My Green Ambitions

After a nice heat wave at the beginning of the month, the days here in San Diego have softened into the gray haze known as June gloom. The mornings are misty. The temperatures are mild. I actually like it, since I'm somewhat sun-phobic. That's what happens when you come from a pale tribe like mine! Anyway, though the weather has seemed less than ideal, the garden is very happy! I am astonished at how big some of the plants have become.

Here is a photo of my cherry tomato plant. I have it in the largest tomato cage they sold at the nursery, which I then also secured with two bamboo stakes. But the plant is so large that the cage is starting to lean to one side and there are new shoots going in all directions! You almost can't see a cage in there at all, can you? (That is a 6 foot fence behind it, by the way, to give you an idea of the size).
Next up is my very happy zucchini plant. We're almost ready to harvest out first few zucchini! I don't know why, but I thought we wouldn't be harvesting much from the garden until much later in the season. The leaves are simply enormous on this plant. I love it! I'm a little nervous that it will obscure my Blue Lake green beans that are growing to the right. I hope they'll still get enough sun.
I was quite excited to discover baby watermelons on the vine! We have several now (about a dozen at my last count) but this was the first one I saw. I planted the watermelon in a raised bed, and the vines are all cascading down this rock wall I built to shore up some crumbling railroad ties. (We'll eventually built a new retaining wall, but for now I'm going with what we have). I love how it looks with the vines creeping down the rocks. So pretty.
My cucumbers are also coming in nicely. I'm trying to train them to grow up this mesh trellis. I've never really used a mesh trellis before, so I hope it will work and will be sturdy enough to hold up the vines.
In the Three Sisters garden, the beans finally sent up shoots saying they were ready to climb! So I helped them find the corn stalks. In this photo, it might be hard to see the beans climbing the stalks - it looks just like a sea of green. But I was so excited to see the plan for this garden actually working! How the beans have climbed almost to the top of the stalks, and they've grown lots of new leaves.
I was also thrilled yesterday when I found a bit of corn silk showing up on one of the stalks. I actually have an ear of corn! The stalks were growing tall and green and healthy, but I hadn't seen any actual corn show up yet. I'm so pleased. I can't wait to have fresh corn on the cob!

My next gardening endeavor, I think, will be with some roses. We had to take out one of the hedges we had in the front of our house when we redid some of our plumbing. It looks so bare out there now that I want to fill it in with something. I thought about trying a blackberry hedge, but I really like the idea of some roses. And the front of the house would be a great location for them. I'm especially in love with Mister Lincoln roses, which are really large red ones that smell fantastic. We'll see what happens!