Hillery Occasionally

My garden is coming to the point where its contents are actually recognizable as precursors to their eventual result. Since I started my seeds in little incubated pods in March, this has been a long time coming.
Having lived my entire adult life up to this year in Manhattan and Brooklyn, this is my first gardening experience so forgive me for the many pictures. I’m just so excited to see my babies growing up! As The Man says, “Soon we’ll be eating our own.”

Up on the deck in the planters we built in the spring, we’ve already had two harvests of beans and mixed lettuces.
The carrots are maturing nicely alongside beets and our Portugal peppers are finally starting to turn red. While the rest of my herbs are inside, the basil flourishes in the hot sun.
I’ve been making pesto!

We have a big animal-feeding trough out front and I transplanted all my tomato plants there as soon as we got back in June.
The deer decided, “Lunch!” So we surrounded it with chicken wire. It’s very dense in there now, but the little guys seem to be doing well. I’ll have to figure out another place to plant them next year so I can space them out a bit.

Before we left for Montreal I dug out a new plot with a pick-ax and a shovel. The earth here is all sediment and rocks and the weather is usually sunny with the temperature in the nineties, so it was quite a job. I planted potatoes in most of it to break up the soil for next year and sowed some spinach, mixed greens, and parsley in the shadier part.
It was a boon to see so much progress when we got home.

Of course, I’m already thinking about next year and more plots. I want raspberries and strawberries, maybe where the potatoes are now. I’m thinking of moving the feeding trough and digging out a bigger space for the tomatoes out front in the Southern exposure. 
The Man planted a grapevine a few years ago that climbs up a pot to the deck and we planted another one on the side in June. How long does it take to plant a vineyard?!