Strawberries and tomatoes are blooming like crazy this week! Garden beans, jalapeños, and green bell peppers have at least one flower with multiple buds. Getting excited! My 3 and 5 year old have never been so interested in plants.

We will be picking tomatoes soon!

Yay!

I had intended to start a strawberry bed this year. It time got away from me. I think I get a spot picked out and ready for next year.

stockergal, You could prepare your bed now and plant in the fall. Many strawberry retailers will ship strawberry plant plugs in the fall for planting around November or so. That gives the new plants a head start over plants purchased from local stores that you'd be planting in January or February.

Dawn

Strawberries, tomatoes, peas, nasturtiums, marigolds, potatoes, sage, lavender, thyme, pumpkins, wildfowers, tomatillos, and the asparagus has these tiny little flowers. And some weird random thing that looks like a cross between a onion and garlic. I didn't plant it, so it must of been from the compost I put on the bed. It is sending up a stalk thing with a flower thing at the end.

I put in a new strawberry bed this Spring and didn't remove the blossoms so these tiny strawberry plants are producing a few berries a day. My Chinese cabbage is heading-up, and the broccoli has about 2 inch heads. I have tomato blooms all over the place and a few have fruit set. The potatoes are huge and blooming, but beginning to fall over. I guess they should have been hilled better, but at this point it is hard to see the rows and just looks like one big patch. LOL My peppers are growing slowly and are still very small but I could see one yesterday that looked like blooms would open in a few days. I'm not sure the plant would be big enough to hold a pepper. LOL

Cucumbers are blooming and setting fruit. These are pickling cukes and I picked enough today to make a batch of pickles tomorrow. I also picked a lot of beans so that the plants should put out a new flush of bean blossoms in the next few days, and I noticed that Mexican bean beetles are here, which is never a good thing to discover.

Carol, My pepper plants that are blooming aren't really large enough to support peppers yet either, but they don't seem to know that.

Dawn

Dawn, Can't believe you have cukes. Mine are barely out of the ground. My peas are just starting to produce and yours are probably gone by now. Three hundred miles makes a difference. I think my bush beans stayed too wet for too long and almost none came up. My pole beans are just beginning to climb. I have been so busy that I still have seeds that need to be planted...maybe tomorrow.

Carol, my bush beans are up...but they don't look right. They're very small still. For some reason their bed sat in standing water for a day or so...and they haven't looked good since. The other beds weren't quite so wet. Dunno.

My cucumbers are also barely out of the ground.

My bush beans were Roma type and I always seem to have more trouble with them. I have a double 16 feet row of Blue Lake Pole, and some Rattlesnake planted in a couple of containers and all of those look really good. I have lots more bush beans that I can plant as soon as I remove some other things. I took out some spinach plants and had planned to take out some mustard/spinach plants that were blooming next to them, but then I noticed that the cabbage looper moths were going to those plants and not my broccoli, cabbage, or Chinese cabbage in the same area. I just left them to go to seed and they are now covered with small seed pods. Once I take those out I will plant some bush beans again. I normally only plant bush beans one time in the early Spring, because I don't like to pick them, and I depend on pole beans for the rest of the season. They will keep producing until frost, and I can stand up to pick them.

Jenn, I have a paver walkway in the center of my garden and it has a short barrier at the south (high) side of it to keep the soil from washing across the walk. The problem was that we got a huge rain and the barrier held the water back and the area stayed underwater for a night and a day before the beans germinated. I can see a few that got washed around, but I would imagine that most of them just rotted. It's not a big loss. The pole beans 2 feet away were not at all bothered by the wet ground.

I planted the cucumbers really early, y'all, and that's why we are harvesting cucumbers now. Remember that we had a lot of days with highs in the 80s, and even up to 90 or 91, in Jan-Mar, so everything I planted early really took off and grew like mad, and then the temperatures turned back cooler in April and they slowed down a bit, but already were good-sized and had developed good root systems. That early planting and quick growth has led to all sorts of early harvests. The sweet corn, also planted in March just a bit earlier than the cucumbers, is almost shoulder high, and I am in shock about that. I think that 2004 was probably the last year that the garden got off to such a quick start.

We did hit 94 degrees the other day (which is just so ridiculous for May), and that probably was the end of the mid-season lettuce, which is now bolting, and the kale. Since I succession plant new lettuce almost every week, we have lots of late lettuce left, and I think/hope it is too small to try to bolt even though we hit 94 degrees.

The early cucumbers were by design. I usually plant them late, on purpose, so that I am not making pickles until the tomato canning season is over, as that keeps me from finding myself making salsa and pickles at the same time. So, I planted early on purpose this year so I could get all the pickle-making done before salsa-making begins. It is just part of the effort to spread out the food preservation work as evenly as possible.

Carol, My peas are done, and my potatoes are starting to die back, or at least some of them are. It seems early, but they have been in the ground for at least 90 days, so it isn't so early that I think something is wrong. I have complained repeatedly about how the garden is rolling full steam ahead, with or without me, and I am running and trying to catch up with it. At the rate things are going, June is going to be an insanely busy harvest month and I am not sure what will be left for July. The bush beans have been producing for about 3 weeks, so they'll likely be done in another 3 or 4 weeks (I have 5 varieties so they didn't all start at the same time and likely won't finish up at the same time), but the pole beans are just starting to climb their trellis now (they were planted later) so I am hoping they'll start blooming not too long after the bush beans finish. I have a lot of pole beans---both snaps and shellies---and southern peas, so I think we'll be up to our ears in legumes all summer long.

Of course 300 miles matters! If it helps y'all to remember this when comparing your garden timing to mine, remember that my climate is more like the Dallas-Fort Worth climate than the OKC climate, so we're always quite a bit ahead of y'all weatherwise.

Almost all my onions look done, and today one bolted. I have no idea why it is bolting now. The necks are collapsing, but I will leave the onions in the bed another 2-4 weeks while the carbs/energy from the leaves is drawn into the bulbs, enlarging them. Often, people think the minute the necks 'break' that it is time to harvest, but that's not at all true. I do have a hard time being patient and waiting for the onion-maturing process to continue unabated, but if you leave the onions alone in the bed while the leaves dry down and the neck eventually does the same, you get better onions and they'll store longer. It is not normal for my long day types to seem to be finishing up at the same time as the short day and intermediate day types, but I assume it is weather related. Everything else has been early, so why not the onions? I cannot help thinking that some combination of warmer daytime highs and also warmer nighttime lows combined to give the onions more HDD hours than they usually get and they are trying to mature early because of it. It kinda makes sense. The stone fruit trees bloomed early and the fruit is sizing up quickly, so I think it will mature early too. It is just one of those years.

Mike, I love it! Thanks for sharing the photo. I used to grow plumeria in TX, but haven't had one now in at least 20 years, so that photo takes me back to my younger days.

The rain is mostly missing us this week, which makes me happy in the sense that I have been able to work outside the last couple of days and catch up on a lot of garden chores. However, I noticed the green bean bed is really dry and some of the others are getting dry, so I need for some of the rain that is in the forecast to be sure to fall on the garden or I'm going to have to water. As it was, I did water all the containers today as they couldn't wait another day to see if we got rain.

Today the first purple coneflower bloomed, so that's another thing for the list of what's blooming.

Dawn

Thanks dawn. You should grow them again. They are so easy to over winter. I just stick them in the barn and make sure they dont get below 40 degrees. My stone fruit that didn't freeze has been dropping early and has worms in it. :( fruit tree guys say its plum curculio. doesn't look like I'll get any to eat.

I just have SO many onion flowers. sigh

Mike, Maybe one day I will. My life consists of too many plants and not enough time as it is, so I've been trying to avoid going off on a tangent and getting any new plants.

That's too bad about your stone fruit. I've only had plum curculio once or twice in all these years, and it wasn't a heavy infestation so we only lost a few fruit. I've always said that if it starts to become a regular problem, I'll start a regular spray program, but it hasn't happened yet. Knock. on. wood.

Bon, I like to leave a few of the bolting ones and let them bloom. The little tiny beneficial insects that fly love all allium flowers.

The latest thing to bloom in our garden is Florence fennel from last year.

Dawn