Garden Update

Here’s what’s going on in our garden right now:

Beans

I wanted to grow some green beans this year and since we don’t have a lot of space in our backyard, I wanted to go with pole beans (which grow tall) instead of bush beans (which take up more room). The only pole bean variety I found at the nursery was the scarlet runner bean… which I learned later is not particularly edible and is primarily grown as an ornamental. Whoops! It has grown huge since we planted it 3 months ago, outgrowing the support cage we got for it. It has pretty reddish orange flowers and long beans growing on it.

Bean plant

Bean

Bean flowers

Pickling Cucumbers

Nick and I had a lot of fun making pickles last year, so we decided to do it again this year! Our cucumber plant took a while to get going, but it has really grown in size over the last two weeks. It has yellow blossoms all over it, as well as the beginnings of a bunch of cucumbers. I think we’ll probably start picking our first cucumbers by the end of the month.

Cucumber plant

Cucumber

Strawberries

We got a strawberry plant this year for a fun experiment. We’ve been plucking the blossoms off of it to encourage the plant to grow. Next year, we’ll let it blossom and make berries. So, nothing exciting to report about the strawberry plant right now, but we’re looking forward to eating its berries next year.

Strawberry plant

Snow Peas & Raspberries

Not much has changed since I blogged about snow peas last month and I blogged about raspberries earlier this month. I think they’re both mostly done for the year, though. Our snow pea plant has continued to produce some peas, but it seems pretty unhappy with the heat wave we’ve been having (almost 2 weeks of 80+ degree weather!). We’ve had a few more raspberries since the blog post, but it seems to be done making berries for the year now.

Thai Chili Pepper

Nick wanted to do a Thai chili pepper plant again this year. If it’s like last year’s plant, we’ll get peppers in October. For now, it’s just busy growing.

Pepper plant at the end of May

Pepper plant now

Herbs

Our herbs this year are basil, chives, parsley, tarragon, cilantro, dill, and oregano. We had all but dill in our garden last year (we figured we should grow our own dill for the pickles). We grew the cilantro, dill, and oregano from seeds. The rest we either grew from starts or are plants that stuck around from last year.