Garden Update June 4th, 2025

Since our last update, all of the garden beds have been filled with rich compost and manure to fuel a great season ahead. Most of them are planted, and the garden’s starting to hum with life.

The Blacktail Mountain Watermelons, Délice de la Table melons, Calypso Beans, and Early Fortune Cucumbers are taking off and looking strong in the back pair of beds they're climbing the trellis and looking vibrant and full. The Potimarron squash and Winter Luxury Squash are just starting to put on growth, but they’re on their way in the right set of beds. We're still waiting on tomatoes to pop up, but I think I saw some this morning. It's just hard to tell what's coming up as there's plenty of little volunteer sprouts.

We’ve added some seeds to the third bed pair on the left. Christmas pole beans, Scarlet Runner beans to fill in the trellises, and another round of Calypso beans. In the final pair of beds, we’re planning to plant muscadines, which should bring a whole new layer of interest (and fruit!) to the garden. We chose Darlene and Carlos and they will be going in the pair of beds right up front.

Over on another part of the property, far enough away to avoid cross pollinating, we’ve started experimenting with the Three Sisters method—corn, Jack-o’-Lantern pumpkins, and in three of them, Yellow Canary melons planted together. They’re just starting to pop up, and we’ll be planting the beans in a couple of weeks once the corn gets a head start. Based on the pumpkins sprouting now, we're expecting them to be ready by mid September. A little early for Halloween, but they should store ok until then if we bring them in where it's cooler.

So far, the carrots have started to sprout, but we haven’t seen any beets yet. Tomatoes, onions, chives, and a handful of herbs are still keeping us waiting. There’s also some seed picking and planting left to do in the third and fourth pair of beds, but we’re close to being fully planted.

We also replaced a couple fruit trees we lost over the winter and planted some others in addition. We now have a few little blueberry bushes, apricot, plum, nectarine, jujube, banana, papaya, fig, asian pear, apple, mulberry, and pomegranate trees. It looks like we might get some asian pears fruit this year, but that's it. Everything is still pretty young, maybe next year we'll get more.

It’s been a lot of work, and we got started late with the garden, but it's alive and growing—and we’re excited to see what comes next. Hopefully we have enough extra to share!