The garden update

Here are some recent photos from our June gardening and harvests.

An updated photo of our gardening area. We have what we call four quadrants totaling 1,400 square feet of soil. Pictured here is our second quadrant – the area where we planted tomatoes, peppers, basil and tarragon. The soil was probably not ready for the plantings because we only finished it in April before planting began, but we're finally seeing progress. Things are now beginning to grow well. The basil is booming. (Front row, lower left.)

The first quadrant can be seen in the lower left. That's where we planted cucumbers, more peppers, herbs, onions, egg plant and Swiss chard.

Here's a lovely salad made up of our first batch of peppers, cucumbers and nasturtium leaves from the garden.

This is quadrant 1; the cucumbers are pretty much appearing twice a week now. They grow really fast.

These are some of our peppers. We planted more than ten of these plants. Varieties include yellow banana, serrano, Mexibell, jalapeno and ancho poblano. We should have enough to keep us going for the rest of the summer.

These are nasturtium leaves for our first salad.

I never harvested the Nasturtium flowers, but they're edible too.

Our first tomato before it ripened and became part of our meal (see below).

Tomato blossoms. All together we have over 18 tomato plants in our garden.

Sharing a little drama; I had to kill a beetle. Normally, I don't like to do this, but I'd seen others in the garden and I know they're pests. This one just happened to be on a tomato when I was ready to do something about it. Most of our other tomatoes are fine, thus far...

This is our very first beef steak tomato. It was cause for celebration. The flavor was amazing and sweet tasting, too.

Everyone has spices they like to use on their salads. Here are the most recent ones we love. I've heard it said that when the vegetables are fresh, the less additions to the salad the better. So true.

Some of our additional vegetables – Swiss chard, okra and our first eggplant. So exciting. It's like Christmas morning in June. More to come soon.