Garden update

Before I left for Maine, I took pictures of the garden with the intention of updating you all on its progress! And well, here they are, two and a half weeks later! :\

I last left you with a little visual of how big the plot is and what we were planting. That was a loooong time ago, when the peas were just starting to poke through the ground! Well, now they are looking like this:

Getting better, are they not? But there is a whole lot more going on in this big plot than just the peas! Here is a picture of how my mom maps it all out (she keeps records in a notebook to remember from year to year what worked and what didn't!)

But since you can't read that, I tried to make heads or tails of it and drew up a poorly-illustrated version for you to see what we are planting and where...

After I made this, I realized I made it backwards from all the pictures I took. So in that first picture of the pea plants, I was standing about where the word "peas" is on the chart. Make sense?

Here are some shots of the rest of the garden:

This is the corn end. There is a lot more corn than my chart shows!

This is the middle part with the cukes. See the peas to the right?

And this is the other end with a while bunch of stuff.

Looking nice and leafy!

We kept noticing these teeny black bugs while we were working. They resembled a flea in the way they jumped, and they were no bigger than the head of a pin. In asking around, we found out they ARE a flea...a garden flea that eats plants just as they come up out of the ground! we could see evidence that they had been hard at work, so unfortunately we had to treat almost the entire garden for them.

We don't like using chemicals on our plants, but it took care of the flea problem, and we didn't know what else to use. You can see the white powder clearest in this shot of the corn plants:

No one knows where those little buggers come from or really what can prevent them...so we're hoping next year they decide to invade someone else's space!

We did make our garden slightly bigger this year, and it shows in the quality of the ground. The new ground is very hard and rocky, which makes it hard to pull weeds or grow produce. This far end of the pea plants shows the difference.

See how anemic those plants look? That is the new ground. They've grown more since I took this picture, and hopefully next year the ground will all be a little more balanced.

Well, that updates you a little on the progress of our garden. I will soon (very soon, promise!) update you some more, since our peas now look like this:

Yeah, its time for an update to my update.

Do you have a lot planted this year? How is it coming?