Backyard Garden Month 3

Kind of crazy to believe that I have only had all this stuff planted for two months!! With the warmer weather, things are really growing now! And I am learning some valuable gardening lessons as well. . .

Let's take a look back a month ago:

Ok.

And now. . .

Crazy what a month can do!!

Celebrity tomatoes getting bigger and bigger (this pic was taken a week ago)

Pie pumpkin blossom (don't have any growing pumpkins yet - until recently, the male and female flowers have not been open at the same time and my efforts at hand pollinating have been unsuccessful, but finally the plants are sending up lots of blossoms all at once so I hope soon we'll get a pumpkin growing!)

The scarlet runner beans - I love how these have been blossoming so I have a few pictures of them :)

Sunny boy yellow tomatoes

Bell peppers and jalepenos are fruiting now

My massive tomatillo plant - it is literally taller than I am at this point, reaching about 6 ft tall!

Tomatillos starting to grow

Here's the beans growing up the trellis (and you can see a preview of the new beds that are going to be added soon!)

The first sunflower is getting ready to open!

A bumblebee on the scarlet runner beans

So, there's all the pics! Since everything really took off growing this past month, it has been within the month that I have learned a lot of things:

1. Tomatoes get BIG.  I actually had no idea they could get this large - I saw pictures of 6 ft high, 4 ft wide tomato plants in various books, but come on - they were gardening books that the author wouldn't be writing a book if they weren't some sort of super gardener, so I just kind of disregarded. The tomatoes I have grown in the past maybe got 2 1/2 ft tall in their containers. As it turns out, planting them in the ground is a whole different situation. . .

       What I will do differently next time: I will not waste money on those small wire cages you get from Lowes or Home Depot (well, I guess I already wasted that money. . .) but I will get hog or cattle panels (whichever ones will allow me to stick my hand through it and pull awesome fruit out) and make them like this: 

That way my tomatoes won't be on top of each other, climbing out of the beds and into the lawn and smothering every other plant I have planted nearby (and being so close they are more prone to massive caterpillar attacks and the spreading of diseases. . .)

2. No pumpkins.  I admit, this was more of an experiment than anything (I took some seeds that started to grow on the side of the driveway after Husband went all Office Space on an old pumpkin last fall before throwing it (kind of) in the compost pile):

I knew pumpkin plants get big but it is totally dominating and it is not really being very productive either (every female flower to this point has not been fertilized I guess, and the baby pumpkin has turned yellow and fallen off every time). I guess we will see if this changes. Maybe I will get 10 pumpkins. I doubt it, though (but if I do, it will be at the expense of every other plant in its vicinity). You can see the effects of the drain on nutrients by comparing the two sides of the garden that have scarlet runner beans:

The left side plants are no higher than two feet up the trellis (and this pic was taken 2 weeks ago!) and the right side is thick with leaves and blossoms all the way up to the top and extending past the top! And the leaves on the left are more yellow than the ones on the right. So, no more pumpkins. . .

That's all for now! Maybe I will try to update more frequently :)