Hello everyone. I hope you saw my first post this year about the garden, because wow, do I have some updates!

To recap:

At our house in Maine, we have three spaces that we are able to use for a garden. The first is a pre-existing bed that is a brick lined circular shape. The bed was used in the past for flowers and occasional herb. It is now going to be used as our primary veggie bed!

The second space is a new garden bed that we put in front of our house. This bed is lined with rocks from the back of the property and will be used for wildflowers, herbs, and strawberries.

Finally, we are using the end of our driveway to place potatoes and onions that are growing in pots.

The Veggie Garden Bed

This garden bed its doing SO well. Our plants are absolutely thriving.

In this bed, as we mentioned previously, we planted:

• 3 types of tomatoes – all 3 types (and over 12 plants!) are doing great. We are just waiting for the tomatoes to ripen so that we can harvest them.
• bush beans – we have harvested SO many beans (as you can see in the picture below). The plants were doing really well….. until some deer decided to make the plants their dinner. Somehow, the monched plants are still alive and are trying to regrow their leaves.
• sugar snap peas – These things are going crazy! They are at least 6 foot 5 inches by now and we are getting a bunch of peas off of them!
• radishes and carrots – these were planted together and are doing great. We harvested a ton of radishes earlier this season and are now letting our remaining radishes go to seed in order to harvest radish pods. The carrots are doing well and we are just waiting for them to get a bit bigger before we harvest
• shallots – these are doing great! Hoping that we can harvest soon
• peppers – our peppers are a little sad. they’re doing great, just aren’t growing much. I think this is due to the weather we have been having. A lot of rainy days over here! We are growing jalapenos, a habanero, and a few Anaheim peppers
• lettuce – the peas and tomatoes are providing excellent shade for a variety of lettuces including butter lettuce, romaine, and arugula.
• basil – we have about 12 basil plants mixed in the garden. We have harvested a bit, but have found that the basil in this area is mostly acting as sacrifice to bugs that would otherwise eat the plants we want to keep the bugs from. Don’t worry, we have quite the basil plant in our house to make up for the basil we aren’t pulling from the garden.

The wildflower and herb bed

Looking back on my original garden post, it seems that things have definitely changed in this bed!

Original Plan

The Update

– a variety of annual and perennial wildflower seeds – foxglove seeds – basil – cilantro – sage – lemon balm – thyme – oregano – Chamomile plants (a gift from a friend!)

– The wildflower seeds have been doing amazingly! So many plants have come up – the foxgloves never came up – the basil seeds never came up, neither did any of the other herb seeds – the chamomile plants are doing well – we planted rosemary and dill. The rosemary is doing great, but the dill was munched by a bug – we bought some lilies and other flowers from a local flower farm, they’re doing great! – I bought borage and blue cornflower seeds when the strawberries FAILED. Those two flowers are doing great!

The Onion and Potato Pots

Our onion and potato pots are doing fantastic, if the dying potato greens and the harvest in the picture below tell you anything! We are slowly harvesting our potatoes and are just waiting a few more weeks to harvest the onions. We pulled one last week and it was still pretty small, so we are anticipating a September onion harvest.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the update and that you’re having good luck with your gardens this year! Thanks, Hailey