Garden inventory

Travel, exhaustion, and weather backed up our usual garden schedule this year. But last night we're 90% done.

Jim built a box for our tomatoes. Now they'll get more sun, and we have more space for other veggies. We have beefstake tomatoes we bought and Roma and cherry tomatoes we started from seed. On Friday we planted about 35 of our seedlings, knowing that they wouldn't all make it. Darwinism has been active in our raised bed, and after the torrential storms of the weekend, we have about 20 nice looking plants. We'll continue to pluck the little guys as the next few weeks go by.

We also planted 10 pepper plants. Jim went a little nuts on the peppers this year. Between those, the tomatoes, and the cilantro that reseeded from 2 years ago, we'll be making plenty of salsa come August.

Willa and I planted radish and green bean seeds. She loves gardening, and I'm happy to have a little girl who doesn't mind getting dirty.

We might put in one or two more veggie plants this year, but have scaled back on variety because we knew we'd be in transition.

I've already mentioned the cilantro, but we're also working with basil, oregano, mint, chamomile and rosemary.

In the fruit department: our blueberry plants are celebrating their first anniversary in our garden this summer. They are growing well, and even though we didn't expect it, we were a little disappointed to not see blossoms. Our strawberries, on the other hand... we have delicious berries that are at peak ripeness this week. The chipmunks have left them alone thanks to the cage Jim made for the plants. They are small and sweet and just the right texture.

It's been a lot of work getting the soil ready, building new beds, and growing some of our stuff from seed. I certainly hope our harvest is decent.