Busy Season

It has been a very busy month for me as summer has begun.  I have had the usual rounds of weeding in the garden and general upkeep on things around the house.  I have also been doing a bit of traveling and sight seeing so I have not had the time to post updates here.  Even so, there is still garden happenings going on here.  My first harvests of peas and broccoli have started to come in.  I have harvested my garlic and am curing it in my back room.  I have started digging up my volunteer potatoes one by one and having them with breakfast or dinner.  I have also harvested a few of the smaller onions to add to my meals here and there.

Slowly but surely things are moving along in the garden.  The late arrival of summer has delayed the growth of my warm season plants, but now that things are starting to heat up I can see that things have been making progress.  After a couple of replantings, my melon seeds finally germinated.  I am hoping they have enough summer to produce mature fruit since they seem to love the hotter weather so much.  My squash needed to be replanted too, so they are off to a slow start as well.  The cucumbers are looking like a crop failure this year.  I replanted the cucumber bed three times this year and all I have to show for it is one tiny, sickly seedling.  I'm not terribly sad about the cucumbers though, because last year they were so productive that I probably canned enough pickles to last for the next three years.

My indoor started seedlings were off to a rough start also.  I think they went through an extended post transplanting shock phase because the weather stayed cooler for much longer than I had expected.  (Heck, in some areas around the valley, there was snow at the higher elevations on the first day of summer!)  They are starting to recover well in the warmer weather that has moved in and now I just need to make sure that everything stays nice and watered.

I know that summer is just beginning but the garden feels like it is off to an extremely slow start this year.  All the plants seem to be far behind in their growth compared to what I have seen in years past.  There are still a couple of months of hot weather ahead of us, so I hope that things will catch up in the next few weeks.  The real test will be seeing how long it takes to get the first harvest from each crop.  I am still keeping my fingers crossed that I will still have a productive garden this year.