“Summer portrait” of my current garden and flower beds.   I’m going to try doing this once a month or so, because (despite my gardening calendar) I lose track of how things “really” worked in my garden in previous years. Outsourcing my longterm memory is one of my favorite strategies for being more productive, so, here goes!

(Warning – this is a long post! …and if it seems like I have a LOT of beds, that’s because I do try to rotate my plants around every year!)

Front lawn: not grass, not weeds, not flowers…strawberries!  In the tradition of “Grow Food Not Lawns”!  Transplanted this spring from runaways in the garden walkway.

Butterfly bed in the front yard:

Container plants: Fig and blueberries

Garden proper – raised bed, quasi-Square Foot approach, with drip irrigation throughout:

Experimenting with harvesting seeds, which is why this bed looks like spanked @$$.

Asparagus beetles sucked this year – totally drained the life out of my harvest.  The bed is well established, but very low yield due to the pests.

Believe it or not, the double-bed of raspberries was actually pruned and trained in rows this year… they are still overgrown though!

Squashes: a yellow, a zucchini, and an acorn.  A sangria watermelon also, just for fun.

A mixed bed of nightshades. (For the record – those are two-year old jalapeños, which were raised in a container last year, and overwintered indoors!)  We decided to try new approaches to train the tomatoes – more on that later when they actually are big enough.  I started most of these plants…myself…indoors…too late…which is why they are all so small at the official start of summer.

FYI – I didn’t mean to plant snow peas!  I don’t know where they came from!

(It also had iceberg lettuce until this morning – all the recent rains had turned them to mush.  Great dinner for the slugs and earwigs! Not so great for harvesting…)

Most of these strawberries are fairly old, and produced very sad little berries this spring.   All new plants / beds being planned for next year!

A yellow, a zucchini, a butternut, and an acorn squash.

You can never have too many tomatoes!

A mixed variety, including some purple beans.

Also started too late in the season… do we sense a trend here?

First time growing blackberries!

And that’s it!   Hoping to stick to this so I (and anyone else who is interested) can compare how my garden does month to month and year to year!