Our Garden's Transformation: Part 2

Oh, what a busy blogging weekend it's been! Finally getting around to posting about our garden, which has been a long time coming.

As I mentioned yesterday when I posted part one of this post, I tried growing edibles in San Francisco, but failed miserably in producing anything more than a mouthful of produce at a time. In Oakland, however, it's been a totally different story. Last summer, I began with some of the easier summer edibles: 3 tomato plants (1 dona, 1 sungold, and one that failed) and a cucumber plant (lemon cucumber). I ended up with so many cucumbers that I had to bring some in to work to give out--that's before I learned lemon cucumbers are delicious pickled--and the tomatoes kept growing to the end of January! That's right: JANUARY! Hello sunny California. After last summer's success, I plants my starts a bit earlier, planting 4 tomato plants (I kept with the dona and seascape and added indigo rose and early girl) in late March and adding 1 squash, 2 cucumber, 12 beans plants (6 poling, 6 bushing), 25 seascape strawberry, and 1 pepper (shisito! so excited) in April. We also have some dino kale and some dino kale hybrids still growing strong front the winter--did you know that dino kale is resistent to bolting?--as well as broccoli, sweet peas, radishes, chard, and favas all in the now shadier parts of the garden.

And just as a reminder, this is where we started:

Looking towards our neighbors house.

Looking to the sunny-est part of the garden--and that's slugo around the strawberries. 

Keyhole plan for veggie garden.

The hammock is the best place to relax--the shade tree perfectly place to protect your eyes. 

Our version of a garden gnome: goat! 

Some very tall tomatoes for only being planted two months ago!

Purple sugar snap pea blossoms.

Our garden pig! (atop a stake for the lemon cucumber)

Our garden aardvark (also atop a garden stake for cucumbers)

Look at the squash blossom!

Baby squashes already :) 

Concord grapes, for Concord grape jam! (these were already here when we moved in)

Meyer lemon.

Pineapple strawberries!

Sungold tomatoes. 

Early girl tomatoes :) 

And the earliest of them all: The indigo rose! Can't wait to try this one. 

Bubbly dino kale. 

Tiny sprouted purple broccoli florets. 

Wild blackberry blossoms.

A lemon cucumber tentral finding the stake!

And that's not even all our edible plants--so many edibles this year I have a feeling my cube mates at work will be well fed. We also have many flowers--both annuals and perennials--that give us fresh cut flowers every week. As this post is already long enough, I'll save that for tomorrow!