Summer's here!

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Welcome back to the Baby Bee Garden! It's week 19 for the garden, and we can say this year's efforts have definitely paid off. Since last month we have harvested several zucchini, a few bundles of Swiss chard, a crop of small carrots and a few tomatoes. There's been a steady supply of basil and parsley, as well. Our garden meals have been delicious. So far we've made squash casserole, zucchini pancakes with a swiss chard marinara, zucchini bread muffins, and, perhaps the best dish, a coconut curry with zucchini and featuring our little carrots.

It's been about a month since the last update. We were hoping there would be good news to report about our peppers and eggplants, and so there is! We have multiple pepper plants producing flowers right now, and one tiny pepper is beginning to grow. We got our bell peppers mixed up with our jalapenos during the seedling phase, so we're not totally sure what we're growing at this point... The small one developing looks like a bell. Two eggplants are getting big, both have flowers by now and one plant has a fruit about 2 inches long already. We planted some purple hull cowpeas which have just gotten started. These are new for us, and they look a lot different from the snow peas we grew. The plants look more like pepper plants than anything else. They're planted near the trellis, but they don't seem to be very vine-y. They do look healthy, though, and they're starting to form some flower buds. We can't wait to see what the flowers look like.

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The stars of the garden right now are the cucumber vines. We started these in June and boy have they grown fast! They've completely taken over their trellis, and now they are reaching out for support in nearby pots. We have to check them twice a day to make sure they aren't creeping too far. They have cute little yellow flowers all over and we're very anxious to see our first cucumber grow. So on the whole, we've had a lot of success up to this point. Of course it can't be all kittens and rainbows, now can it? We've had a heat wave for about two weeks recently, where the temperature got above 100 degrees every day. Plants don't really grow too well in that kind of weather, it seems. We've lost the kale plants, they just kind of shriveled up. The pansies are pretty much dead at this point. The strawberry plant took a hit because we missed watering it for a couple days. The leaves were almost completely burnt up, but it's bounced back since, sprouting some fresh bright green leaves. All of our zucchini plants have pretty much overgrown their pots. Next year we plan to stake them from the beginning, and prune them as they grow to train them to a small space. Our green tomatoes seem to have stopped growing, and they're just not turning red for some reason. Also we've noticed some of the green tomatoes developing "blossom end rot". The fruits get a dark spot on the bottom where the flower was, and they slowly rot. We've plucked so many of our little green tomatoes because of this!

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On top of that some creature has been eating the green tomatoes right off the plants, but we haven't been able to catch anything in the act. Hopefully, we'll see improvement as we move past the hottest part of the summer. We're just happy to be eating some food that we grew, it doesn't get much more satisfying than that! It's about time to begin planning for a new crop of fall vegetables, so stay tuned for more action in the Baby Bee Garden!