Garden: End of June Update

     Only 9 more days until my due date and I might be going a little stir crazy. Hubby says that it is nesting and that the feeling is completely normal but I am wary of this advice. I do not feel the incessant desire to clean everything or to cook tons, just this overwhelming feeling that nothing satisfies me (how selfish, I know). Nothing does it, not cleaning, not cooking, not chocolate, movies, shopping, sleeping, walking, ice cream, sewing, stitching, nor laundry makes me feel like I have accomplished anything for the day. This close to my due date and I figure that a slight feeling of agitation is probably normal and not a step into a diagnosed   disease (fingers crossed).

     On the positive side, my tiny little half-hearted pregnancy garden is doing pretty well, all things considered. Hubby and I spent about five hours prepping and planting and I have spent maybe two hours since weeding and staring at it, so its success has much more to do with luck and benevolent garden spirits than my green thumb. 

 This garden is maybe ten feet long by four feet wide, so there is nothing really too special going on here, but since it is my first garden since I was a child, I am pretty impressed with the idea of seeds turning into plants then turning into food. The picture to the left show my amazing pea plants, which are by far doing the best, then in the wine barrel planter are my potatoes that I started from too-soft spuds left in the cupboard too long, and at the bottom is a daisy plant that Hubby had given to me for Mother's day. There are also pumpkin plants in between the peas and potatoes but are hard to see in that picture, when they start to flower I will post new pictures of them and in front is supposed to be a row of carrots, the really neat ones that come in purple, orange and yellow but I am unconvinced of their success at this point. The kids and I really love eating cut up carrots with our meals so I thought different coloured ones would really go over well but a late frost might have disagreed with me. The picture  above that shows more pumpkins, I planted some for carving and some tiny Jack-Be-Littles for decoration. In the top left of the picture you can almost see the tomato plants that I am attempting. I have not thinned out any of my plants, like I said, this is supposed to be a minimum input garden considering I can not bend over much at this point, so there are just mounds of plants growing and hopefully becoming fruitful in the near future.

      Here are my little pea flowers just starting to blossom, some of them have opened completely and I may, or may not, have tried to count them all to see how many peas that I will actually get. I do have a sneaking suspicion that my darling Husband will get to them before I do and eat them all raw straight from the plant and I will not get any.

     Not that I can take any credit for this, but we do have a mulberry tree that grows on our property which has tons of berries on it, all way to high for me to reach. I have been trying to convince Husband to spend some time on a ladder to aide in my conquest of the berries but it has rained so much in the past two weeks that we have not had much time to pick them anyways. I really wanted to get enough to can some, make some jam and to make a pie but the only one that has ventured to pick any has been E and she gets enough to satisfy her hunger and then moves on to something more interesting. 

     All in all I am pretty happy with my low maintenance garden, outside of getting poison ivy all over my hand and no carrot crop. The seeds that I bought from Home Depot have all done well and had almost 100% germination, which really impressed me. I am really hoping that this rain will stop for a couple days to let me clean and air out the house before Baby Rogers gets here although with single digit days until the due date, I am not sure that will happen!