Mom Always Said "A Watched Pot Never Boils"

Sometimes daily, sometimes every second or third day, you will find me out in the garden, camera strapped around my neck, looking for blossoms, bugs, and produce. So far, the sun sugar tomato plants have produced one very small round of tomatoes (but O. M. G. when they produce the next round, it will be an explosion of fruit); the zucchini have been giving nonstop now for over a week. In fact, today I harvested 9 more zucchini, many of which are destined for a zucchini chocolate sheet cake. The picture shows one of my cats, Dakota, checking out the zucchini to see if it is kitty-worthy. (Yes, Dad, I will wash off the kitty hair before cooking with it.)

But I am ever-so-anxious for the rest of the garden to bring on the food! My beans are blossoming and vining and just beginning to produce some beans (as evidenced by the picture), but they have a lot more work to do! Plus, while I love zucchini and have lots of recipes to fix it many different ways, it would be nice to have some variety in my garden diet...some rich, juicy tomatoes, a crisp cucumber, a little cilantro to spice up a salad or some salsa.

But despite my whining, the plants are doing very well. The cucumbers look absolutely amazing. I do wonder, however, WTH I was thinking when I planted the dill in the very next row. I am going to have to put some fencing or something between the cukes and dill or move the dill so it won't be literally overshadowed (and killed) by the cukes. Only about three dill plants took hold, so I'd really like to keep them growing!

The beans are vining and blossoming nicely, including the ones that I planted too close to the zucchini. The onions and shallots look pretty good, too, although only a few shallots actually came up. I'll probably end up simply using those for seed shallots next year. But the onion greenery is fantastic, and I can see a thickening of the stalk at the bottom, which hints to me of a decent size bulb growing.

I didn't think much about companion planting this year, so eager was I to get the plants into the ground. Apparently, beans and onions do not companion well. I'm not certain what this will mean for bean production or flavor...I'll have to do a bit more research. But even though I haven't gotten much produce out of my garden yet, I have high hopes that I will soon be eating more of a variety of food from my garden. And I suspect that once the tomato fruit begins to ripen--there is already a LOT of fruit on each plant--I will be complaining that I can't keep up with the variety.