Fail fail fail

So after getting the basement closet MOSTLY cleaned out I have STILL not managed to purchase the water needed to go into it. It's depressing.

I also have not made much headway on the landscaping in front of the house. Also depressing. It's been oppressively hot and that, coupled with the fact that I was studying for my professional certification exam have put me behind schedule everywhere.

This weekend the plan is to go to a PYO strawberry farm and attempt to pick, well, strawberries, if they haven't been cleaned out yet. I'm hoping to make some strawberry jam this summer and it would be great if I could manage it from a PYO since my strawberries seem to have stopped bearing.

My tomatoes however are setting fruit nicely and at least one Roma plant has 4 small green lumps forming. It continues to do better than my Topsy Turvy tomato plant.

My pea plant, the last survivor, has been slowly decimated by an unseen pest. I did manage to find a lone green caterpillar last week and moved it off the pea plant but yesterday discovered what appeared to be a discarded cocoon between some leaves so either he came back or his sibling was still there and I never found them. I harvested 7 pea pods yesterday but I think I may have left them too long on the plant to actually BE edible. I'm trying to leave a few pods on there to seed save for next year and my understanding is that they need to dry completely on the vine.

Cucumbers have SHOT up in the last week and while I still do not see any flowers I am starting to see a bunch of new growth and tendrils. The onions are still not large, not much larger than the sets I started with, as best I can tell, but their stalks are starting to fall over. Not sure why but I will leave them in the ground as long as I can.

So there is my update.

We plan to set up a raised bed next year for me. While I love my containers, if I am to grow any real quantity of anything I need more room and currently I wont get that from my containers. So I think next year we will do maybe an 8ft x 4 ft raised bed to accommodate those items that I want a quantity of such as the peas, tomatoes and cucumbers. I can also see re purposing the containers to grow more items but not having to combine multiple plants into the same container like I tried this year. Specifically I can see potatoes in my future with one of my containers.

I will say that while it is only late June I still feel like I have learned so much about plants and gardens already.