garden progress

I'm happy to report that our garden has been doing quite well!  Here's how the plants looked when we planted them back on May 7th:

And here is our garden on June 2nd:

The zucchini plant has gotten so big lately!  The leaves are huge and there are lots of little zucchinis popping up.  (The leaves are even bigger now than in these pictures!)

We actually just picked a zucchini prematurely this weekend.  After we picked it we heard from a friend that we should have just let it keep growing :)

We're excited to hopefully have some veggies soon.  Both our tomato plants are big and we're seeing some little green tomatoes!  The peppers are not as far along but they're still making progress by producing some flowers.

spring at the Barnes'

I have to say that we are enjoying all of the green outside at our house this spring!  It feels like we have plants and flowers coming up everywhere, especially in our backyard.  It's quite the difference from our last house that had practically no landscaping compared to this house.  I'm loving seeing some of God's beauty at home :)

Yesterday we even planted our own vegetable plants.  We had been debating about exactly where we should locate a garden in our backyard.  So instead of really having to make a decision and to see what we could do before putting a dent in our backyard grass, we decided to plant several pots of veggies!

green and yellow peppers

roma tomatoes

celebrity tomatoes

zucchini

Honestly, we don't exactly know what we're doing with growing these vegetables, but we thought it was worth a shot.  (We know the containers we used a couple years ago to try and grow tomatoes were too small, so we went with bigger ones.)  I just need to remember to water them everyday, especially since they're in pots and will dry out faster and I've been reading that the zucchini love water.  And we'll have to keep the bunnies away.  If they start eating them, then we'll just have to put chicken wire in front of the holes that they get through under the fence right now :) Maggie loves chasing them, but they are pretty brave bunnies. We had one come in the yard on Saturday night while the 3 of us were out there having dinner on the deck!  It had some nerve, but Maggie quickly chased it out of the yard.

I've been having fun taking pictures of our pretty plants and flowers...

hostas - we have so many and this is just one kind that we have!

lily of the valley completely surrounding our tree (and invading into the grass)

(btw, i'm loving this pic, if i can say so myself :)

the 3 trees I thought "were dead" - they're blooming! we're hoping it helped that we cut off a lot of the dead branches last fall

found this little guy on the tree branch...I suspect this may be one of those "fake ladybugs". I'm not sure if they can harm trees but it may not hurt checking into. We've found some of the same ones in the house before...hmmm.

more lily of the valley - they are slowly taking over all of our flower beds

and yet another huge patch of it! we also have a large area of chives (or wild onions, which is what my mom said they might be). feel free to ask us for some if you want some chives!



Feel free to leave any comments if you have tips for us on our gardening.  We're hoping our little garden will be fruitful so we'll be eating some home-grown veggies in a few months :)