden is producing real food. I'm a novice gardener. I planted 8 bean plants, 6 cucumber plants and 2 tomato plants. They all looked a little sad and pathetic when I first planted them in my new raised garden (gift to me from Hubby). My tomato plants are still kind of hanging out...no real produce and not much actual growth. I'm not sure what the problem is. But my beans and cucumbers look great. I've been picking beans for the last 2 weeks. At first there really weren't many beans but I was so excited I picked the 20 ripe ones anyway. Today I got enough to feed 3 of us a serving. The Imp doesn't eat cooked veggies. The Singer loves them and is so excited to have fresh green beans. The cucumbers are developing. I had to fight off the ants (I used corn powder, red pepper and boiling water), but they seem to be gone. I have one cucumber about 4 inches long...and several more a few days behind. I can't wait to eat them. Even the Imp eats cucumbers. I'm now researching what to plant come the fall. As we don't usually have but one or two nights below freezing our growing season is essentially year-round. I'm also looking into when to plant strawberries...the harvest is usually in late January thru February, so I've got to figure out when to start them so I can enjoy them next year. I'm pretty excited about all this.

In addition to enjoying watching my vegetables grow, I'm enjoying my rose bushes. My Mr. Lincoln (strong smelling very red roses) bush has given me 3 blooms a day for the last few days and still has 7-8 more buds. My Fragrant Cloud (a birthday present from my mom this year) has given me 2 blooms for the past 2 days and still has 5 buds on it. And the Fragrant Cloud lives up to its name. It is wonderful to have the blooms in my house and even more wonderful to sit on my porch and smell them from their bush. We've been fortunate with our rainfall, as I know just to our north, in Georgia, a serious drought exists. The afternoon thunderstorms have taken hold and I enjoy hearing the rain beating down on the roof. Our rivers and aquifers are still several feet below "normal" so we still have water restrictions. The paper said that we would need at least 17" more rain than normal for the summer (wet) months to get things close to 'normal.' And going into our wet season we were 5" below normal for rainfall for 2008.