Project Garden Noob - Year 6

Oh poor, poor garden.  I'll admit, it's been neglected.  So what went awry?  1.  We have a small child, which makes spending hours putting in a drip system "challenging." 2.  Spring did not exist this year.  It went from torrential rain, to upper 90s, and is apparently going back to torrential rain. 3.  Husband and I have been a bit overwhelmed with various life happenings (medical junk, refinancing our house, job interviews)  It's funny how life just insists on happening despite what you want to do. I was able to plant tomatoes and onions the first week of June, which I know, is painfully late on the onions.  One of the tomatoes appeared to die, so I bought a replacement.  Then I managed to nurse the dead tomato back to the living.  We managed to plant some cucumbers and zucchini last Sunday, June 21st. Here's the rundown of what we have: 1. A baby rhubarb plant that also came back from the dead 2. Potatoes in cages (a p...

One day (in 2014) I stumbled upon a post in the LA Times about tomato cages (article from 2012).  There seems to be a lot of theories out there about how to grow tomatoes (up, on the ground, upside down?), and I knew our homemade cages last year where just painfully too short for how large those plants became.  I really liked this cage configuration from the Times - it seemed simple enough and cost friendly enough.  I initially checked out some of the basic cages at the nursery and were surprised how expensive they were.  I went to Home Depot and was able to find fun colored ones for roughly $6 each.  My wonderful mom purchased 10 for me, paired by color.  They are nice enough that they can be reused year from year, and they stack well - not taking up too much room in an already too full garage.  I was able to buy a pack of 6 bamboo poles for $3.  So 5 permanent cages for $35-40.  Perfect. Setting up the cages was relatively painl...