Thank you rain.

Here's a picture of our garden tonight. We harvested tons of beans and basil last week. We realized that we didn't plant enough to have extras for canning but we did successfully can 2 quarts of green beans. We ate one of the jars tonight and they were so good. We did plant enough to eat them fresh for at least one meal a day. They were so good fresh we couldn't let them sit long enough to store and can. I made a big batch of pesto and had pesto pasta, pesto pizza, and pesto burgers (veggie burgers with pesto spread).

We are still planting things around the yard. Last week I bought a pack of watermelon and pickling cucumber transplants and planted them in some empty spots in the garden. We've had a bug get to a few of our basil plants and now some pepper plants. Something is eating right around the base of the stem. The plant falls just falls over. We pulled up 7 zucchini plants with caterpillars. Anyway, that, and another new bed we started a few weeks ago, has given us a little extra space to plant some new stuff. We had a few little transplants that we started from seed a month or so ago also and I went ahead and planted most of those (basil, dill, peppers, tomatoes). Daniel and I both planted a bunch of seeds today. I started more bush beans and corn. Daniel put down squash, tomatoes and sunflower seeds in our front yard. He said the soil was a lot richer in the front yard especially around the trees and along the border of the yard. Oh yea, I almost forgot, we also started a bed of luffa gourds. They are supposed to grow a vine up to 30 feet in a season so we planted them so they will reach up some bamboo and shade a south facing window to the playroom. (you can see the window in the picture behind the big pomegranate bush). I think there are about 14 total plants. Hopefully I'll have tons of luffa sponges to share!

For the past week we have had to do some heavy watering to keep things from wilting. We have such poor, sandy soil it seemed like everything was just withering away in that 100+ degree heat. Thankfully, we had a very refreshing evening storm last night. All 5 barrels (and lots of extra buckets and plastic bins thanks to my husband running around in a lightning storm collecting extra water.) Don't worry parents, he was careful ;). The plants really perked back up today. Even the potatoes that we thought for sure where about to go are looking much better.