April – July Vegetable Garden Progress: The Beginner Gardener’s Journey

As we step into the summer months I wanted to wrap up the spring season by showing progress since I started my plants in April to the beginning of July. 

This is how my yard looked before I put in my spring plants too what it looks like now:

I had been gardening for a couple years so we had this setup for awhile. But when this picture was taken these plants were probably leftover from winter and weren’t really being taken care of. You can see on the left side there is a sad old tomato plant just clinging for dear life, and there wasn’t really anything from the garden I could use cause most of plants had long been stunted or were way past their prime. 

This photo is a few of weeks after I restarted my garden, mostly everything is still in its immature stages and nothing bearing fruit yet.

By May is when I had my most abundant harvest. I didn’t take a picture of my yard around this time for some reason, but here is a picture taken from May 17 of a zucchini squash. My plants grew a good amount of zucchini for awhile. The always reliable green beans grew in abundance. Cucumbers were growing like crazy. I also enjoyed a nice helping of lettuce and tomatoes. I was also able to get a couple of bell peppers in, which in a two and half years at trying to grow some this was the first time it bore a large enough to eat.

By June you can start to see my garden still looks pretty full, but now a few plants were starting to show some wear and tear. The squash plants weren’t producing nearly as much as they did the month earlier, and if they were able to produce fruit they never grew any bigger than 4 in. The lettuce had completely bolted so it no longer had the fresh taste as it did in its glory days. And the green beans and cucumbers had also slowed down production. Tomatoes however were ripening faster which was nice, so June is where I started to see a more abundant harvest from them. Another surprise I saw were the onions. After almost three months they finally started to bulb and now they all look like full blown onions, which is awesome! 

At the end of June I tossed out some of tapped out plants and introduced the summer lovin’ plants. The newest additions being eggplants and a blackberry bush. I also switched up the sage herb that I never use with a mint plant, which I like to put in my smoothies. I threw out the old lemon thyme in favor of French thyme. I also made some rearrangements and I graduating to planting more in ground. As you can see I’m making use of the space that’s next to green house and the flower bed has a lot plants in the ground, when before it was full of containers.

No diss to the container gardeners out there, but if you have the green space to plant in ground then I say use it! I find that you actually save more water when you water in ground plant than in containers because plants in containers dry faster. And aesthetically it looks nicer than a bunch of pots all huddle together. Don’t get me wrong, I do like how the containers give the garden more texture, so I still like to use containers for some plants. But I’m slowly stepping away from the container while I have the green space to do it. 

Another step up from container gardening is to install a raised bed, especially if you are hesitant to make any permanent installations to a property. This way you can still move a raised bed and plant it somewhere if you have to. 

I’ve also gotten into more flowers lately too, which is good not only to add color to the garden, but also a lot of the flowers help attract pollinators like bees and hummingbirds. Also medical plants, such as eucalyptus can come in handy too. 

This novice gardener is moving on up. In all I say about 80% of garden was fruitful, and this dinner here is the sum of work.

A nice garden salad with sides for my entree coming from the garden too! The salad had lettuce and cucumbers from the garden. One of the sides was zucchini that I grew. And the sauce had herbs like basil that I grew from the garden as well.

My most proud accomplishment is honestly the onions. For a long time I lost hope they would grow to be anything, and now I got these honking onions that I’ve been using for my meals! So of course the motto for this would be don’t give up! I was also fortunate to not have a huge pest infestation. It took about three months to get the most out of my garden, but it is so worth it. Don’t expect you will fail, be brave and garden!