Filling in the spaces, planting the tomatoes

Two weeks ago we visited Tomatomania once again and got 10 different tomato varieties this time. Because I couldn't eat the tomatoes last year, we ended up buying a few of the varieties once again.  Hopefully this time I don't have to enjoy the tomatoes vicariously through my students.

In the past month the raspberries and strawberry plants have exploded into joyous greenery - hopefully this translates into more than two berries at a time!

Dave was excited to discover that, after planting his asparagus last year and patiently waiting, he now has ONE skinny stalk (~0.5 cm diameter, if that). You have no idea how hard it is to photograph something so thin...

Here we go again - garden 2014, woohoo!

Ok, so it's time to get started once again - this time we want to have better soil.  The stuff we purchased last year (which was supposed to be primo soil for fruits and veggies) has the consistency of concrete... 

So we got a bunch of bags of steer manure (not as stinky as we thought it might be), excavated some old soil, and mixed the new stuff in.

And then did a little planting.

We convinced our gnome to sign another contract to protect the berries -he seemed pretty happy about it. Not sure if the bird in his hand wants to sit there all summer again, though:

Fixins for Greek salad!

Yes, apparently we can get all the ingredients for Greek salad to ripen at the same time!  Well, our garden doesn't supply ALL the ingredients - no olives for olive oil or milk for feta cheese, but otherwise we're good!

It was delicious.

Yes, but will everything be ready at the same time so we can make a Greek salad?

We've got some great progress going on....  It's amazing how quickly some stuff grows. Here's the latest:

Sun sugar tomatoes:

Pickling cucumber (left; he's a pretty fat guy) and regular cucumber (right):

Snap peas:

Green pepper:

Broccoli

 

Ta daa! The watering system is FINALLY in place

It has taken a long time, but the plumbing is finally done!  It is a work of art, though. Dave is pretty proud of his workmanship:

Still need to do some covering of tubing along the trench, but otherwise it's done! Yay! Here's a close-up example of our drip system setup around the tomatoes (the rest of the beds have drip tubing in straight lines):

Growing, growing, growing

Our tomato plants are getting pretty big in the raised bed:

The ones in the pots are a lot smaller, but our very first ripe tomato will come from a potted plant.  Here we check back with our famous first tomato:

And a few more up-and-comers:

Now, we've got some baby green peppers, too:

Our "protector"

We hired a gnome to protect our plants from pests and animals.... 

He has dropped the ball on occasion (note the little chew holes on the right-hand leaf of our raspberry plant).... but he's good friends with the birdies.