This Year’s Garden!

Gardening this year has been an uphill struggle; The Ladies built raised beds last year, which has helped tremendously by containing the produce and excluding the weeds, but the lack of rain has necessitated putting a chunk of each day into keeping my efforts from turning to dust.

So Tuesday’s rain was a great relief, and the garden rejoiced:

The watering system I rigged up sat blissfully idle today.  Thank You, Father Sky.

Our garden is a mix of what we planted and the “volunteers” which appeared as a result of last year’s reseeding (we’re going with a no-till model, and just being grateful when Free Stuff shows up!  🙂 )

Among the volunteers are carrots (which provided nice white flowers but no carrots to speak of,) onions, garlic, leeks, some kind of vining things which might or might not be pumpkins (half the fun is the expectant waiting,) and two little trees in the mid-ground which I think are apricots – again, time will tell!  😆

So far we’ve harvested and enjoyed rhubarb, asparagus, lettuce, radishes, snow peas, beans (green, yellow and purple,) squash (summer, delicata and zucchini,) purple potatoes (more volunteers!) cucumbers, broccoli, kale and rainbow chard – I’m growing leaves!!

And we have flowers interspersed, some (such as the marigolds and aliums) as companion planting for pest control, and some just for eye-candy.  Glads:

…and zinnias:

The rain really freshened them up, and they were a joy to photograph:

We’ll have sunflowers later on, but right now they’re just buds:

We’ve been sharing our bounty with a fat little woodchuck (she and I have a love/hate relationship,) but there’s still as much as  I can eat and more.

Thank you Mother Earth; Thank you Father Sky.