And now we come to the last part of our tour : All The Rest
As promised, here are the rest of the tomatoes!
This is the other side of my shed (the opposite side connects to the deck). Apparantly it used to be a dog kennel (hence all the little white doors in the side) and so there's a huge slab on concrete on this side of the shed that makes it get very warm here. Since my mom lives a little higher in altitude than I she complains she can never grow a good tomato, so this year she brought all her tomatoes here to see if we can get them to grow. She also had the smart idea to use field fencing to cage the tomatoes with which not only gives steller support, but also acts as a great inhibitor to my tomato-snipping/swiping 4 year old (that cute guy on the trike) and 2 year old (also cute but not pictured). So far all the plants are loaded with green tomatoes, and I've gotten two that have ripened without being pulled off! Already a sign that things will go better this year.
When I started to run out of room in my big veggie garden and still had plants to put somewhere, I realized I had to come up with an alternate spot. Luckily, the edge of the cement slab runs perpendicular to the shed, and this area gets full sun all day long. So I decided to dig up a section (it didn't end up being very big, that grass is stubborn stuff!) and put my cukes and mini pumpkin plants here. This was after I had discovered that pumpkins like to vine out, but before I discovered that they like to send out more roots along their vines. So the plan was to let the mini pumpkins vine out across the cement, but I don't know if they'll get mad at me for not being able to root. My four little cucumbers are not growing as well as I'd hoped (I did start them from seed) but they finally are starting to take off and I finally put up something for them to climb up on. I found this awesome netting at my local Ace which I put up for the cukes to grow on. I did find a decent sized cucumber on one of the plants - at least it would have been decent sized if the slugs hadn't eaten it *grrr*. I try to grow organically, but slug bait is the one essential in my garden.
This section is by far the saddest one yet. We have a nice circle brick flower bed around these two trees in the middle-ish of our yard, but the poor thing just has not been high on my gardening-priority list. Eventually I'd like this to be our strawberry patch, since one whole side of it gets sun all day long, but right now it's mostly a weed patch. This side does have four mint plants (mint does well in part shade) which I hope will take over this half and then the strawberries eventually the other half. I tried spreading poppy seeds on the strawberry half for this year, and I got tons of tiny pink ruffly poppies that popped up, but I think I didn't water it and they all kind of just look very sad right now (not too many made it to full maturity, and then they didn't bloom for very long). I'm not even showing you a picture of the other side for shame of how many thistle plants are growing there.
And last, but not least, my three young apple trees. These came with the house, and I am still learning exactly how to care for them. Only one produced last year, and its little green apples all got hard black spots on them. I was able to use quite a few of them still and made some very tasty applesauce. This year all three flowered, but the first one flowered too early (the one that had produced last year) and so all its buds died when we had another cold spell. The one in the middle has tons of beautiful looking green apples, and then the third flowered and started producing apples, and then suddenly half the tree died and the remaining apples have started getting dark black spots like the other tree's last year's crop. I really don't know what I am doing with these guys, but I hope to get them back on track and be able to use their yummy fruit (especially since my kids absolutely love apples). My hope is set right now on the middle tree.
And that concludes the Grande Toure of the Iggy Mama Garden!
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