Caution: Garden Update!

After many weeks of hard work, we are now beginning to enjoy the fruits of our labors! Sayre has begun to bring squash in from his plant, we have peppers on a few plants, the beans are in bloom, and sooo much more!

Since this one thing has been occupying a large amount of my time and thought, I decided a little garden 'tour' would be in order.
Most all of these pictures were taken well over a week ago and all of the plants have doubled in size since then!

Corn and Okra
The corn is doing very very well, thanks to the fertilizer that Daddy scattered and the nice rains that we have had over the past several weeks! The stalks are now about five feet tall ,the tassels are beginning to show, and the June bugs/Japanese beetles will soon be going to town on them. We had a storm come through late last week, which mowed the corn down... Sayre, Sawyer, and I spent the next morning hauling dirt and mounding the stalks with it. Since doing all that, the corn has survived several storms very nicely!

The Watermelon Patch
This patch used to be the eyesore of the garden; I'm all about neat and tidiness in the garden and this was nothing but weeds and crabgrass. It took me two days of weeding by hand and hoeing the crabgrass up to bring this little plot into usable-ness. We did have four hills of watermelon seeds, but do to bad seeds and a dog, we are down to two living hills.

Moving right along
Next to the watermelon we have a plot of squash which are doing amazingly well!!! They have doubled in size since this picture was taken and are full of bright yellow flowers in addition to a few small squash. Earlier this week I planted the nasturtium (which is in the planter) in the plot, laid down newspaper, and asked Sayre to put pine straw on top. It looks much better and will help keep the moisture in and weeds out!

Sunflowers
Behind the squash plot are two plots of sunflowers. There really are two plots pictured here, but you can't tell. The front plot is huge!!! As in, the sunflowers are taller than I am now!!!! I love the cheerful colors and happy faces that sunflowers add to a garden!!!

Beans, beans, and more beans!
We finally have rows in our bean plot thanks to my Daddy!! He pounded the t-posts down and stretched twine for the beans to climb on! It will make picking so much easier!

Gourds...
To the right of the beans are my gourds....

...with 'not so little anymore' gourds on the vines!!! I've been having a problem with wilt on these plants and I'm not quite sure what going on. Hopefully, it won't spread to the rest of the plants.
The large space behind the gourds is now full of cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers (I just forgot to get pictures of all that).

More sunflowers
These flowers have since opened and are rather interesting to see... the flowers didn't develop fully and are lacking in many many petals. Makes for quite the interesting object to observe!

Rainbow after the storm
The late afternoons of last week were full of thunderstorm activity; we are so thankful for the rain that the Lord has been sending our way! This time last year our grass was beginning to turn brown and we were watering by hand every other evening. The Lord has been very gracious to us this year!

Well, I'm off to tend to my garden after escorting our little chicks out of doors (that's another story for another day!).