I had some extra garden space this spring, and decided to pick up some cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon seeds when I was out running errands one afternoon. We tried a couple of melon plants last year, but they didn’t produce any sizable fruit.

These are doing really well, and are quite healthy. They don’t appear to be touched by any type of pest. We do have a woodchuck who lives under the shed though … hopefully Puck will do a good job patrolling the garden and keep him away from these!

I’ve been incredibly busy with work, and the garden seems to change faster than I have time to spend in it!

We have cauliflower, broccoli, turnips, potatoes, beans … and by the time 5:00 roles around, all I want to do is crack open a cold beer and not think about making dinner. I’m going to try and make scalloped turnips tonight – but I think we might be out of soy milk. I’ll take some pictures and post the recipe when I do!

If you’ve ever tried your hand at growing heirloom tomatoes … then chances are you’ve run across Early Tomato Blight.

Early tomato blight is an infection (caused by the fungus Alternaria solani) that starts out as dark brown spots, yellowing leaves, and eventually spreads quite rapidly through the crop killing the leaves and fruits if it has a chance. The fungus spores form in hot, humid weather and then wait for a nice, cool, wet evening to start destroying the plants. We’ve definitely had more than ideal weather for blight this summer. It shows up just as the plants are starting to set fruit – and once the infection starts, it is nearly impossible to stop from spreading. If you’re growing organically and aren’t planning on dousing them with fungicide, that is.

I was just looking back on photos from last year, and these sunflowers are opening up an entire month earlier than they did last summer! We had a warm spring and everything got off to an early start. I always associate sunflowers with the end of summer, beginning of fall …. nice to see these so early this year!

These are dwarf sunflowers, about 3 feet tall with nice large single-flower heads. I planted them all along the front of the garden. I’m hoping they will all open up together soon, and make a very pretty border.

Jessi’s half of the garden is reaching full-harvest mode!

I probably should have picked the broccoli a couple days ago – it’s just about to flower. There are some nice cauliflower heads out there that I didn’t notice last night. I have more than 20 cauliflower and broccoli plants in the garden, and they seem to be taking quite a while. I started them way back in March – you’d think they would have matured by now. It was a hot spring, though – so maybe that had something do do with it. It’s also getting a bit too hot for lettuce – Chris’s lettuce bolted already. I’ve still got a few heads out there that look like they’ll be just fine for a while.

You know it’s summer when every meal looks something like this:

Flowering Onion (click for a close-up)

We’ve never had much luck growing onions or other root crops.

In Morris, our soil was too heavy, and root crops were leafy at best. We ate a lot of beet greens, actually! When we moved to the “Great Anoka Sand Plain,” I was excited to see how our carrots, onions, and potatoes would turn out.

We fenced in our entire 1+ acre lot last summer, and we planted a lot of vines in hopes of one day having a “green fence.” I know it takes a few years, and I’m not quite sure how close you are supposed to place the vines to achieve full coverage.

I cut down all the catnip in the garden, which should give some of the other herbs a bit more room to grow. I’m sure well get a couple more good pickings from it this year.

Once it’s dried I’ll bag it and hide it away for a snowy day!

I don’t have the patience for annuals (unless you can eat them), so I figured I’d add some perennial flowers to the garden this year. This spring, I picked up about a dozen daisy-like plants at a really neat family-owned nursery that is literally two minutes down the road from my house. Terrific plants at $2 each – and they are already flowering and gorgeous, lining the entrance to my garden.