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Garden Noob's June Recap

Am I the only one experiencing June whiplash?  It's July and I'm in complete and utter denial over this.

I'm also mad at myself because I really want to be posting three times a week and my last post was 6/12.  Not cool. Not cool at all.

Then again, at this point, we are really just watching stuff grow.  We've been harvesting sugar snap peas and lettuce as needed.  It's super fun to finally tastes some fruits of our labor.  And they taste pretty amazing.



We've also had a couple of set backs:

1) A mystery sprinker decided to randomly activate last week in the garden.  It took out a broccoli plant, but my spaghetti squash seemed to bounce back from the deluge of water.  Said sprinkler has since been capped off.  How it even pushed through all the soil, I will never know. 

Here's a blurry picture of that mess:



2) I missed a broccoli harvest, it bolted (flowered).  It's really shocking how fast that happens.  One day fine, hoping it will grow a bit more, next day, no dice, it's toast.  The little we had was delish, now I'm anxiously waiting for the cauliflower to grow.  And we might try for a fall harvest of broccoli. 

Otherwise, everything is looking good, we have baby tomatoes and zucchini and our watermelon is starting to spread out quite a bit.




Lastly, I found this little guy while weeding my carrots the other day. :-)


Happy July everyone!

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