And suddenly, it was July

In the words of Inigo Montoya: Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

In summary? June was a craptastic month for gardening in Washington. If you live here you already know that, if you don't? The sixth month of the calendar year, known elsewhere either specifically as "June" or more generally as 'the beginning of Summer, was being referred to here as "June-u-ary" due to the fact that the weather was more like January than June.

Cold, grey, wet. Did I mention cold? That pretty much sums it up. I would add dismal and depressing as well simply because it felt like summer would never come. And also because the garden just wasn't making any progress.

The weather finally seems back on track but our garden is very behind this year. It's hard to say whether all the plantings will have time to be successful or not. If we're lucky and get a summery September and late fall frost we might just be able to turn this one around.

To start with, we were late planting this year. The trip to WA DC (along with all the pre-trip planning and shopping) set us back quite a bit from our usual schedule.. Throw in the exceptionally bad weather with seeds literally rotting in the ground from the cold wet, a bit of vandalism* that required replacing all of our pepper plants and crow damage to contend with (involving the loss of 3 beds of newly planted green beans) and you have what is probably our least successful garden to-date.

Speaking of crow damage, here's our latest attempt the thwart their annoying sprout pulling behavior:

The crow pentagram
(not really, but it does look like some kind of attempt at garden magic, yes?)

We've found that the crows seem to avoid activities that involve getting near or under the string so we set this up to try to protect the lone remaining winter squash seedling.

When is early corn really late? When it's not planted until July 1. It's a good thing we're growing a short season corn (Quickie - 64 days) , we may have just barely enough time to actually get some corn this year.

really late early corn

The tomatoes seem to coming right along now that the warm weather has hit. Our tomatoes are all short season varieties from Territorial Seed Company so we should manage a decent crop before fall. The Beaverlodge plant already has some tomatoes set:

baby tomato

Here's a better picture of the onions:


And finally, a couple of full views of the garden:

From the East (near the tomatoes)

From the West, near the driveway
(yep, still haven't managed to get rid of that last patch of sod)

*an added incentive to get that fence up as soon as time and finances allow! I like the open aspect of our current garden plan but a fence would keep the random dogs out (footprints in freshly planted beds are quite annoying) and discourage acts of opportunistic vandalism by bored teens/young adults.