All planted out

Well with a few exceptions, I can say that the garden is "planted out." It has been a struggle wrestling with weeds and grasses, but with some help from Hunter we have tamed the wild portions of the garden and brought order where there was chaos.For this 6 feet of pathway, Hunter took outthis wheelbarrow full of grass roots.

My plan this year was to focus on the two fruits I love the most ... tomatoes and a charentais melon grown in Cavaillon known as tranche de miel. In my decade of gardening there has never been a moment in which I have said "too many tomatoes this summer." I've done it with cukes and summer squash ... even with shallots, but never with tomatoes and certainly not with these amazing melons. So right now there are 39 tomato plants and 8 melon plants in the garden.
The tomato varieties are:
Big Zac =12
Italian Sweet = 8
Better Boy = 8
Belgian Giant =2
Boxcar Willie = 4
Sungold = 2
Costolutto Genovese =1
Hillbilly = 1
Brandywine = 1.

To make room for these I decided not to plant potatoes this year ... neither sweet nor regular. The store does a better job than I do. However, it happens to be my husband's favorite crop, so he is running a potato bin at the back of the garden with the last of the Red Norlands SBS had on the shelf. I also sacrificed Winter Squash ... I still have four butternut squash from last season in the basement. However, yesterday I did plant a few Waltham Butternut seeds at the east end of the garlic bed, and some Baby Pam Pumpkins at the west end. Maybe there will be a successful overlapping of the bed this year.

I still have some artichoke plants that will need a bed outside the garden, but I can work on that later. Also, I read yesterday that one CAN container garden artichokes and bring them inside for the winter. So I am off to find a few 16 " clay pots.

But it is pretty much tomatoes and melons as far as the eye can see. I plan to container grow two melons away from the garden, in the hopes that the seeds from those melons will not be tainted by cross pollination.

I have been having a cutworm problem ... attacks to newly sprouted green beans and some of my trasured melons, so I tried a little trick with hosta stems proposed by Daphne.Elsewhere in the news: There was successful fruiting in the apple "orchard" this spring despite those surprise late frosts. Because of our exposure to cedar apple rust, I chose resistant varieties like Freedom and Jonafree. However there was one "experiment" in the orchard ... an Arkansas Black ... and it is sporting its first fruit this year.