My Square Foot Garden Grows! and Grows! and…

I’ve tried to find tomato cages for my cucumbers without any success. The variety is Burpless and they like to climb. If left to their own devices, they will sprawl over the ground and the resulting cukes curl up and assume all sorts of weird shapes. When I grew these before, I put the long gone tomato cages over the plants and they could climb to their hearts’ content (do cucumber plants have hearts?). They ended up looking like the English cucumbers you find in the supermarket but they tasted much better. Had I gotten things out sooner, I would have gone with planting the little pickling cucumbers, too, but they get bitter in hot weather. The Burpless doesn’t. Hence my decision to go with only these seeds. And they are grown from seed. I couldn’t find any plants. They either weren’t available or I had procrastinated too long. I may have cucumbers later than anyone else but maybe they’ll last longer, too.

If you look right at the base of the trellis in this picture, you can see the cucumber plants.

In the center of this picture is a bloom on one of the pepper plants. I plan to let these grow and mature until they ripen into red sweet peppers. They have a much better flavor that way than the “green” bitter peppers some of us don’t like at all. And the green ones surely aren’t burpless. That’s ’cause they are close to being indigestible.

If you can’t see it very well and want to, click on it, then click on “All Sizes” and choose a larger one.

This tomato is the one produced by the strange blossom on the Pink German Queen. I do believe it will turn out to be cat-faced. Some say those tomatoes have a better taste than any of the perfect ones.

And now! TADA!! It’s the tomato that’s getting ripe. Rather than the four inches across it’s supposed to achieve, this one is about two inches. That’s okay. It will still be tasty and I don’t need giant huge tomatoes. I don’t eat them on sandwiches any more. And, no, I don’t eat the dehydrated disasters that are supposed to pass as raw bread. I broke the bread addiction long ago.

If you look ‘way back at the right upper end of this picture, you can see the splash of red that’s the ripening tomato. I plan to have it for a Sabbath treat. It should be good ‘n ready in two more days.

This is some of my cilantro:

And these are part of my dill plants:

You can see watermelon sprawling everywhere—and it’s just getting started!

These are the volunteer tomato plants that came up in last year’s box. They are really taking off!

And now to the Grand Finale to today’s pictures—the lettuces. I’m letting these grow to form heads. I want to see if they will do it in this hot weather.

One of the women at work stopped me a couple of days ago to talk about my Square Foot Boxes. She wants to get started on an easy to maintain garden. I agreed to talk to my neighbor about building her a 2′ X 8′ box, supplying all the materials, and setting it up. I didn’t see him until this afternoon and he said he’d do it. He’s going to talk to his wife tonight about what to charge. So…it’s contagious. Better than the flu!