June Garden

Draggon Tongue Beans

 Here are the beans.  They have a very distinctive look.  You can eat them as green beans when they are immature or fresh at this stage or dried.  The beans to the left are the true to form beans.  I will save the best of these for planting next year.  The ones to the right are almost completely purple.  I suppose if I wanted, I could save and plant this type until they stabilized and produce a pure purple variety.

 I only had one little strip in the garden, but I still managed to get about six cups of shelled beans.

This bowl was heaping full before I started shelling.

 The propagated tomatoes are still doing well.  They are growing fast and flowering.
 We'll see how fast they set fruit.

The pickling cucumbers have started producing now.  I've been able to pick a few and in the next few weeks it looks like there will be several a day.  I'm glad I trained them up the twine.
 It has worked really well so far.

The first planted tomatoes are doing as well as ever.  They are getting real big and I've been eating the Porters since June 1.

These are the Porters.  They were developed in the 30' and 40's in Stephenville, TX just a few miles away.  So, they are well suited to this area.

The yellow squash have set several fruit, but have cast off all of them until now.  I don't know what the problem was, but it looks like it's over.  Squash are good as self-selecting production to what they can accommodate well, so I wasn't real worried about it.

The zucchini are producing now too.

June Garden

 The squash is starting to look pretty good.

 Tomatos are much happier without the potatos crowding them out.

 French Marigolds are really starting to put on a show.

 These are the tomato plants, in back, that I propegated a few weeks ago.  They are doing well.

 Here are the cucumbers that are being trained up twine.  They are doing well and are producing.

 The Porter tomatos are already producing.  I picked the first ones on June 1.

 These are the new chickens. They are getting pretty big now.

The first pickling cucumber, ready to pick.

Potatos

I finally couldn't stand the potatos crowding out everything else, so I harvested them last week.  I got about 15 lbs.  They came out real nice and could have grown for several more weeks, but you have to make choices when you have so little space.  I will save the best ones to plant again next year and eat the rest.  In the meantime, my tomatos and onions can get bigger and have more sun and air.

Pear Espalier

I've wanted fruit trees for a long time now, but didn't have the room in my backyard.  I have seen espaliered fruit trees for a long time, but it never occured to me to try it myself.  Here is the final product. I have the first level done.  Each year I will add a level.  There will be three levels in all.  I will prune it to the lenth of the wires and the height of the fence.  I will take up about a foot and half of depth.  The variety I planted is Flordahome semi-dwarf pear, mainly because that was what was available and had the right shape to prune.

This is how they looked to begin with.  I obviously pruned them a lot.

These are the anchors, with a tightening mechanism, to keep the wire tight.  The branches of the tree are trained along the wire.

As you can see, it takes up very little space.  Now I just have to weight for it to get big enough to fruit.