So I’ve learned an important lesson… 1 row of beans will not prevent the cross pollination of 2 types of cucumber… I planted Boston Pickling cukes and Lemon Cukes with a row of Blackeyed Peas in between, here’s what each looks like normally…

Boston Pickling:

And Lemon:

And here’s what you get when you plant them too close together…

Sigh… on the bright side, Harvey says they taste great… Otherwise, we’re drowing in monster Zucchini (seriously – you could take out a Zombie with these things), there are lots of Cherry Tomatoes we’re just waiting to turn Red (or white, depending).  I spotted the first crook neck yellow squash today and harvested a handful of the Dragon’s Tongue Heritage Beans.

I planted my Earth Tones Dent Corn last night – not much came in the pack and I’m thinking about going back to Rural King to get some more.  I had to wait later to plant this than I wanted because my gardening neighbor also planted corn (to eat) and I didn’t want to cross pollinate and ruin his food crop!  So this is what it looks like (image borrowed from Johnny’s Selected Seeds):

 I’m going to attempt to make beads out of the dried kernels – hopefully those colors will as impressive off the cob as they are in the picture!

I’m going to post about my garden on this crafty, creative site because frankly, you can make some nifty things from naturals. Gourds are nearly unlimited in their craft-ability, native americans used to make teething rings out of Job’s tears, ornamental corn kernals can be made into jewelry. Plus growing your own dye plants, drying flowers, pressing leaves and blooms, and on and on.

So my garden is going pretty well.  I’m in the process of mulching the thing, which would be easier if it weren’t so frickin HOT! And of course, being Summer in Kentucky, when it’s not too hot to breathe, it’s raining!  I can proudly say, though, that my garden was 3 weeks earlier then my neighbor’s and I have much fewer grass and weeds… of course that’s more than likely because of my crap soil condition… but I love denial! This is the first year there’s been anything on that lot besides lawn and, of course, I didn’t do any soil prep.

We got a late start (thank you Ice Storm From Hell and a month and half of down pours), and several of my seedlings starved to death in their little starter trays – note to self, use bigger starter pots if you refuse to transplant before you can get them in the ground.  But the tomatoes have finally taken off and while the eggplants are really trying, something keeps eating them – and, oh yeah, cutworms need to die, die, die! Those little buggers helped kill of several off the tomato plants that made it through the seed tray debacle.

I ordered all my tomato seeds from Amishland seeds – see the Garden Links for the site. I also ordered some Ground Cherries and Job’s Tears which I really, really, really need to get into the ground.  Everything else came from the old standby of Lowe’s and Rural King.  Oh yeah – since I lost a bunch of tomatoes to the cut worms I had to fill in with some Rutgers seedlings purchsed from Rural King.  They came in a bunch of 20 for like $3.95 – I couldn’t pass that up.

We’ll probably have all kinds of cross pollination and wind up with a bunch of mutant veggies but it’s my first garden so…

I’m waitng till late to plant my turnips, carrots, radishes and golden beets. My attempt at a fall crop? (I have no idea what I’m doing!)

We want to turn our entire landscape into either edible, or at the very least useful.  We have 4 oak trees around the house that are going to come down at some point this year (old argument between hubby and I – I said they were too big for our lot, he said they shaded the house, ice storm came and big branch ripped the electrical meter off the side of the house, hubby says their too big for the lot – ), and we’re going to put semi-dwarf fruit trees in their place.  We ripped out all the boxwoods and holly’s from the front and one side of the house, the ones around the air conditioner will stay until next year.  There are 3 nandinas that I’m going to dig up and move closer to the pool, right around the water spigot.  The nandina, the wysteria tree, and the 2 stonecrops will be the only non-usefuls.

Close to the nandinas will be my rose garden, running down the left side of the house.  I count them as a useful because I have a recipe to make beads out of the flowers – supposedly the beads keep their scent! Yummy rose beads!  I’ll post about that experiment next summer. (Although I should go raid Mom’s rose garden so I can blog about it this year… mwahahahaha!)

Anyway… here’s the diagram, there’s still a few empty places I need to plant but I haven’t decided what to put there - I’ll keep you posted – And just wait until I try to figure out how to can it all!