Sunday in the Garden

I watered the Peace Patch with Noah this morning, whose kindergarten class has yet to visit the garden.  He lugged the watering can from bed to bed.  "This is a lot of work." he complained.  

Things are looking good.  

The spinach looks like spinach and the broccoli is growing with vigor.  The peas are ready to shoot up their climbing trellises and the beans that looked yellow last week look much healthier now.  Some of our sunflowers are gargantuan at this point.  I'm not sure what makes the difference between the small ones, the big ones and the giants ones.  Could it be soil quality?  Water regime?  Seed variety?  We have similar difference among watermelons.  Beans, on the other hand, seem to grow uniform.  I wonder if the second graders and fifth graders would have explanations for the differences?

The grass is getting ahead of us under the mulch.  We've been mostly successful at keeping grass seed out of our beds, but we may need more mulch if we are going to continue to stay ahead of it.  

It won't be long before there are many more flowers out there.  The wildflower garden is teaming, as you can see.  The cosmos seem to be encouraging everything else along.  We have a giant sunflower in the middle of the wildflower bed.  We have finger carrots galore and radishes and turnips and kohlrabi in other beds.  Even eggplants have surfaced.  We could use a good rain, as our water table falls lower and lower it evaporates our soils faster from below.  

Noah was happy to have a morning in the garden, but he did grow tired of carrying around the watering can.  In the end, we watered every bed, the greenhouse, the sunflowers and the plants along the fence.  We also watered the three sisters, but our hose didn't stretch that far, so they were only watered by watering can alone.  The sun has been hot since then.