The garden is dry, but it looks great!

We present to you today some photographs of our Fermilab garden. It looks very nice. Now we just have to wait (and continue weeding!) for the crop to come in.

Here is our stand of tomatoes. These are not the biggest plants in the Club area (J.W., not surprisingly has the biggest).

Our peppers are well weeded and clean. I hope this hot weather gets them to grow some more.

In the foreground is the collards, then the wispy fennel, followed by the okra, then four rows of beans.

Turning to the left, we see (from the right) collards, leeks, beets and turnips. In the background are pumpkins and other melons (where the sprinkler is going).

And here is a beautiful tomato blossom. (If you are going to click on one picture to see a higher resolution version, it should be this one.)

Successful morning of weeding

Joanne and I got to the garden at about 8:30 and worked for almost 5 hours! It was hot at the end, but we got a lot done.

We finished weeding everything; most by hand but some by hoe. We finished making the tomato cages.

Jo raked the weeds up and took them away (the Garden Club has a place for this sort of refuse).

Then I tilled. I was able to go between all the rows, and I cleaned up the area for the pumpkins. it already looked great. Then I put on the furrower and furrowed between all the rows! Some of the little plants got buried, but I think I caught all of them and un-buried them.

We had two remaining bags of shredded leaves, and we placed them under the pumpkin plant and around the peppers.

Joanne watered everything while I put in the last of the tomato stakes.

Photos

Here is the okra, after the weeding, tilling and furrowing (click to see a larger image):

The view from the south side of the garden:

A nice snapshot of some beans and blossoms:

Our work of weeding and tilling:

More maintenance

It has been 1.5 weeks since our last day of work at the garden (I tilled between the rows and put down a lot of shredded leaves then). Consequently, the weeds have grown quite a bit--faster than the plants, in most cases.

I was able to weed the two rows of okra and the one row of fennel. We have 15 sprouted fennel plants. The first row of pre-weeded okra is the row on the left of this image (the full row that comes from the bottom-left corner):

Weeding three rows (one seventh of the 21 rows I have) took me an hour, so weeding the rest of the garden will take six hours. Maybe we can do it together (E & J) and find some shortcuts (for example, use a hoe (novel idea)).

The tomato plants are looking very nice. The pepper plants are a mixed lot--some are OK and some are still small. The leeks look great, but need weeding. The pumpkins are OK--I think that we have one gigantic pumpkin plant left, but the other (small) pumpkins are coming up nicely.

Lots of work to do. Yay!

Update from the evening: I was able to weed ALL of the tomatoes and most of the peppers with a hoe. And I mowed.