We have cucumbers! We found several last night that are about 6” long. We’ll give them a couple more days and then we’ll try one (or maybe I’ll take one tonight). The squash are about 4” long and getting fatter each day. It’s amazing how much the garden changed from Friday morning to Monday – especially since it rained some. The ‘from seed’ tomato plants that were about a foot tall are now closer to 18”, and a couple of them have blooms. We have a few tiny green beans and a dozen or so small green tomatoes. The beets are ready to begin picking. The pumpkin blooms are HUGE. We have blooms on the peas, cantaloupe and watermelon. The onions and potatoes have sprouted, and the lettuce has gotten even bigger. Some of the corn and giant sunflowers are as tall as I am!

We're unsure when to pick the cucumbers. Ours have a lot of white/light green on them – mostly on the bottom side. We don’t know if they will turn greener when they are ripe, or if we should pick them and set them in the sun to ripen like a tomato, or if our variety is a lighter color than we’re used to. I may just pick one and see how it tastes.

Steve’s leaving for Memphis after work today, so I’m on my own for the weekend. Hopefully I don’t get spooked at night out here in the sticks by myself. I’ve got a list a mile long that I’d like to get done at the property while Steve’s gone. We’ll see how far I get.

We picked a bunch of radishes last night and sent them to Memphis with Steve. We have lots of blooms on our cucumbers and pumpkins, a couple of really small yellow squash, and one green tomato the size of a marble. There are quite a few tomato plants growing now, but they’re only about 4-6” tall, so they’re way behind the game. This weekend I’m going to plant some more of Dad's green beans in a few places where the original ones got trampled by the dogs. The first batch of beans that I planted are coming along nicely, and we figured that these late plantings will extend our harvest by several weeks. Steve thinks we don’t have enough green beans (they’re his favorite), but we have about five times as many as last year, and we were over-run by them for several weeks. I’ll be spending lots of time weeding this weekend.

We thought we pulled out all of our blackberries when we cleaned up last fall, but Sunday I found some growing on our back fence. At least I think it's blackberries.

We've been having trouble keeping the garden wet. We have a pump in the well, but it pumps really slow and the water level in our well drops surprisingly fast. We're going to have to supplement with tap water, but we haven't gotten a hose long enough to reach the garden yet.

Unless we find somebody who absolutely LOVES radishes, I probably won't do them again. They're too hot to eat. My companion planting book says that radishes are good for squash, pumpkins & gourds, so I have them sprinkled throughout those areas of my garden. That's probably all I'll use them for in the future.

I can't figure out what we're doing wrong with the tomatoes, because they're coming along very slowly. Did I tell you that the seeds we planted have finally begun to pop up? The packages said germination in 7-10 days, and they finally sprouted at about 3 weeks! Of course, that was after we had given up and bought 12 plants. We're still hopeful, but we've been disappointed so far. Our next-door-neighbors have tons of green tomatoes on their plants already.

We haven't had a problem with animals yet. Maybe they just haven't found our garden yet. I've seen a bunny here and there, and some bugs have chewed on some of the leaves, but that’s about it. We've been told that the coons will know exactly when to pick the corn, and they'll steal it. I read that if you plant melons or pumpkins in your corn, the coons won't go into the vines. We have cantaloupe in one corn patch and pumpkins in the other, so hopefully the coons will stay out. We haven't seen any deer. I know they're in the area, and I've seen tracks at our house a few times, but I've never seen a live one on the property. I think most of the damage that our garden has incurred has come from our dogs running through it. We've had to teach them "out of the garden". They've mostly figured out what that means, and they scramble to the edges when we yell at them.

We've got a big problem with weeds and grass, but we expected that because we didn't get the garden plowed early enough to kill it. Luckily I'm content to sit for hours and pull weeds and grass, which I've done a lot in the past few weeks.

Also we have a phenomenon in our garden where one half is growing much faster than the other. The rows were planted with the same thing at the same time, but one half is much bigger. There was an area of the garden that Steve plowed several weeks earlier than the rest, and we think that that area is where things are growing better. We haven't noticed a difference in the amount of weeds, just the size of the plants.

It's been dry here for about a week, but we got a tenth of an inch of rain this morning. The garden is happy again!

Unless we find somebody who absolutely LOVES radishes, I probably won't do them again. They're too hot to eat. My companion planting book says that radishes are good for squash, pumpkins & gourds, so I have them sprinkled throughout those areas of my garden. That's probably all I'll use them for in the future.

I can't figure out what we're doing wrong with the tomatoes, because they're coming along very slowly. Did I tell you that the seeds we planted have finally begun to pop up? The packages said germination in 7-10 days, and they finally sprouted at about 3 weeks! Of course, that was after we had given up and bought 12 plants. We're still hopeful, but we've been disappointed so far. Our next-door-neighbors have tons of green tomatoes on their plants already.

We haven't had a problem with animals yet. Maybe they just haven't found our garden yet. I've seen a bunny here and there, and some bugs have chewed on some of the leaves, but that’s about it. We've been told that the coons will know exactly when to pick the corn, and they'll steal it. I read that if you plant melons or pumpkins in your corn, the coons won't go into the vines. We have cantaloupe in one corn patch and pumpkins in the other, so hopefully the coons will stay out. We haven't seen any deer. I know they're in the area, and I've seen tracks at our house a few times, but I've never seen a live one on the property. I think most of the damage that our garden has incurred has come from our dogs running through it. We've had to teach them "out of the garden". They've mostly figured out what that means, and they scramble to the edges when we yell at them.

We've got a big problem with weeds and grass, but we expected that because we didn't get the garden plowed early enough to kill it. Luckily I'm content to sit for hours and pull weeds and grass, which I've done a lot in the past few weeks.

Also, I don’t know if you noticed, but we have a phenomenon in our garden where one half is growing much faster than the other. You can see it well in the picture of the radishes and squash. All those rows were planted with the same thing at the same time, but one half is much bigger. There was an area of the garden that Steve plowed several weeks earlier than the rest, and we think that that area is where things are growing better. Does it really make that big of a difference? We haven't noticed a difference in the amount of weeds, just the size of the plants.

It's been dry here for about a week, but we got a tenth of an inch of rain this morning. The garden is happy again!

We picked our first radishes last night. We tried them, and they’re pretty potent! There will be lots in the next couple of weeks.

We moved our refrigerator and downstairs freezer this weekend, so it’s bare-bones living in SL now. I feel like I need to keep going back there because that’s what we’ve been doing for so long, but there’s really no reason to be there.

It's hard to believe that less than a month ago that we had our first asparagus harvest, we hooked up electric and water to the trailer, and had the deck built. Now we can live there.

Our garden is in full force. We’ve had rain here at least every other day for the last couple of weeks, so I haven’t had to do anything but pick weeds and watch it grow. The only problem we’ve had is that our tomatoes haven’t come up. We planted them from seeds, but we can’t tell what’s weeds and what’s tomatoes. We finally decided that they weren’t growing (they’ve been in the ground for 2 weeks), so we bought 12 small tomato plants (3 each of 4 varieties), and planted them yesterday. I’m sure you can guess that today I looked at the garden at lunch, and I believe I see tomatoes poking up. We figured that would happen. I think we’ll be over run with tomatoes this year – at least I hope so! Everything else has sprouted and is growing like crazy – including the green beans that I got from Dad last year and the loofah that Emily brought from South Carolina.

A farmer from down the road came and cut our hay on Thursday. It was waist tall and quite the ‘critter’ habitat. When he was cutting the hay, every dog in the neighborhood was over and the sky was full of birds looking for him to stir up moles, mice, bugs, and who knows what else. He was over yesterday raking it to get it ready to bale. He said the rain has hampered him some, but hopefully he’ll get it baled up this week. He said he’ll probably get about 10 bales, and he offered us $20 per bale! Steve said we’d take $10, as he’s helping us by mowing our front yard.

We’ve really enjoyed sitting out on our deck in the evenings and enjoying our new place. At night, the field is lit up by flashing lightning bugs.

We moved the fish tank yesterday. We drained the water down low in the tank and left the fish in it for the move. It was a bumpy (rather sloshy) ride for them, but so far there haven’t been any casualties. If they make it the next few days, they’ll probably be ok.

The only major things left for us to move are the refrigerator, living room chairs and our bed. We’ll probably leave the living room chairs and our bed for a few weeks, so we can use them when we stay there, and so it looks lived-in.