We are still trying our hand at farming, and are very pleased how it's going. When I started the seeds back in the beginning of April, I thought for sure that they wouldn't all pull through. Every seed made it, first shocker. Then when they were planted in the beds, I again thought surely some of these will not make it...again shock...everything is doing fine. One thing about the method we are using, is the planting is thick. You are supposed to cut things back regularly to help make sure sun is shining on everything, but also to help you see. Well, because we are planted extra deep it makes it hard to even trim. The heat and being pregnant doesn't help matters either. My gardening is done pretty much exclusively after 7:30pm. Anyway, we had not trimmed to the extent we should. It's surprising how fast everything grows. We had a couple of tomato plants that were leaning so bad, our dirt is very soft, and the stakes don't stay up as straight as they should with the weight. Friday night we had to forego date night to trim the garden (romantic, huh?). So we trimmed back as much as we could of the tomatoes, tried to tie them to the stakes because even though they are staked, they are a bit out of control. The grape tomatoes have outgrown the stakes, so there's only so much we can do there. Saturday we got some really long rebar to help us a little, but of course Saturday morning we could only do so much outside before passing out from heat exhaustion. Tonight we did a little more to hopefully prevent future leaning stakes. We also had to stake the eggplant. Friday when we trimmed the tomatoes, the eggplant got some trimming as well. I was surprised at how many were actually on the plants. I counted well over 30 on there tonight (anybody have any good eggplant recipes to share?). Here's a few of the latest pictures of the garden:

Here's the garden last week...middle of the day.


Black beauty eggplant


I don't think the squash will last much longer. The yellow is about done for, but the zucchini seems to be doing pretty good still. Out of the few plants I had, we've gotten a LOT.


The grape tomatoes are thriving. We started getting big tomatoes last week. Our little trick is to pick pretty soon after they start ripening. They ripen fully inside, and still have the vine ripened taste, and the birds don't peck them.