It’s been a cold, rainy May, so gardening has been difficult, but we’re finally eating lettuce from the garden! Other plants are doing the things they are supposed to do, and we’ve planted a few more seeds and a tomato plant.

So here are the peas. I planted them AGES ago, at the end of February, but they’ve been very slow to grow, and some of them never came up at all. The seeds are a couple of years old, so that’s not surprising. We put more seeds into the blank spaces this past weekend, even though it’s late. The plants are still so small, maybe they’ll be able to catch up!

Broad BeansNext are the fava beans, planted at the same time as the peas.  They’re over 2 feet tall and flowering, so hopefully we’ll have beans soon! The original idea was to plant tomatoes here after the favas were done, but I don’t know whether the timing will be quite right.

Here we have a few carrots at the front, baby onions right next to them, and then all the lettuce behind that.  This past weekend, we put in more carrot seeds and lettuce seeds, and today I thinned the lettuces and brought some young lettuces in for eating.  There’s plenty more in the bed, too, so we’ll be eating salads now!

You’ll notice, also, that about one-third of this bed is overrun with weeds.  I’d cleared out the entire bed, but didn’t get the whole thing planted, so the weeds took over. I’m clearing out and replanting one section at a time, because if I waited until I had the whole thing cleared, I’d never plant anything.

I thought raised beds were supposed to help prevent weed growth, but grass grows everywhere around here if you don’t keep pulling it out and/or killing it. It’s a menace.

Finally, I’ve just put in one lonely tomato plant. I’m planning to grow more; this is just one that someone happened to give me.  I created this bed from a dirt/gravel area next to the raised bed, which was starting to become overgrown with the above menace, grass. I broke up the dirt, pulling out the bigger clumps of grass, and then dumped a bag of compost over it and spread it out.  I made three hills, dampening the compost to make it hold its shape, and then dumped a bag of bark mulch on the bed and spread it around the hills.

The other two hills are for zucchini. My kids like zucchini.

Now, where is all this leading? I know I want my garden to be more productive this year, and I want to really be eating from it, but I haven’t set a measurable goal. Any ideas? What’s your goal for your garden?

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