Blooms and Baby Veggies

This is so rewarding! My yard is overflowing with flowers and vegetable babies and peas hanging on their vines. The first long awaited nasturtium is here along with a host of new buds and my hydrangea (top photo) is finally looking a little pink. There are squash blooms coming along everywhere. I have been hoping to produce enough to donate something to "plant a row for the hungry". It looks like I will be donating cherry tomatoes, yellow crookneck squash, acorn squash, and zucchini. My lettuce has done very well as well and we have been supplementing our barbecue hamburger nights with lettuce. I waste less when I can just go out and cut off exactly how many lettuce leaves I need. A note on the brilliance of nature: I am so glad that tomatoes and strawberries turn red when they are ready to be picked. It would be harder to find them, especially on the really big bushes.

What I learned this month....

Hybrid tomatoes will grow very large and should be penned up with the larger tomato cages. If you use the smaller cages with the hybrid and don't trim off half the plant, the plant will grow up and pull the cage out and over. (Yes, there is a small tomato cage in the tomato plant above!!) Perhaps I will look into proper pruning of tomato bushes.

Nasturtiums like lots of water and fertilizer! My husband planted a couple nasturtiums under my rose bush to surprise me and they are doing so much better than the nasturtiums I planted in the front row of my flower beds.

Snap peas should not be picked until they are absolutely bulging and the flower has been pushed off the end.