HSV Garden Challenge #4

Our Peter Rabbit garden is coming along nicely. 

We harvested the radishes during our "row" of The Story of Peter Rabbit.

However, we left one lone little radish to let it go to seed. The stalk is over 3 feet tall! and has little white and purple flowers.

"Other seeds fell into the good soil, and as they grew up and increased, they yielded a crop and produced thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold."

Can't wait to see how many more seeds we get from this one little radish! We planted new radish seeds hoping for another crop, while we wait. 

Hard to believe just a month ago our Peter Rabbit garden looked like this:

And now this:

If you look closely, you can see that our turnips (that we are growing for our row with the book Down, Down the Mountain) are shading the carrots. I've never grown turnips before, but now I know to plant them on the north side of the box. (That is what I mean by a "trial and error gardener" ~ I live, I learn, I move on learning from my mistakes. . . and keep moving forward). I learn something new every season (in life and gardening) and I hope my kids are catching on to that.

I am pleased with how well onions make my garden look so green.

And these little sweeties are pretty pleasing as well:

I have a fond memory of picking peas from the garden when I was a child and these just make me happy.

Here is my "baby:"

I am trying something new this year.  Rather than use cages, I am vining my roma tomatoes with bamboo poles and gardening tape. To do this, I snip off the tomato leaves that do not produce fruit. This encourages the plant to grow taller and puts the energy into producing fruit. And I stake the tomato vines with gardening tape that stretches for growth. I can squeeze more plants into less space this way. I learned this technique from SFG. I hope 50 plants in a 4x8 box isn't too much. . . if so, I'll know for next year!

The marigolds I started from seed are flowering, too! (My first time doing this). 

Here is a wide angle view. In the far right corner is a three sisters bed (corn, beans and squash). This is my first time trying that too. 

This has been the worst year for mosquitos that I can remember. Here is my solution that I picked up from our local greenhouse/gardening center:

Citronella oil, clove oil, peppermint oil and rosemary oil (smells good)

Next to my tomato box is three hills of cucumbers, that I started recently. This box was supposed to be for tomatoes, but I lost some from hardening them off too quickly (we have had a lot of cold rainy days and I wanted to get them in the ground because they were getting leggy). 

Pest?

I noticed this morning that my cucumber seedlings are infested with an unidentified pest. Here is my 1st defense:

The active ingredients are rosemary oil, peppermint oil, thyme oil, and clove oil.  I gave a light mist spray over the whole garden. Let's hope it works. 

I've never blogged so much about my garden this early, but I am thankful to the Homeschool Village for hosting the garden challenge. If I had not been motivated to get out and start working on my garden when I did, I don't think I would have gotten as much done with all the rain we have had. Thanks HSV! 

Thanks for following along with my gardening adventure. . .

I went from this:

to this:

And we just might have some sun after all this Summer. =)