I've been picking away at the veggie garden over the last week or two. The direct-sown peas haven't sprouted yet - soon, I hope. I've plopped out some of my wintersown Buttercrunch, Romaine, and Red Sails lettuce, as well as some ws German chamomile. I've planted out about 250 onion plants I ordered from Dixondale Farms this year. Now I'm starting in on the potatoes - about 2 pounds planted, about 8 more to go! Have several varieties of hardneck garlic coming up from a November planting, and a big bed of shallots because we love cooking with them. As always, I've rather underestimated the amount of room things are going to need. But that's a great excuse to start making more beds! I've got 2 tiny little two-day-old Stupice tomato sprouts - still waiting on all the other varieties. Lots of ws herbs, flowers, greens, and other goodies still to go out. They're awfully small, but my first couple transplants are very happy, so I'll step up the planting-out phase soon. My resolution this year is to keep a faithful garden journal, so that next year I'll remember what sprouted when, and what I learned from my mistakes (of which there are always plenty). I'm also doing a lot of reading about what to plant to attract specific beneficial insects, and which companion plants help repel certain pests. Dh and kids think my obsessive bug research is a little odd. Oh, well... they're probably right! I wish you well in your veggie garden endeavors. I'll be thinking of you as I putter about in mine! Maybe if you put a bed of your favorite perennials (or annuals or herbs or whatever your favorite is!) in your veggie garden, you'll visit it more often and have more fun while you're there. You'll also have fewer pests, since the flowers will attract beneficial bugs to help control the bad bugs... Nightingale :o)

I am not trying to tell you what to do but watermelons like it alittle on the dry side. They dont like there feet wet. If it get very wet you will have fungas problems and may even loose your plants. I grow about 8 acers a year on plastic. For a good tasting red melon that is about 25 pounds try the Patroit melon. A good orange melon of about22 pounds is the Gold Strike. Also the orange-glo melon will get 50 pounds easily put the rind is very thin.

Premature pumpkin harvest here. Heard a large crack in the back yard yesterday, and went outside to find my largest Big Max lying on the patio with a big gouge out of it. Either it got too heavy for the stem to support or the squirrels were playing with it. Anyway, it broke off and rolled down a slight slope and over the retaining wall fence. Decided it was nature's way of telling me to harvest and get the vine into the compost pile. The big pumpkin weighs 43.5 pounds and has a 54 " circumference. The smaller one is only 13.3 pounds with a 31" circumference. Loved growing these this year and will probably grow them again next year. 3 New England Pie pumpkin plants have produced 5 good sized pumpkins and I have 6 more that should be ready in a few weeks!

Bon, Pumpkin vines grow like nothing else, and you can use them to hide a multitude of sins. I like to plant them on the far edge of a garden and let them work their way inward, taking over real estate once covered by plants that have finished up and no longer are producing. I'd rather look at huge green leaves running rampantly throughout the garden than look at spent plants that are past their prime. In 2011's horrific heat and drought, the one thing I had that still looked really good in August was the Seminole plant....you couldn't even see where the corn, squash, tomatoes, etc. had grown because all those drought-killed, roasted, toasted plants were buried under Seminole's vines, and we harvested dozens of pumpkins right up until the first hard freeze. Even after that freeze, I found another dozen or two pumpkins buried under the dead foliage that I had missed when I harvested everything the afternoon before the freeze. Because Seminole is so hard-shelled, those frozen pumpkins weren't even damaged. I harvested them green, put them in the garden shed on a shelf, and they matured over a period of weeks and months. Nothing will make you feel like a super gardener any more than a rampantly running pumpkin vine that produces scads and scads of fruit. The downside, of course, is that they take over every available inch of space, so for gardeners with less space, their rampant growth can become a problem. Some years I let them climb the fence and thence run upward into the pecan trees. (I didn't plant any in that corner this year though.) By the time the pumpkins are turning from green to their mature buff color, it is autumn and to a person driving by or walking by, it looks like we have a pumpkin tree. One year Chris' large iguana, Alex, escaped from his cage and climbed to the top of a 40' tall pecan tree that had pumpkin vines running through it. Our neighbors were treated to the sight of an "alligator" climbing a pumpkin tree. One neighbor looked at it, stopped and talked to me, and said he needed to call his wife and warn her so she wouldn't wreck the car while looking at the alligator in the pumpkin tree. A lot of people think of pumpkins as kid stuff. If that is true, then I am just a big kid. Dawn