Our garden is doing nicely this year. I attribute it to couple of factors:

• Over the past 4 years I have focused on the garden, adding peat moss, leaves, and horse manure to the soil to loosen it up. In these years, I’ve also figured out the ideal teak patio furniture that the garden needs.
• This year I actually used restraint in planting peas and beans and staggered my plantings to enable harvesting over a longer season.
• We have had timely thunderstorms giving water at needed times. This plus the abundance of horse manure compost have kept enough moisture for the plants.
• I got a some volunteer plants from last year’s crops, namely pumpkins and cucumbers, that I didn’t plant this year but were desired by the family.

Let’s take a look. Starting on the far right is a row of 10 rhubarb plants leading into a row of asparagus which has gone to seed forming big green bushes. In the foreground are about 10 tomato plants. On the far left you can see the edge of a volunteer pumpkin. In the center back are carrots, beans and peas. In the far back is what’s left of a pickup truck load of horse manure which I have been using to compost between rows as they emerge.

This is pretty much the same scene from the other side with a row of carrots, 1/2 row of yellow wax beans and 1/2 row of spinach in the foreground; a row of late peas, and the tomatoes and pumpkin in the background.

I haven’t grown carrots before because they are so cheap to buy, but Eric wanted carrots and they are doing quite well. You can see there is a lot of horse manure between the rows.

The tomatoes are starting to show on the plants.

This picture shows our volunteer sunflower standing at the end of what used to be a row of peas. I planted three rows of peas in early April and we have been eating peas for about a month now. Eric and I would eat them out of the garden and throw the empty pods to the dogs, who relished them. The dogs made the short leap from being fed empty pods to picking pea pods themselves. Unfortunately when they picked the pods they usually yanked the whole plant out as well. Within a week they had destroyed the outside row of peas! So I replanted the row and I am hoping to get some early September peas.

My pea trellis consists of hog panel fence. It worked well for the shorter peas, but as you can see I have a row of peas that required 8′ poles. These peas had extremely long vines and folded over the top of the trellis.