Garden Journal (vol. 11)

Our resident hawk moth caterpillar.

I always find it exciting to explore my garden after being gone a while. It's like walking through a time warp. The potato and zucchini plants are taking over and sprawling all over the place. I can't even mow the lawn near the garden beds, not that I mind. The tomatoes and peppers are starting to ripen. We picked our first bowl full of juicy ripe tomatoes to make a tomato, basil and bocconcini salad. Swoon.

The Swiss chard keeps on growing, even when I cut a bunch of chard it continues to grow which is handy. The kale is ever abundant. I don't think our family of five needs more than nine mature plants to have our fill. The pea plants are done and need to be pulled out, something I should have done a couple weeks ago. Next year I will plant them much earlier in the season. The bush beans are finally producing but not as much as I had hoped. Next year I will plant them in a row along the west side of a garden bed. They seem to prefer that side. The runner beans are making their way up the trellis, some of them have even used the sunflowers to climb up.

My husband got around to staking the raspberry plants and planting two apple trees and a peach tree. The fruit trees might take a couple years to produce so I'm glad we planted them this year. Other than the raspberries and fruit trees we've also planted two elderberry bushes and three saskatoon bushes. The only thing left to plant are two grape vines.