It’s been about six week since I planted my vegetable gardens, and things are coming along nicely.

Our hops plant, is, well, you can see here how it’s doing. And I cut it back to the ground every fall! Crazy.

I’ve never had taller snow peas. They are approaching 6 feet tall, and just finally starting to really produce. You can see the sugar pie pumpkins coming in at the bottom too. To the right, happy happy tomatoes, which survived my early-planting experiment and are now thriving.

So far, inter-planting snow peas and cucumbers (as well as snow peas and pumpkins on the previous trellis picture) is turning out really great! The cucumbers, in particular, are climbing up the snow pea plants almost unassisted. I am very interested to see if this works out well, because it means doubling my yield of vegetables on the exact same square footage for these trellises.

We’ve had a VERY rainy few weeks, and the raspberries don’t even look like the same plants that they did 6 weeks ago. They are huge and bushy and covered with flowers and little white fruits. After such a disappointing year last year (I think it was about 10 raspberries total) we are due for a bumper crop! Crossing my fingers.

Since I’ve been promoting anise hyssop on here so much this year, I should let you know: IT SPREADS. This was once three plants. And it’s been thinned out and cut back a bit!

I don’t know if it’s because I added so much more milkweed to our landscape last year, but we have seen TONS of monarchs this year. At least quadruple the number we usually see. Some of them we just left out in nature, because I felt that 14—the number of eggs we found and brought in—was enough. But then again, after a thunderstorm I checked on these guys outside and couldn’t find them. I hope they found a nice safe place to make their chrysalises.

Inside, all but one of our 14 caterpillars are now in chrysalis. And No. 14 will join his or her comrades any minute now. For a day or two, they were eating so much milkweed that I feared we might run out!

Finally, a pic from our community garden plot at Sabathani. Adam took this when he and the kids stopped there this week to weed and pick strawberries. Because that plot gets a little more sun than my plot at home, things seem to grow more quickly there. My cauliflowers at home are not nearly this far along, although we’ve also been battling cabbage worms at home.

So far everything is coming along nicely in the garden except for one miss: my radishes suddenly bolted this week! I don’t know how I managed to miss the right moment to pick them, but I did, and as a result all but 4 or 5 were in flower when I went to check on them last night. Pretty disappointing, but I do have a few more that I planted a week or two later, so I’m going to try and be vigilant and catch those in the next few days/week.

How’s your garden growing so far?