Lavender and Lilies

It's summer in the flower garden, too. My mailbox bed has daylilies as tall as the mailbox. Also in full bloom: milkweed, coneflower, lavender, and roses. One of my favorite things about gardening is watching the progression of blooms throughout the growing season.

My spring garden was all pinks and purples. In the summer, there's a lot more yellow and orange. Those bright colors seem to be a better match for the steamy summer heat.

Goodbye, Spring. Hello, Summer.

I harvested all of the potatoes yesterday. The grand total is just over 28 pounds! That's quite a yield from twenty little seed potatoes.

We picked the last of the peas today, too, and pulled up and composted the pea plants. The only thing left from the spring garden is lettuce, and it's having a hard time during the heat of the day. It may not last the weekend.

After I dug up the potatoes, I added a whole wheelbarrow load of gorgeous screened compost to that bed. Compost is magic. I use the three-bin system. By the time the third bin is done, it's really beautiful stuff to add to the garden soil.

In place of the potatoes, I planted cucumbers, basil, and dill. When I pulled up the garlic a few weeks ago, I planted zucchini and yellow squash. Add that to the peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes, and it's summer in the vegetable garden.

Harvest

I harvested my first potatoes this weekend. Sort of by accident. This is my first attempt at growing potatoes. So far I've learned that, like tomatoes, potatoes probably need to be staked or caged. I discovered this after a good rainstorm flattened several potato plants. Most of them are still doing fine, even though they're growing sideways, but a few stems broke and those plants are dying. I dug up one this weekend and found about a pound and a half of redskin potatoes. So now we're looking for potato recipes. I have about 20 plants--at 1-1/2 pounds per plants, that's a lot of potatoes in our future.