Done working in the garden for the day. The wind out there is crazy! I was constantly having to run stuff down and put bricks and rocks on my gloves and seed packages to keep them from blowing away to who knows where. Seriously, it’s gusting like crazy out there.

I pulled out all the leftover winter stuff. The Brussels sprouts were doing little more than acting as a nursery for nasty caterpillars, and the broccoli and cauliflower I was waiting to go to see were just taking too long. I also yanked up the fava beans. The plants were dying back, so they were done doing the very little they did. I harvested the beans from the already dry pods, and the rest of the plants are out in the sun to dry out the pods. There’s not even enough to eat, so I’ll replant the seeds this fall and see what happens.

Bed One now contains one bulb of Elephant Garlic, more scallions (the first ones just plain failed), radishes, carrots, pepperoncini, and two of my baby tomato plants. That’s in addition to the regular garlic and the last of the winter carrots (which need to come up soon).

Bed Two has a variety of volunteer tomato plants and way, WAY too many baby basil plants (it’s behaving like a weed), plus the tomato plants I’d already planted, lettuce, and marigolds.

Bed Three sucks, and the only thing thriving in it are the cucumbers, though the walking onions did come up too. I didn’t add much outside dirt or compost to this new bed, and it’s showing me exactly how awful the actual dirt in our yard is for growing anything but wildflowers and weeds. I still need to kill the bed of fire ants in this bed, pull up the stuff that’s not doing anything at all, and replant more cucumbers, since they seem to like it. In fact, I’ll probably do that later today.

And how are things going in the garden? Not bad! As I already stated, I am overrun with basil, which is fine. I’ll be thinning them out in the next few days and using them for dinner cooking. The Winter Tomato has several ‘maters on it, as does that bizarre hybrid. The Better Boy is finally blooming, but I can safely say this will be the last attempt with this particular hybrid. Just never does well. The first batch of lettuce is busy going to seed, and the baby lettuces seem to still be doing OK. The marigolds have gone nuts, but they are gorgeous, so I don’t care. I have three peppers on my Texas A&M jalapeño. There’s another huge batch of carrots ready for harvest, and the pole beans are almost ready for a trellis. Also, the squash, which I planted in pots, seems to be thriving and will be blooming soon.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the mound area is just not thriving. The parsley did come up, as did the dill and Nasturtium, but the radishes were all eaten off by who knows what, the Nasturtium look like hell, and nothing seems to want to grow. Also, the lone potato plant is still alive, but it’s growing so slowly.

All in all, I can’t complain too much. I’m pretty sure we’ll at least have tomatoes and basil, carrots and radishes. I’m happy with that outcome. Who knows, maybe everything else will take off and really do well as soon as the weather settles down. We’ve had some hot days followed by unusually chilly nights, and I am certain some of the plants out there aren’t happy about that. But the soil temp is holding steady, so once it gets hot and stays that way, maybe things will just start growing.

Also, I have a ton of excess seeds. I’m thinking of making some small packets and offering them up to people who might like them. Some of them are very high quality purchased seed, but most of them are saved seeds. I imagine almost all of them would grow anywhere, though because I have been self-selecting on the saved seeds for plants that do well in high heat and low water, the saved ones might do best in the south or southwest. I’ll work on organizing and cataloging what all I have this weekend and then maybe next week start taking names of people who’d like a little bit my garden in their yard. I don’t have a large enough garden to use them all, and I’d rather see them used than sitting around losing their potency. I’ll be getting more seeds from my garden this year, and they do begin to stack up after a while!

You know, I think I’ll go plant more cucumbers (and maybe squash) right now, and go ahead and build the trellis for the beans. Might as well get that out of the way right now while I feel like it. My neck and back are already unhappy with me, and if it really does rain for the rest of the week, I won’t feel like going out there and slogging around in the mud. Then I can ignore the garden for a few days again.