Garden Update-- Beets and the Jungle

 These are the first beets of the year.  They were very good (had them for lunch).

 Here's the jungle.  The tomatos and cucumbers are going crazy.

 These pictures were actually taken after I pruned a bunch of the cucumber runners.

 In the foreground you can see some of the little tomatos I started by seed are taking off.

You can see this thing is so big I have to tie up some of the branches.  

You can also see tons of tomatos on both plants.

 This is the new bed.  First used last year (at least the portion to the left.

On the left is beets.  In the middle is a nice yellow crookneck squash.

On the right are a couple of cucumber plants and some oinions

you can't see.

 This is my little bell pepper, doing quite well.

 Cute little guys about two inches in diameter.

 Nice little white type pickling cucumbers will be ready in a couple of days.

 If you enlarge this one you can see tons of tomatos.

 Yellow crookneck squash blossom.

The French Marigolds are all blooming now.  It smells great.

Garlic (early)

 I had to pick some garlci earlh because my dog knocked them over.

They are small heads, but seems to have bulbed fine.

Hopefully the dog will leave the rest alone and they will get another month to grow.

 These are really, really strong smelling too.  Good thing I like garlic.

 They look pretty good once they are cleaned up.

 Lots of little yellow crooknecks now.

These are the cucumbers now.  The picture below is from a week ago.  Big difference.

This is last week.  The tomoatos have grown a lot in a week.

This is this weeks pic of the largest tomato plant.  It is over the top of a 5 foot

cage by several inches.  You can see it was a good foot shorter last week

in the pic above.

First Pics of the New Year (click the pics to view full size)

 This is the view of the garde from the spot closest to the back door. 

 We have asperigus, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, sugar snap peas, 

beets carrots, bell peppers, and garlic.

This is the opposite view with the chicken coop in the background.

 One of the tomato plants is already 5 feet tall.  

I also always plant French marigolds along the bottomof the terrace, 

both for their beauty and their beneficial properties for the garden.

 You can see the cucumber runners and climbing strings attached to plant hangers.  

This gives them theroom to grow up, since I don't have room for them to grow out.  

They have dozens of blooms already.I won't be long and we"ll have plenty of these 

white type pickling cucumbers.

 Here you can see the companion plantings around the tomatos.

 There are mainly carrots and beets.

 The big boy.  These heirloom tomatos get big.

Several dozen tomatos have set.

 Lots of blooms on the yellow crook neck squash too.  

You can also see the beets growing in back.

 A little visiter on the flat leaf parsley.  

Don't know what it would turn into, so ended up chicken food.

 This is the garlic patch.  My first attempt.  We'll see in about a month.

 The red ones are new additiions. 

We traded them for a really broody one we had.  

Huge eggs.

 And this is part of the 10 lbs of bacon that I cured over the last week and 

smoked and packaged yesterday.  I just love the way it looks.  It tastes even better.

 This was a really thick belly from a pastured pork from a farm in Iowa.

I used a sweet dry rub for the cure, but then added a lot of pepper.  Good contrast.