The potatoes have really taken off too. I have already mulched one bed twice since the plants were getting so tall. They are becoming so lush that I can hardly wait to start harvesting them.
The garlic is starting to get ready for harvest. Many of the plants have one or two brown lower leaves. When they get to the point where they have five or six brown leaves, then they will be ready to pull and cure. I imagine by the end of the month I will start pulling some of the smaller plants.
The peas started blooming about a week ago and I was able to have my first small harvest just a couple of days ago. The more you harvest peas, the more peas the plants will produce. I hope I can stay on top of them and put up a decent amount for winter in the freezer. These first small harvests are always the tastiest though, so I have enjoyed some in salads and stir fries.
I have been harvesting the largest leaves off my kale, spinach and lettuce and enjoying them with my dinners and lunches as salad greens. Kale is a little on the bitter side raw, but I like wilting them in a little olive oil and sprinkling them with salt as a side dish of greens with my dinners lately.
Some of the broccoli has just started to grow their flower buds. I will harvest the first large heads of broccoli, but leave the plants to grow more florets for a continuing harvest. I planted two different varieties to see which one does better at producing florets and to see which one tolerates the hot summers better. I want broccoli that doesn't bolt before forming a good sized head.
Some things in the garden are not growing so well however. I have done a second planting on most of my squash and bean plants because most of them failed to come up. I hope it was because I planted them too early and they were too cold to germinate and not because the seeds were too old. I was trying to use up some of the oldest seeds I had this year, but perhaps I should have just gotten new ones.
My pepper and tomato seedlings are off to a slow start. They were pretty badly damaged in a windy hail storm that blew through while I was at work a few weeks back. I decided to plant them anyway since I had put that much effort into them already. Most of them were on the small side, but I mulched everyone in really well and gave them a good drink. I hope they don't stay in a shocked state for too long. Some of the peppers started to show some signs of growth only a week or so after transplanting so they will probably be just fine.
Overall I am pretty pleased with the state of the garden this year. I am trying to keep up on the weeding as best I can, but I think that once the harvests start coming in, weeding will probably fall by the wayside. Maybe I will do a good enough job that the weeds will be mostly eliminated by then, but I doubt it. The first year of weeding a garden is always the worst because of the amount of weed seeds that are present in my neglected soil. This year is the year to break that cycle for my soil by getting rid of the plants before they go to seed and mulching everything heavily so the remaining seeds can't germinate. Next year I am going to try some no till practices in my garden, so that should further reduce my weed pressures in the garden beds. I want to do everything I can to make less work for my future self in this garden.
The chickens have been quite entertaining for me to watch as I work out in the garden. I throw them most of the weeds that I pull so they have something to scratch and peck at in their little enclosure. I have been moving the egg chickens once a week and every time I move them I seed the space they just occupied with plants that the chickens can graze on next time they get moved there. They do a great job of removing the weeds from the lawn and fertilizing and loosening the top layer of soil. I am hoping they turn the yard into a lush little chicken pasture by the end of this summer.
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