Garden Update...

I’ve written a couple posts about my first foray into vegetable gardening… starting my tomatoes and peppers inside and then planting a square foot garden outside. I figure it’s time to update since it’s not so much a garden anymore, but a jungle!

The green beans were the first to explode. They sent out their shoots and started climbing and when they reached the end of my 5 foot trellis they just kept going! They actually started wrapping around each other to make them stable enough to grow taller and when they couldn’t support their own tower any longer they fell over and started winding themselves around the railing of the back steps. One shoot keeps grabbing onto my clothes when I try to go in the back door… I’m currently not sleeping to avoid nightmares about Audrey 2.

The cucumbers are also out of control. The leaves are huge! Tons of flowers are sprouting on there… I had no idea that cucumbers are actually the stem of the flowers. There are literally itty bitty little cucumbers growing on this plant with yellow flowers at the end. Not all of them… only the female flowers. Thanks to Kate, my resident expert and the only person I’ve ever met that majored in Ornamental Horticulture, for explaining to me the ways of the plant world. (This conversation about male and female flowers also led to the revelation that the Grease 2 song “Reproduction” is all wrong. A female sings “make my stamen go berserk” but in reality the stamen is part of the male flower. Just goes to show you that movies are no replacement for education. Come on lyricist… do your research!).

And just today Steve and I picked our first three cucumbers!!  I couldn't believe it, but a couple of full-sizers were hiding way underneath all those branches.  We were soooo happy, as you can see!

The tomatoes and peppers were actually the slowest growers, which I thought was strange since I started those inside in March. Imagine how long they would take if you didn’t do that! But now we have little hybrid tomatoes and little pepperoncinis growing so they’re on the right track.  Woot!