Our garden so far...

I used to think of gardening as something retired people do because they don't have much else to do. (Sorry, that sounds harsh.) When I think of gardening, I picture cute, older ladies in overalls and muddy clogs, flowery gloves, oversized sunglasses, and floppy hats. But as you know, we've been trying to grow food here and I even shared some photos of our attempts. Our plants are doing surprisingly well so far despite early high temperatures. (105, 106...ugh.) We've gotten a steady stream of 8-10 strawberries a day and a few smaller green peppers almost every day. Our tomato plants have blossomed and there are lots of tomatoes starting to get going! You can see from the picture that the topsy turvy tomatoes are doing great,too! We may have a hundred ready at once at this rate. That's ok, bring 'em on. Our yellow squash plant has a LOT of blossoms and a few squash already growing. Our watermelon plant, which Jeremy picked out and planted, has blossomed, too. Our corn is 3-5' high and we're so excited to see what comes of that. Our wall is about 6 1/2' high and the corn is getting close to the top...And our zucchinni plants are doing well, too. Several small zucchini are growing, they're about 6" long. I love steamed zucchini with spaghetti, or raw grated onto a salad. Next year we need to start seedlings earlier and plant earlier in the year because we should be harvesting by now, I think? It's getting hot enough that to protect themselves the plants may not grow the food, which takes so much out of them.
But this is pretty cool, I like it! My husband has put in so much work and effort in this. I've done my part but not the hard labor. I planned, shopped, planted, and now water, prune, fertilize, and weed. Next step; provide shade by building t-shaped supports and buying light-colored sun shades for the more delicate plants. The corn should be ok...thank heavens. So far so good. Our tomato plants, which you can see in the light colored pots, were much fuller, but I pruned them back. I read that to have lots of tomatoes, prune any stems that aren't growing fruit. Apparently they didn't mean all of them, which is about how I took it. Ken pointed out that without leaves they can't go through photosynthesis. Ooops.