Weekly Update of the Community Patch 6-8-14

This weekend was architecture days!  After the success of the raised bed, I was emboldened to finally put in the trellis materials the vegetable plants needed. So on Saturday I installed (with help from hubby) three different structures for the vegetables to grow on.

Here is the garden this week:

Here is week one (for comparison):

This week the big additions were the raised bed for the thyme, the trellis for the cucumber, the string frame for the peas and the rope pyramid for the pole beans. I detail these items in another post on Wednesday..

Additionally the plants are beginning to bush out, flower and bear fruit.  We have green peppers, hot peppers forming, flowers on the acorn squash and tomatoes, and we were able to harvest greens for a salad this week.  To taste the first fruits is a wonderful experience.  Look to the bottom for a recipe for dressing I made to go on the greens.

The greens are doing very well and we were able to cut some of all of them to eat.

We finally have neighbors.  I guess the person who originally took the space next to mine had to decline and someone new has moved in, but she has a lot of weed work to do.  You can see she is slowly working her way from the back to the front and has a patch already cleared.

The melon and the zucchini were both attacked by the cucumber beetles, so I was glad that I waited to thin them until  later as a few plants were so eaten they had to be removed.

Melon plants thinned to 2 inches apart.

three sunflower crowding each other

I also thinned the sunflower.  Originally I planted three seeds in a hill to see how they germinated.  In one hill nothing came up, but in each of the other three hills, at least two plants came up.  This week I thinned each hill down to the strongest heartiest plant.

Thinning is a fact of growing from seed and if you do not do it, you get weak thin plants that cannot support fruit or die in the middle of the season, so bite the bullet and thin the seedling.  I usually wait until after the plants have formed to real leave.  the first leaves out of the seed are usually round and indistinct, but the second set or real leaves, are the shape of the proper leaves for the plant.

You can see the plants I plucked out were not as healthy as the one I chose to leave.

But the one left I in each hill I expect to get 2 to 3 feet tall and give me lots of sunflower seeds!

thinned sunflowers