garden update: late june

After the sad tale of our dead seedlings, you'd think the garden would be having a rough time. But amazingly, it's going gangbusters - particularly the items we started from direct seed. 

My herbs are all doing well in pots. Basil is doing so well that I'll have to move it into larger pots soon. (I was making do with what I had at the time and knew this would happen eventually.)

These are sunflowers that I planted after being given some free seeds at Farm to Table this year. I had no idea how they'd do or how many would survive, but they seem to be thriving and I would venture to guess will outgrow their pots too!

This little guy is one of the seedlings we thought was dead. Mark held on to two tomato seedlings that he thought had a chance and planted them in the chard bed. They seem to be alive!

A few pepper plants are doing well too, sharing a bed with some rows of chard that were direct seed. 

This bed of beans was ransacked by the chickens soon after the seeds were planted, so we didn't know if we'd get anything at all. Mark put up some netting on the top of the bed so it's sort of "caged" in. And it seems a decent amount of seeds were spared from the chickens' talons!

There are four mini "beds" with cucumber plants. They are spots of earth that Mark dug up and put some light fencing around to keep the chickens out. These seem to all be coming up healthy as well.

Last year we grew one single corn plant, and enjoyed delicious corn off of it. This year we have a whole bed! It's unlikely to be knee-high by the fourth of July, but it's also doing well.

In the big tomato bed, the plants are also getting big. We had a whopper of a storm a few weeks ago and Mark bravely went out to stake up the plants in the rain as they were getting completely bombarded before they were really strong enough to withstand it. 

We even have a tiny tomato starting! The first one to actually start growing here. (We got one seedling from our farmers' market that already had a baby tomato on it when we purchased it, so it didn't feel like it counted. This one does.)

How are your gardens coming along? What did you plant and how are they faring?