Turf Wars

My peas and pumpkins are at war. I have potatoes taking over one of my boxes. The beans are starting to make a tee pee. It's a crazy year in my little garden and it's been fun to watch it grow. I put my garden together haphazardly, letting my older daughter pick what goes where and just seeing what comes up and how it does. Sometimes we're successful and sometimes it's a flop, but it's always fun to keep track of the plants.

This year, I put my tomatoes on the front porch, since they will take over the garden and prevent anything else from growing under them. That left plenty of room to plant some new things, like the potatoes. I had never seen potato plants before; I just thought they'd be fun for the kids since you can't see the tubers as they grow. Turns out, potatoes grow huge plants above the ground. Mine are about 3 feet tall, have pretty little pink flowers, and are producing some kind of fruit from the flowers. I just had to "corset" them today with string to keep the plants from completely blocking the path between the boxes. Apparently, when the tops start to die back, it will be time to harvest the potatoes, but I have no idea how long that will take. So far, they seem to be really happy and green, so I assume it will be a while.

I've planted pumpkins before, but the plants have never done very well. They'll grow for a little while and then they'll either wither or something will eat them, so I've never gotten a pumpkin to grow. This year the pumpkins are VERY happy. I have 2 plants and both are climbing like crazy and have lots of blooms. Pumpkins have huge leaves, a fact I hadn't realized before, and the stems are really prickly, making it even trickier to keep them trained upwards because they fight back when I try to feed them through the netting. I hope I get at least one pumpkin off of these vines. My kids will be beyond excited if we do.

I planted peas next to one of the pumpkins, not knowing that the pumpkin vine would be so enthusiastic. The two sets of vines are fighting for space on the trellis netting and I have to keep untangling them to give them each their own space. My older daughter is keeping close tabs on the peas and harvests them as they ripen. So far, they haven't made it into the house because she eats them as soon as she picks them. I don't mind, though. How can I complain about her eating peas? She also keeps a close watch on our blueberry bush, but those fruits either go to her brother or into the fridge since she is allergic to them (she vomits within an hour of eating raw blueberries; she's fine with cooked ones).

She has also done some random planting in my tree box. There were a few seeds that fell as we were planting, so she took them and stuck them in the soil of the big box. We now have another pea plant growing up between the lime tree and the tangerine tree and a sunflower starting to appear in a bucket that she filled with soil. And we have a tomato volunteer that popped up in the middle of the tan bark from a tomato that fell last season. It's starting to flower, so we'll probably get a few tomatoes from it, too.