Garden Clean-up

Sunday nights, in the past, were my DIY project posts. But as I am getting back into blogging, after having been gone during the Toxoplasmosis (click for my experience) issue, I needed to work on my…

Oh…how I love my annual vegetable garden. I had finally planted it in the February/March timeframe. As everyone knows though, in March I became very sick…probably infected with the Toxoplasmosis, coupled with normal baby sickness, as I was in my first trimester.

But after becoming sick, I had to let it just go. Andreas hates gardening. He loves what is produced, but actually work in it?!?! Nope! Unless I really need him to. So needless to say…the only love that the garden received from March until now was from the sprinklers. Very sad.

This is what it looked like this week before I started the clean-up.

Totally overgrown.

Here you can see the cucumbers overtaking the peppers and strawberries.

Originally we had the flagstone laid around the perimeter of the raised beds because I usually plant the cucumbers, squash and zucchini on the edges of the beds so that the vines flow out rather than inside of the beds.

This was when we first designed the space last year. Looks so much nicer. Sigh!! The flagstone design was because it used to be so hard (and annoying) for Andreas to mow without the flagstone there. This year…flagstone and I didn’t help the vines to grow outside. And now you can barely see the soil or the other plants. Boo!!!

The middle section is where most of my herbs are planted and they were a complete mess. In fact, they weren’t even getting enough sun on the lower branches so my mint has thinned out terribly.

And…my poor dill, parsley and basil! They are supposed to be trimmed or cut regularly so that the tops don’t produce the flowers, which are really the seeds for future growth. And of course, when the flowering starts, the herbs don’t grow as plentiful. They looked so pitiful.

While the right side of the garden didn’t look too terribly overgrown, the vegetables have not really been overflowing. Lots of green, but not much in produce. Very sad.

So what did I do?

Well I wish I could say that I cleaned it up so well that it looks fabulous. Unfortunately…there were some things that I could just not correct now. And we leave for vacation for two weeks so I felt like some of my efforts would be wasted anyway.

I did cut back the flowers on the herbs.

Maybe the herbs themselves will start to grow again?!?! I hope! As you can see above though, I wasn’t able to cut every single flower off, but I tried and did the best I could.

I also cut back the mint but it looks so sad now.

I did clean out the weeds as well, but hard to tell with all the green. I also had to fix the tomato plants so that they grow up instead of out, as some of the branches had grown outside of the tomato trellis. But I don’t have any fabulous pics to share for either of these efforts.

And that was really all I could do.

But I do have some great veggies growing. Look at all the zucchini.

And how about this fabulous corn?!?!

This is the first time I have planted corn. Four stalks total. But as you can see…this one stalk is growing a bit weird.

My patio tomatoes are really flourishing. As is my watermelon.

And this cabbage!

Actually tastes like lettuce. And as you can see…the small rabbit that has been hiding in our yard, has started to eat it. I cannot wait though until they mature enough to eat as I will just eat anyway. We love different variations of cole slaw.

So…that’t it. I had so many more pictures that I could have added, but I figured this post was long and boring enough. Ha! Well…it was fun writing it.

The moral of the story is…you cannot let your garden go. You have to attend to it weekly in order to ensure that your vegetables and herbs flourish and produce all that they can.

Unfortunately my garden doesn’t look much different now than it did before the clean-up.

But at least its producing. I guess I will just take what I can get this year and just plan for a better one next year.

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