The garden in early June

I'm a little late getting these pictures posted.  It just amazes me how much the garden has grown in one week.  I'll update the pictures in a week or so.  But all the heat and rain have caused the garden to triple in size (or so it seemed) since these were taken.

Either that or there was some radioactive ray gun aimed at them... or perhaps I've watched to many SciFy Channel marathons lately.

Those are marigolds and zinnias at the end of the raised beds, an idea I swiped read from Manuela's lovely blog.  Actually, I steal get a lot of ideas from her for house and garden.

 

I should go through my pictures and show the timeline of our raised bed garden, which was built entirely when we had "a little extra" money to work with.

The first spring, hubby built the fence and two raised beds (the small bed for the herb garden and the first rectangle bed).  Then later the same season, he built the second two raised beds, which look like one long rectangle in the pictures.

This year we were hoping to extend the garden but didn't have enough funds to accomplish it... so we concentrated on purchasing a few much needed support structures (purchased with a surprise gift from a friend).  If there is one thing I've learned these past few years, many veggies really need those supports to grow properly.

Those very tall red tomato cages came from Lowes, who has them in multiple colors.  I'm hoping they provide better structure than the smaller size cages I have been using.  I'm also trying the green structures shown, one for a tomato plant and the other for a cucumber plant.

This year, he also built another raised bed structure in a corner of the raised bed which was not being used.  He spent part of yesterday taking our wheelbarrow to the dry creek bed in the forest for soil.

The owner of that property gave him permission when we first built the raised bed to take the soil (free soil helps a lot).   As you can tell from the above picture, we still need to budget for mulch on the ground!

We add compost to the soil when possible.  This year I used an organic fertilizer in two of the beds (I'd already planted the green beans when I bought it).  Since we use soil from the dry creek bed, we do have to hoe the weeds quite regularly but I have this wonderful old hoe that is perfect for a raised bed garden and I actually enjoy getting out early in the morning and attacking those weeds.  It's easy when they are tiny... 

The structure has been keeping out critters so far.  It is very simple, as you can tell from the "gate".

I love the way the garden is looking these days.