The vegetable garden mid-summer

The first bed has tomatoes, basil, zucchini, cucumber, and Jerusalem artichoke.

I am not sure what is going on with the tomatoes, quite a lot of the branches

are dying off and the tomatoes don't seem to want to ripen on the bushes.

I ended up picking a whole heap of them yesterday when I got home from work

at lunch time as they were getting burnt. They all had a touch of colour on them

when picked and it looks like they will ripen inside okay. 

The second bed has potatoes, watermelon, tomatoes, basil, beans and asparagus.

Once this bed starts growing it will be quite crowded, hopefully now I have the mulch

on there it will take off. The beans are Blue Lake which I have always grown in the

past, but this year, they just seem to be really tough and not really nice to eat at all.

Might need to look at trying a different variety next summer.

I have never had any success planting potatoes in the vege garden before for some reason.

So this year I had a plastic tub and drilled some holes in it and planted the spuds, they started shooting away in no time. On Christmas day I found some potatoes in the pantry that had sprouted so I ran out to the vege garden and just shoved them in the ground and forgot about them, got such a surprise when I when out there one day and found they were poking up through the dirt.

There is lots of basil planted, and it is finally starting to take off.

Looking forward to some pesto.

Zucchini, well yes, there are about a gazillion of them out in the garden!

The first lot of potatoes I planted in the plastic tub.

The small harvest I picked the other day. Since then there has been lots more

tomatoes, beans and corn picked. I also put a second lot of corn seedlings

in on Sunday.

I was looking back at some photos recently from the summer of 2010 when the raised garden beds were first built. That first year or two the vegetable garden both summer and winter was the most productive it has ever been. This summer is really the first time in a few years that I have been able to do a bit more out there, as two bad shoulders has seen not much happen in the garden. For probably the last six months I have been trying to do a bit out there everyday. The garden is nowhere near like I would like it to be, but slowly but surely I can see a little bit of improvement. I guess a little bit is better than nothing. 

Yesterday was a very hot day and today is set to be another stinker, in fact the next few days are all pretty yuck heat wise. We have had no rain here for about 3 or 4 months now so everything is extremely dry. While we melt some parts of the northern hemisphere are experiencing blizzard conditions. The weather always seems to go from one extreme to another. We have had no rain and yet over east, parts of that have had torrential rain. Crazy weather. Think I might go find something to do with all these zucchinis!!