A quick look at the garden and how it grows.

So, life is very busy right now in the non homestead side of things as the warehouse at one of my jobs prepares to move on Saturday, so my time is more limited than usual. But I didn't get a chance to cover the garden on Tuesday, so here we go! Above is our garlic that's doing amazingly well. It's up at mid thigh level on me at this point which is great.

We also have the walking onions which are doing fairly well as are the random onions that are currently still tiny. The perennial scallions seem to be doing well for the most part, however the constant rain and hard winds have knocked one of them over as you can see Below Left. It doesn't seem to have hurt the rest of the plant though which is what really matters to us.
The front bed that we dug out to put the various onions and scallions in was very much a last minute inspiration We had a whole lot of things that needed to get right in the ground, and I really didn't have time to get a whole new bed dug and sifted of rocks before the Lady of the House's father arrived with the coop. I'm happy with how it's going, but I'm also glad I didn't clear the whole thing because we seem to have a few snakes that use that area for cover near sun. It's startling seeing a 3' - 4' long snake, but snakes and owls will keep our small rodent population down outside.

On the leafier side of life, the kale is still doing well. Next time we are most definitely planting it in rows and with proper spacing. Some of the kale is doing very well, but the crowding is making a real difference in the bed, and that's just inefficient! So, soon we will begin harvesting baby kale to start eating  as salad bits, in dinners etc. It is a good thing to know that while you can literally just spread a hand full of seeds and they will grow with our varieties of kale, but it's also good to know that it is wiser to space them. I am personally tempted to just spread the seeds around the yard and let the Kale grow mostly on its own. That way we'd have a nice edible crop growing like weeds around our yard. Maybe just around the perimeter of the clearing, but we shall see.
Speaking of the leafier side of life, the lettuce is also growing quickly, and also would have benefited from not just being randomly scattered. It's not too bad, and again, as we start harvesting baby lettuce it will probably help the others quite nicely. We already thinned the radishes on the left side of the photo Right, and they're still expanding quickly. We may not get much in the way of radishes out of them though, the ground may be too clayey for them. Apparently when the ground isn't loose enough radishes just form a long tap root looking for air space rather than expanding out into the radishes we know and . . . well, have never tried in my case so I can't say love yet. Fortunately radish leaves are still edible even if we end up not having proper radishes. As we work on our soil adding in more organic matter so we have more dirt and less clay will be an important thing.

Remember this empty bed? Well, we decided to plant our random tomato plants in it. I put them all up near the top so we can potentially put something else near the bottom, and so the soil will be nice and hard to support the trellis. From left to right we have in the ground tomatillo which you can't see due to it being so small, two varieties we don't know, and one of our orphan Cherokee Purple plants off on the right. We shall see how they do, but I definitely need to dig more garden bed space for all of the tomatoes we still have yet to plant!
Left here is just one of the pretty flowers we have growing all over our yard like weeds. We haven't been feeding this to the rabbits, but the grass, clover, and the like have been going straight in to the hutches. Mostly that bribery has been very effective at keeping Twilight's attention. Today though she got very aggressive with me. We will talk more about that Tuesday, especially if she keeps it up. I had to hold her down to finish weighing the kits so she wouldn't bite me, so we're a bit concerned about that.