Your plants look so healthy! And your garden is so neat and nicely organised! Fantasic. Thanks for posting pics, it's very inspiring to see other peoples gardens and all the work they put in.

Sarah

Sarah:

Thanks for the compliment! :-) I agree, it's very inspiring and encouraging to see the work one puts in and the joy they get from it. Makes me want to get out there every day and pull a weed or tie up a tomato plant.

Great job...beautiful garden and I agree...It is so neat and tidy...

Very lush and healthy!

Let me ask, how old are your squash plants?

WOW.

Please tell us your secrets! Everything's SO GREEN!

Just lovely.

what an assortment of tomatoes!!! you make the rest of us look bad. i WISH my beefsteaks looked like that! i can never get a beefsteak grow in the proper shape, they are always deformed.... what do you plan to do with all your bounty? lots of spaghetti? GREAT JOB!! it appears all the regular garden pests took one look at your garden and decided it was too pretty to disturb!!! LOL! Sarah

greenthumbintraining: My squash plants were planted by seed on June 6th so they are a little over a month old. I can't wait for grilled summer squash :-D

jennijenjen: haha, I wish there was a secret besides LUCK. I do though think that the raised rows help tremendously since rainwater seems to back up like little motes and water the plants thoroughly even during quick heavy rains.

sarahlynnwhite: haha, I definitely plan on canning to truly get all I can out of my bounty. As for the pests, I've been lucky so far but have had a few grasshoppers and slugs feast on some of my pepper plants, which is not a major issue since I'm willing to share to a certain limited extent LOL

Your taste buds are gonna thank you BIG TIME for getting the gardening bug again! Congratulations on your gorgeous garden... you will need to post some more pics when stuff starts getting ripe!

Your garden pics. are an inspiration. Wonderful plants and so neat. Makes me hungry looking at those beautiful tomatoes.

Thanks for all the compliments! It's always nice to be reassured from fellow gardener's that the hard work is worth it! :-)

Well, since it's been a little over a month since I started this post, I figured I would chime in with some updates. The garden has been extremely prolific in all its glory, providing an overwhelming amount of vegetables the last 3 weeks or so. I have harvested dozens and dozens of zucchinis, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and a great assortment of veggies. I have stuffed zucchinis and cucumbers, canned tomatoes and made homemade salsa and given baskets of vegetables away. The garden has thus far been extremely successful. I went away for vacation Jul 28th-Aug 4th and took with me any vegetables that were the slightest bit edible, including several small zucs and cucs and five of the first large tomatoes that only had the slightest color of red to them. I was fearful that while away the deer would enter the electric fence and/or climb the 6 foot horse fence and destroy whatever they could while I was gone ( which they have done in the past.) The evening before departing, I surround the woods and garden in fishing line and chairs, ladders, buckets and whatever large objects I thought might deter them. I also tied up over 30 pie pans and used LIQUID FENCE and several sweaty shirts that I had wore the previous week. I also set an outdoor stereo on a timer from 8pm-8am. I did all this in hopes that I would return to a great harvest and not that of sadness. I arrived home on the 4th, just as the sun was setting, and was ecstatic to see my possibly "extreme" measures had been a success. To my delight, dozens of ripe tomatoes, large peppers, zucs and cukes galore. For the last week I have been harvesting a dozen tomatoes minimal daily. In the pictures below, I picked nearly 4 dozen tomatoes in one day. I also spent this evening canning some tomatoes and making salsa and 4 loafs of zucchini bread. While in the garden this evening, I plucked 7 tomato hornworms off my plants, 4 of which had the parasitic wasp cocoons on their backs. It makes me happy to see the good bugs (the wasps) are helping me out since I'm proud to say I have not used insecticides. The hornworms and squash bugs have both been bad the last week since arriving home from vacation. It seems while I was gone the bugs have come out form hiding. I have been hand picking and destroying daily and it seems to be helping. The only other real issue I have been having is powdery mildew. I have used 2 homemade remedies to try and control but to no prevail. The first remedy of baking soda actually killed all the leaves of my crooknecks and for a short time stunted any vegetable growth. But in the last 10 days or so they started growing nice and green again and once again are baring fruit. The mildew has spread to the cucumbers and zucchini in the other part of the garden and I attempted to control with a milk remedy, but that seems to have done nothing. With temps in the high 90s and extreme humidity, this is more than likely an endless battle. Truthfully I have gotten such a wonderful crop of cucumbers and zucchinis that if they poop out now, I won't be disappointed. I look forward to my planting of a fall garden in the next couple weeks. Well, I apologize for going on so long but as a gardener knows, there's always something going on in the garden :-) Hope you enjoy my pics from today's harvest!
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Yes indeedy, great-looking garden! You must have excellent native soil there.

Regarding the good luck with all kinds of pests, that is quite typical for a first-season garden. It does take some time for insect pests to get established and for animals to learn where your garden is. Following years one tends to get slammed as the beneficials are not well-established. A wide selection of plants is critical for a long-term balance. Your range of plants is rather narrow, somewhat lacking in legumes perhaps. I try to have leguminious crops growing at all times, and grains. Late summer is a good time to throw down a ground cover of legume - I often just sow out something like old dry beans under the large summer plants of squash and toms to get a quick lush growth in fall which will then be frost-killed. In late fall you can even sow a winter cover like rye or wheat into the legume to pop up while the former whithers down.