Garden Stuff (photo overload edition)

As you know, we left our home to visit Kevin and Dawn's family in Arizona. That meant I wouldn't be around to water the garden and sunflowers. So I bought a soaker hose and some extra hose repair ends, as well as some garden mulch to put in the garden while we were away.

The mulch was pretty easy to put in, but it would have been WAY easier when the plants were smaller. Same story for the hose. It went in just fine, but was kind or tricky. I cut about six feet of the soaker hose off to put in the front where the sunflowers were. That's why I bought the repair pieces. It all came together fine. Before we left I made sure to turn the water on, and hoped it would do the trick...

It worked GREAT! Everything was alive and flourishing.

Here's Duncan, Liam and Jennan standing between the two boxes.


Here I am showing the boys what's been growing. A large yellow crook neck squash. Can you see it?

I went ahead and picked some of the larger fruits. There's that cook neck squash from the previous picture. You can see the dark green zucchini. And then you see their off spring- some of the yellow crook neck squash was cross pollinated with the zucchini and made these greenish green and yellow splotchy squashes. Pretty crazy. Now, if you plant the seeds from those cross bred fruits, that's what you'll grow. Pretty interesting stuff.

For dinner that night, I cut up some of what I picked, and sauteed it with some GFCF butter (so the boys could try some), salt, pepper and garlic.

Just for fun, I plated some with the kielbasa Anna and I were having with it. It was TASTE. The boys didn't care for it (it takes a lot of tries before they change their minds), Jennan ate it up, and Tegan picked at hers.

Sunflower #1: We returned home to a fully bloomed 6+ foot sunflower. Very cool.

The two smaller sunflower heads are starting to be too heavy for it's self. The blooms are resting on the fence.

The front pumpkin is still in pretty bad shape. I don't think it will last much longer.

Back to the garden boxes. Here's a picture of what we'll soon be harvesting from the crook neck squash plant. The largest one in the shot is probably 2 inches or so.

There's the cantaloupe. Almost the size of a softball.

Here's a picture of some of the hose around the corn bases.

Some of the other cantaloupe blooms finally got pollinated! There's about 4 or 5 (that I've found) of these little nubs growing.

The pumpkin plant in the back is growing like crazy. Here's one of about 3 (that I've found) little pumpkin nubs. Can't wait to see how big they get by the end of October.

So that's this week's update. Not pictured is our one lonely Roma tomato that's still doing fine. Can't see any others beginning. It probably needed to be more in the open instead of in the middle of other huge plants. Our zucchini has some sort of plant disease or something. Might be something called "mosaic virus". The leaves are being affected. Doesn't seem to be affecting the fruit though. There's about a half dozen that are about 4 inches long. I'd like them to be about 6 or so before I harvest them. The corn we planted from seed seems to be growing taller than the ones we bought at Lowe's at this point. Haven't seen any ears growing yet, but I'm sure they'll begin soon.