Dear Dee and Mary Ann and Gardening Friends Everywhere,

Summer has arrived! Or at least it seems like it has arrived. We went from temperatures barely getting to the low 60’s last week to a high of 88 F yesterday (Sunday). Today it could also get up to 88 F and our record, set in 1965, is 90 F.

No warning, just “Ta Da!”… summer.

Oh well, it is better than the snow I hear you are experiencing in Boise, Mary Ann. You have my sympathies. Snow now would freak me out completely.

As you can see from the picture above, my strawberries are ripening and it looks like it is a good crop this year, with nice, big berries. I took some to my mom for lunch on Sunday and she enjoyed them and said they were delicious. Of course they were! They were grown in my own garden, warmed by the Indiana sun!

I spent all of yesterday morning warmed by that same Indiana sun, planting out the rest of my vegetable garden with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, green beans, corn, melons, zinnias, marigold and sunflowers. Oh, and I’m soaking some okra seeds to sow later this evening when I get home from work.

I wondered if I would have any room left for a “holding nursery” in the vegetable garden after I planted everything. There are still some plants, mostly perennials, that I need to dig up and move temporarily until the newly designed garden beds are ready for planting. The garden designer kept eyeing the vegetable garden as a likely temporary home for them.

But I wonder no more.

I don’t have any room left in the vegetable garden, though I did ask myself as I planted that last bed with zinnias and sunflowers if I should have just left it for holding over other plants. But then I decided I would miss the zinnias and sunflowers, so I planted them anyway. We’ll come up with another place to hold over plants.

By this time next week, I should have some pictures of the new beds in the back to show you. I hired two nephews to finish them up with a thick layer of mulch to keep the weeds down until they are fully planted, which could be awhile.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of the vegetable garden all planted up.

Those white pipes sticking up are 1″ PVC pipe. I pound two foot pieces of that into the ground about a foot, then use that to support the actual tomato stake. It’s much easier to pound those into the ground than to try to pound a six or eight foot stake into the ground.

And now looking back at the list of what I planted I just realized I didn’t plant cucumbers. Didn’t plant cucumbers! I’m not sure I even bought seeds for them. I need to take care of that this evening! What was I thinking? I can’t have a vegetable garden without cucumbers. Where will I plant them? I’ll figure something out, but now I am defintely out of room in the vegetable garden.

Until next week,

Hortifully yours,

Carol

P.S. Look at this one pea plant. It is heads and shoulders above the others.

It’s just begging me to write a separate blog post about it.