garden tour

So, this is my garden at the moment. Kind of pathetic, but there you have it.
The view of the garden area as seen outside my back door. This doesn't show areas to the right in my yard where I have a few more smaller raised beds. Two along the back fence and another small one to the right.

Starting from the left.... We have carrots and strawberries. Almost all the carrots at the back didn't come up. The slugs quite enjoyed the strawberries before I got very many of them. And they have some blight or something. I was actually getting some decent strawberries this year but the creatures beat me to them most of the time.

Next to them is onions and peas at the back. Most of the peas didn't come up either (as well as some onions, which are looking kind of sad, too.)

Next we have spinach and lettuce. There will be another raised bed here, though I may actually turn it horizontally here so more of it will get sun a bit longer. But I already was planting the early crops before I was sure I was getting raised beds so the material is waiting in the shed. Again, quite a few seeds didn't germinate. (I'm convinced mother nature is being mean to me.) I had sown seeds for 7 heads of lettuce. Most didn't come up so I tried again. Still not good luck. This was all I ended up with. (Ignore the weeds I gave up on in the spinach bed when the spinach was about gone.)

This bed has zucchini (which I've been waging war with squash bugs), pickling cukes, onions, bell peppers (another sad story), banana pepper, and I think I finally got an eggplant to start - it doesnt look like a weed. The compost I threw on top of the weed barrier as mulch when I was going away for several days to help keep the moisture in while I wasn't around to water. (The barrier is only one one side of the bed.)

This is all tomatoes. These I threw wood mulch on top of the plastic weed barrier I have in this bed.

At the back we have corn and beans. Crossing my fingers I get any corn at all. I will be ecstatic if I get some edible corn.

To the left of the corn I threw some melon seedlings into the grown. Rogue seedlings I discovered in my kitchen compost bucket.

At the front of the garden, I used some scraps of wood to make this mini bed for pumpkins. I figured the vines can just trail over the sides. They're finally growing. They were getting little flower buds while they were still tiny.

I forgot to get a picture, but I have a large pot (you can see in the first pic) that I put table squash in. Only they didn't want to germinate, so I put a few more in. I have finally seen a couple of sprouts today. Mother nature might play another trick on me and still have most of them sprout. I had that happen with pumpkin and cantaloupe seeds. Germinated months later. WTH???

Now, here along the back fence to the right of my large garden area is cauliflower. It stayed tiny in the starter pots. Finally started growing decent after a couple weeks in the ground. And my one marigold that sprouted even though I put seeds around the whole perimeter. Mother nature doesn't like me. :( 

Here we have cantaloupe, 2 asian melons, and yellow wax beans.

And here are hot peppers. A cruel trick of mother nature because I don't eat hot peppers so wasn't so concerned with them! (Though my hubby will.) The packet of seeds were given to me and they were old so I threw the whole packet in a wet paper towel to germinate (also do some of my other seeds that way) and wouldn't you know it... almost all those litter suckers sprouted!! Well, I get attached to my 'babies' I give 'birth' to so I couldn't just throw them out. Neither did I have the room to grow them individually, so I put them in the cells by 2's. Twelve cells with 2 plants each - and they were growing nicely, too. WTH?? Nothing else I had started from seed grew as easily! I gave one 4-cell pack to my backyard neighbor she could give to her son. So here's my little plot with the 16 hot pepper plants I still had left.

So I've been keeping track of what I get out of the garden to see how much return I'm getting on my investment this year. I need to produce about $100 worth of fruit and veg to make up for the money I sunk into making raised beds this year. (Which is looking rather pathetic right now.) Previously I was planting in the ground and you can see from the top pics I have crappy soil. I've been weighing the zucchini and cucumbers. The lettuce and spinach I'm just kind of making up as guesstimates. Like the spinach you buy in bags at the store - I probably got like a dollar's worth at best. The lettuce I've been harvesting leaves rather than cutting it as a whole head and I'd say I've gotten about a head's worth so far that I've eaten. The peas weren't even enough worth counting. Maybe I got a dime's worth. :P