Cucumbers, cucumbers

As I mentioned before, we have a lot of cucumbers. Luckily today I am going to training and I think there will be people there who would appreciate a fresh-from-the-garden cucumber or two! The garden is one of my favorite things about getting up at 6 am to eat breakfast. If I wake up and roll over about this time, Baby decides that she is very hungry and kicks me until I get out of bed to feed her. Then I am awake, so I go and check on my other growing baby, the garden. I was pretty surprise by the number of green beans this morning because I hadn't been noticing them. Then again, there were three ripe cucumbers I missed yesterday. I cut back the very leggy tomato plants earlier this week and today three of them have tomatoes that are beginning to ripen.

Webinar He**

I've been sitting at my computer for almost 5 hours, watching/listening to webinars. After about 3.5, I lost a lot of patience and began to play with the self timer on my camera. This is 23 weeks plus a few days--just over 5 months--isn't this baby cute??!!

The Garden Close-Ups

Our sunflowers survived a hailstorm a few weeks ago, as evidenced by their pock-marked leaves. I think they protected some of the other plants as well. They are just beginning to bloom this week and are well over 8 feet tall!

We have many, many green tomatoes of several different varieties and have been getting one or two ripe cherry tomatoes every few days. Hopefully in a few days the plants will be inundating us with the little treats!

One of many cucumbers growing all over the garden. There is a whole row along the fence and I have been trying to encourage the plants to trail over the fence. Hopefully the bunnies won't discover the cucumbers hanging just in their reach! Since the arrival of gophers, I have been finding the bunnies almost cute and friendly (well, and since Betty fenced the garden and they haven't found a way back in!)

One of two tiny pumpkins just starting out!

The Garden

As we've* worked and worked on our yard this summer, its sometimes hard to remember how it looked "before", so we are at least trying to document a little more of the "after." By we, I mostly mean Betty, who spends hours weedwhacking, cutting, burning, raking and just generally toiling away on her limited days off! I spend most of my time in the garden searching for rodents! It all seems to be doing well, now, and I haven't seen a new gopher hole in two weeks.

Here is one of several cucumber patches in our garden! They seem to be doing quite well--we're already giving cucumbers away in the way that many folks give zucchini away at this time of year!

The green beans are also doing well as plants, but aren't producing many beans--this might be due to the mouse that lives under the yellow squash plant.

These pumpkins grew from seeds that my class and I saved last fall and planted many, many times this spring. After blossoming for several weeks, we are just beginning to see tiny little pumpkins!

Two Down!

I was very happy to discover, about 36 hours after setting the traps, that I had caught another gopher this morning! I would like to send the picture around to all his little friends, but they would probably eat that too, the varmints!

News of the Week

Thank goodness we mulched the garden with straw last week--we have had two torrential downpours since that certainly would have stripped away all of topsoil we have built this year as all three sections of our garden slope downhill. It was a tough decision as the mulch makes it harder to see the gopher holes. Last week Betty helped one find its way out of the lettuce garden with a shovel.

Betty has been working very hard to tame our jungle, including weedwacking all around the garden (so I can have a better view of the gopher holes!)

21 Weeks! 19 to go! I'm still wearing the same clothes, but now often have to unbutton in order to sit down! After a meeting downtown last week I definitely garnered a few "aww, you're pregnant" smiles while walking back to the train. The same night, however, I also surprised an older lady in the women's room at a restaurant--causing her to think that she was in the wrong restroom. My height and short hair seem to override the pregnancy in terms of gender markers still!