The Ides of June

It's nearly the Ides of June. Today there was almost two inches of rain from thunderstorms following almost six weeks of drought. And yet in this dusty spring, the gardens haven't fared so badly.

This is the field shown in the post about horse plowing. There are two plots of corn separated by a plot of potatoes. In the foreground those are melon plants just germinating. The corn got one rain just after it was planted but is still waist high after a month and a half of dry weather.

This is a terrible photo, it makes the plants look stepped on. These are the tomatoes shown growing in the egg carton in the previous post.

And these are the peppers that were growing in the pie pan.

Here is the sweet corn that was growing under the soda jugs.

Onions which were grown from seed. The larger ones are about 4" across.

Kohlrabi about big enough to eat peeking out from the edge of the bed.

The first broccoli of the season.

Black Palm Kale two weeks after transplanting and beets behind that.

Lettuce of various kinds and kale growing behind that.

Another bed of lettuce and spinach behind that. You can see that some of the lettuce and the spinach have been harvested and the lettuce plants, cut off 1" above the ground, are growing back. Since this photo was taken, each lettuce stump made and new rosette of lettuce as big as the original, that was harvested, and then it has grown a third. The third growing has begun to bitter so the rabbits will get the last of it.

Snap peas blooming in spite of the very dry conditions. Now that they have had some water, they will grow up another three or four feet and set on more peas along the way.

This was going to be a fallow part of a bed used for composting this year but it grew up with volunteer potatoes so evenly that I left it alone. It looks as if this 4' x 7' bed will yield about 35 pounds of potatoes without even the effort of planting them. That's black peppermint growing in the lower right of the picture.

Cabbages and kale.

A bed of kohlrabi transplants in the foreground and behind that, beets, lettuce, and mizuna. In the bed behind that are collards and broccoli.