Late June and early July: Strawberries, Campers...and weeds!

 Strawberry Jam class!

A beautiful week of cool weather in the garden.  The ground was very loose after 2 1/4 inches of rain, so weeding was easy.   Taty's group pulled up the overgrown lettuce, saving the best leaves for salad,  and also pulled the old pea vines on the west end of the trellis, saving all the overgrown pea pods, so the peas can be dried for soup!  

The storm knocked over the corn plants.  The soil is so wet the roots can't hold!

The entire garden seems suddenly engulfed in weeds!  This photo shows a zuchini and cantaloupe plant on the left, IF you can find them amidst the weeds--some weeds are almost 1 feet high!  But you can pull out handfuls at a time!  So this has been a major week for weeding!

Here's "weed mountain" at the end of the week! (taller than me!)

Now that it's weeded, the garden looks great.  But as I dumped bucket after bucket of weeds on that "mountain," I kept thinking that all that sunshine, water, and soil nutrition went into growing those weeds.  What a shame that wasn't all vegetables.  So many of weeds were in the paths.  Perhaps I should plant more intensively with narrower paths!  

The first beans!

Carrots still tiny and thin!

Finally some broccoli heads beginning to form!

Rec cabbage heading up!

The first time I ever grew an iceberg lettuce head.  I think I didn't know when it was ready to be picked.  Today when I opened the outside leaves, it was all rotten.  Oh well...I don't think much of iceberg anyway.    

The herb garden.  Blue flowered borage and yellow flowered dill in the background.

The raspberries are huge!

And the early berries are almost ripe!

This is the onion and garlic patch, almost done being weeded (see far end!)

Red beets in foreground, then celery, then chard, then corn (standing up better again, after being straightened by me, and then the plant's natural ability to grow upright seemed to solve the problem by the end of the week.

I saw the first 3" long cucumber today!

Squash and melon patch:  Cantaloupe right front) and watermelon (left front), then Zuchine (left middle) and summer squash (right middle), and pumpkins left and right rear)

 The potato patch.

Plum tomatoes and peppers

 Bib boy tomatoes.  Added the willow stick teepees over the cages today, so that I could tie up the vines as they grow.  I read that big boys are indeterminate, meaning they will grow and grow and keep producing more fruit, until frost.

The asparagus has now all leafed out, since I stopped cutting it a few weeks ago.  Soaking up all that sunshine to nourish its roots for next year.