How Does My Garden Grow Week 14

June has been a rainy month. The upside to this is that we've had to hand water less than usual, and the garden is growing beautifully. The downside is that the weeds are growing beautifully too. It's time to mulch the garden in earnest.

I ordered some sheets of red mulch for the tomatoes, and I'll be putting them down next weekend. I have read that tomato plants thrive with red mulch, and produce bigger and better tomatoes, so we'll be testing that out. The cost of 8 square sheets was less than $2. If it's effective, I'll get more next year. I plan to reuse the sheets year to year.

It's nice to see small tomatoes on our tomato vines, and equally small peppers on the pepper plants. Our lettuce has doubled in size, and I planted more lettuce seeds yesterday (Mignonette Bronze from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed www.rareseeds.com). We should begin eating lettuce from the garden in a week or so, and I hope to cycle through new lettuce from now through the fall.

Our fingerling potato plants have started to flower, so they will be ready pretty soon. They seem to enjoy their environment. Unlike the sweet potatoes - most of those became fodder for the chipmunks. We've had good luck with our deterrent efforts, but the adorable little pests are still frustrating us. My husband has started to look from the hose to their den holes with a gleam in his eye.

We have wild blackberries growing over into our yard, so my husband harvested a few to munch on this weekend. They were tiny, but delicious.

Since the vegetable garden is in, we've paused on building more garden beds to weed and mulch the flower beds.

In addition to everything we expect to harvest from our garden, we picked up our 2nd week of CSA, and split a subscription to an 11-week fruit share with some friends. We are inundated with veggies. This week we dropped some of our excess at my Mom's, and we're going to have to do some intensive menu planning to use all the greens, but I'm looking forward to that.

Soon we'll be eating, and preserving food from our garden. Summer is flying by, it's hard to believe tomorrow is July.