creativecasey: My growing garden...A diary of a gardener

Happy Wednesday everyone! As a gardener, I am happy to say that there is a 70% chance for rain this evening - which we desperately need. As a photographer, I'm not so happy - I'm supposed to have a maternity session this evening and the rain is likely going to force us to reschedule... Oh well, you can't win them all!

I do have a funny story to share.. I've been feeling a bit under the weather with a summer cold and honestly, it's been so retched hot outside that I haven't really wanted to spend very much time in the garden...however, yesterday, I went out to water and found that 3 of my large (and when I say large, I mean taller than me) lemon tree tomato plants were completely tipped over! ACK! Part of the problem was that I had NO IDEA how big these heirloom varieties were supposed to be, so I was happy when I found these $1 tomato cages on sale on Mother's Day at my local Ace Hardware Store. Little did I know that within a month, I would be unable to actually see the cage because the plants were so big! So here we are, Peyton and I, in the garden in the middle of a 100 degree day... I'm asking her to hold up the plants, which by the way, are about 2 feet taller than her while I sprint over and grab some of my older (yet more trusty) tomato cages to prop up the beasts.

So, I have deduced a couple of thoughts from experience...

1. DON'T BUY CHEAP TOMATO CAGES

2. Even if it's hot and you think you don't need to, go visit the garden at least once a day to make sure it's all in order - ESPECIALLY if it's windy...

So there you have it folks...real life lessons from an actual ~~crazy person~~ gardener.

Let's move forward... I took some fun shots of the garden a few days ago...here goes...

Here is a look at a growing birdhouse gourd... Peyton love these! She wants to pick them now and has a hard time understanding why we have to wait... More to come on that...

Here is a shot of my growing brandywine tomatoes... I CANNOT wait to start eating these... NOM, NOM, NOM!

Here is a shot of my lovely marigolds... At first I wasn't too worried about their aesthetic beauty, more about their ability to detour bad bugs from the garden, but as it turns out, they are truly lovely and add some much needed color to my garden of green... I'm thinking I will start these from seeds for next summer...

And here is a look at the beastly plants... As you can kind of see, there are some other brownish tomato cage fence helping to hold up the larger tomato plants...

Here is a closer look at the lovely groupings of the lemon tree tomato variety... Right now, on each plant, I would say there are at least 80 tomatoes growing and I think I have 4 of this variety planted in my garden :).

And from my butterfly garden, I noticed that the beautiful common milkweed was starting to bloom... So pretty!

And last but not least... here is a shot of the lovely canopy from the lemon cukes. I've never grown this variety before, so I'm really excited to try them out... They are very prolific in the garden right now...