My summer garden

This is the third summer (wow!) that I've had a garden at DG. It's a great spot as it's super sunny and there's plenty of room. You might remember that we (and by we, I mean M) did a lot of new irrigation this spring, for both the orchard and dahlia garden (both new this year) as well as to the garden (improvements over last year).

I've always planted a few flowers in the vegetable garden proper, and this summer I expanded what I'd done in the past. I started with a couple nursery sunflowers, then one 6-pack of Zinnias, and then a lot of volunteer Cosmos came up.

1 of 2 Sunflowers from the nursery. Each plant had dozens

It was looking great. 

Zinnias: so much bang for my measly 6-pack buck!

Volunteer Cosmos--love them

I kind of fell a little bit in love with the sunflowers, so I bought a couple packets of seeds and planted them in July. Felt kinda late, but it was a cheap risk. And here's what I got--though none of them are as tall or girthy-stemmed as the transplants from the nursery, they are so darn cheery. They make me happy.

At least these flowers have been a success. The vegetable portion of the garden has been a mixed bag. The cherry tomatoes (1 yellow, 1 red, 1 orange) are doing reliably well (all except for one). The regular sized tomatoes are unhealthy and not bearing very well. The peppers (jalapenos and serranos) are bearing well, but they're so tiny that a couple of the "bushes" have only 2 peppers each (the whole plants are only about 8 inches tall). The squash is the only thing that's going gangbusters--and there only one of the two. The yellow straightneck has not bourne a single pick-worthy specimen. The other one, some kind of light green-skinned slightly rounded end zucchini-like fellow is trying to singlehandedly feed the world.

We think that our amendments in the raised beds cause too much of the water to filter through too quickly. The irrigation system is working well, but to combat our super-clay-ey soil, we added lots of amendments, and apparently not enough native soil. Poor little plants are doing their best, but in some cases, they've just struggled for months.

Next year will be different on several fronts: it should be much easier to tend since we'll be living there and it won't be a drive out there after work to harvest, weed, etc; we plan to re-design the layout of the garden and will either remove the raised beds, or re-dig them. One thing that won't change is to have abundant flowers in the veggie garden. It's such a happy place to be!

The garden, looking west, at sunset