How does my Garden Grow?

Well.... my gardens are growing pretty well, however the one in the front doesn't look so pretty. This is only our 2nd year at trying to grow stuff and in the front garden it's the first so this year has definitely been a learning year.

Here's what the courtyard/front garden looked like up till this spring.

Here's what it looked like when we got everything planted.

We planted 7 tomato plants, onions and garlic.
Here's what it looks like today.

Welcome to the jungle. We were late in getting the cages around the plants so when we did finally get them all we could do was use them on a few select branches and not the whole plants. Well a couple of plants we were able to get caged. Hey, we're newbies at this and now we know to cage those things as soon as we plant them!

The tomato plants here in OK haven't been doing so great. I talked to my local farmer and she said because it got so hot so early here this year the tomatoes aren't producing. And some of my plants look like they are dying off on the bottom but have green leaves on the top. She said that there is a fungus in the dirt and that it won't kill the plant.

Just in the last couple of weeks we've been getting some tomatoes. Most of my plants are cherry tomato types so they've been gradually producing. I haven't seen any larger size yet. Of course with this jungle it's easy to overlook some.

We were late in getting the garlic and onions in the ground so they haven't grown very big. But we're going to try the garlic this fall/winter and onions again next year.

I was wanting to grow some carrots but I didn't have a good place so I'm saving those for fall too.

The back garden looks much better. Go here to read about making it. Here's a before of it before we planted.

Here's what it looks like today.

Back there we planted 2 tomato plants, 3 pepper plants 7 okra and cilantro and basil. However, when I planted the herbs I used some of the beautiful compost soil to plant them. After a couple of months we noticed that some plants were coming up in the pots that didn't match. We left them planted to see what they were. They were tomato plants! Apparently when I harvested my compost soil I got some tomato seeds and since they were getting sun and water daily just like the cilantro or basil we got at least 4 new tomato plants!

3 of them we transplanted to the garden, they are small but we'll see how they do. The 4th one, had grown it's roots into the ground out of the pot and so we couldn't move it, it was also the biggest.

One of our pepper plants didn't make it when I caught one of the dogs pulling bricks down to get his nose under the chicken wire and trampling the plant to get into the garden. I saw this from the bedroom window and I ran outside to chase him out of the garden with my kitchen broom. He was SO grounded! Don't worry he wasn't permanently harmed....

So we were down to 2 pepper plants, which I can't remember the variety and the labels are gone. But they have been producing like crazy! David LOVES it! When he wants to make salsa he just goes out to pick a pepper!

The okra looks great too! I've never grown it or seen it grown so this one was totally new for me. They've started producing too.

All in all we're very happy with having the gardens. There are some changes we'll make for next year. Like building a proper garden in the back. The spare bricks aren't cutting it and we need to make it more dog proof. We'd like to build another one in the back as well but we'll see. We'll be planting some things a lot earlier and I'm hoping to get enough compost soil to add to the courtyard garden when we plant next year.

I'm still hoping that the tomatoes will flourish by fall so we can hopefully can some. But we'll see how it goes!

How are you're gardens doing? If you're in OK are you getting tomatoes or strawberries?

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