Friday's Coffee & Garden Update is back on!

I've missed coffee & my garden log for a few weeks.
Wanna know why?

It seems like someone is constantly needing something. Diapers, juice, cheerios, breastfeeding every 2 hours during the day, a nose wiped, conflict resolved, more diapers, lunch, books read, accidents cleaned up, laundry washed, shoes on, shoes off, diapers changed, more feeding, oops I forgot to feed the big kid supper, crying and crying and crying... Did I mention diapers? OK, so I guess you get the drift...

Yes, I took a picture of it.

I don't really even have time to be doing this now, but I really want to do a garden log entry, because I'm behind on that, too. I need to for my own records if nothing else. So here I sit doing it anyway. I'm just not going to be able to show you all the pictures that I'd like to.

Here's the garden view as I can see it from my rocking chair... where I spend most of my time, it seems, nursing the baby:

You can't see everything in the photo, but the more I work out there, the more it begins to look like a real garden. It's very exciting! And yes, I do get about 5 minutes at a time during the day to go out & work. Then I take David & Elizabeth with me out to the garden every evening that we can get Rebekah to sleep early. That doesn't happen every night, though.

Just a few of the highlights... The potatoes are growing so fast I can hardly keep up with covering them! The cage on the right (the red seed potatoes) is growing much faster than the other (organic potatoes from the store).

The raised bed in the foreground still has onions trying to make something of themselves, 2 tomatillo plants (replaced after the freeze), and pepper plants. I lost all of my jalapeno plants in the great raccoon raids of 2009, so I had to replace them also. Still hoping my pepper seedlings that I have left will kick into gear and become plants large enough to produce. They're incredibly slow growing and still measure just a few inches tall.

The raised bed in the background has tomato plants that seem to be doing well... after I had to replace all but one of them. My lovely heirlooms - all but one froze. They've been replaced by Roma, Sweet 100 Cherry, Celebrity, Yellow Pear. I still have 2 tomato plants in the "nursery" recovering from the raccoon attack.

I'm trying a cattle panel support system for the tomatoes, as described in last month's Texas Gardener magazine. I love that magazine. I've also got an arch made out of cattle panels coming off the other side of raised bed 2 and hope these Lazy Housewife pole beans will fill it in! Another first time to plant for me - pole beans.

David and Elizabeth already enjoy playing under the arch. I think they'll enjoy it even more as the vines fill in.

Not pictured, we also have Butternut and Spaghetti Squash sprouting, burpless cucumbers and sunflowers. The horseradish has really taken off since the little sprout I showed a few weeks ago

and the Rainbow Swiss chard looks ready to me. I love the beautiful colors.

I have been enjoying salads and sandwiches with fresh lettuce for about 2 weeks now. Hopefully I'll have enough to take a small bunch of lettuce to the Mother's Day cookout at Grana's. I wonder how the chard would be on hamburgers?

Not much blooming now... that will be resolved in future years. I need blooming plants around me. Last week the petunias looked pretty good.

This week, my one remaining rose is blooming.

I planted some zinnia seeds that a neighbor shared with us & they've started sprouting, so we'll have some blooms later in the summer at least.