It’s the end of July, so I thought I’d share a few pictures of where the garden’s at. With a few exceptions, things aren’t doing too bad with the goofy weather.

Despite cutting the red raspberries back this spring to skip the summer crop and encourage a heavier fall crop, we still have a bunch of berries already. I’m not sure what’s caused it, but I won’t complain.

The potatoes are finished blooming and have started to die off. We’ve been digging a hill at a time for a while now – just enough for a meal. I’ve started to notice bugs in a few potatoes so the kiddos and I spent a few hours on Sunday digging about a third of what was out there – probably just shy of 100 lbs – and moving them into the basement.

The red potatoes seemed more constant than the whites this year, but both did well. The only light spot was the Yukon Golds. One hill would have a meal’s worth of potatoes and the next would have one the size of a golf ball and nothing more.

The peas have all come and gone at this point.

Since the kiddos passed on having their own pumpkin patch this year, we found a spot in the garden for a few seeds.

The leaves are so thick from the top that you can’t see any of the pumpkins that have set on, but they’re there. If I remember correctly, there should be some butternut squash in there somewhere as well.

I always have an issue with missing cucumbers until they’re the size of zucchini, so this year I planted them along side of a cattle panel. It’s pretty simple to convince them to grow up instead of out and it makes finding the cucumbers a lot easier.

We even took a crack at making our own dill pickles last night. If you look closely, you’ll notice there’s a few spears in with all the slices. Lulu was helping and thought some of the cucumbers should be sliced differently. I didn’t think it’d be a bad idea of have a few spears each time we open a new jar. All of the jars sealed up perfectly, but don’t ask me how the pickles turned out. The jars have to sit a few days before we can open one back up and taste.

The green peppers are just getting started, but stuffed peppers aren’t far off.

It’s hard to say how the eggplant are doing. There were two eggplant that set on early and were just about ready to pick… until the dog decided she wanted them. I need to start watching them a little closer to see if she’s picking the smaller ones, too. As of this morning, there were only blossoms and eggplants the size of golf balls. I won’t get too excited if the dog steals a few veggies throughout the summer. If she didn’t keep the raccoons out of the garden as well as what she does (we have a lot of them in the nearby timber and cornfields) we wouldn’t get anything out of the garden.

It feels like we’ve been picking green beans forever, but they’re still blooming. At least all of them are being put to good use.

I’m only going to show you the “good” picture of the carrots. I sowed all of the carrots in beds instead of rows this year, but with the wet spring/summer we weren’t able to keep up with weeding all of them. Some of the beds look great. If the carrots underneath look as good as the tops, we’ll be set. We just don’t talk about the other carrot beds.

And then there are the tomatoes. I’ve been looking at green tomatoes for 6 weeks and have yet to have one ripen. To make matters worse, blight has set in and all of the plants are slowly dying off. With the cool, wet summer it is apparently a pretty wide spread problem this year. At this point, we won’t have to worry about freezing many tomatoes later this summer.

Finally, it wouldn’t be summer if we weren’t swimming in zucchini. The DW and Lulu whipped up a batch of zucchini muffins yesterday while Peanut was napping. Muffins with zucchini in them have to be good for you, right?