In speaking with Bruce this weekend, I realized that I haven't commented on my garden this year. As with past years, I have a full load of vegetable plants to keep me busy while I am outside, supposedly playing with the kids. I did a few things differently this year, hoping to learn from issues I had in the past.

• I enlarged one of the smaller plots from about 3 X 10 (ft) to close to 12 X 10 (ft). Although I have an additional 90 sq ft of space, I haven't increased the number of plants. Rather, I have used the extra space to give my plants more real estate to expand into and some more space for me to get betweeen plants when I am harvesting.
• This season's varieties include some previous year's stand outs and new kinds I haven't tried before. The bite size tomato varieties are Juliet, Sweet Olive (new), Principe Borghese (new), and Green Grape. Small tomato varieties are La Roma Red, Viva Italia (new), First Lady (new), and Lemon Boy. The monsters of the tomato patch are Brandywine Yellow (new), Park's Whopper, Giant Belgium, and Great White (new). The hot pepper varieties are Garden Salsa and Bulgarian Carrot (new), while Gypsy, Nardello, Fat 'n Sassy, and Golden California Wonder (new) make up my sweet peppers. I even planted Ghostbuster eggplants for the wife. I have 2 plants of each variety, except for the Lemon Boy, of which I have 4. So far everything is looking great and the amount of fruit on the wine is just amazing. The tops of the Sweet Olives are so yellow they look more like a flowering bush than a tomato plant.
• In addition to planting live plants, I also planted 2 Zuchini, 2 Squash, 4 Cucumber, and 1 Mini Pumpkin mounds. I only got them in the ground about 4 weeks ago, but I expect the zuchs and squash pkants to start flowering this week.
• To keep my mortal enemies (weeds) at bay, I have put down black weed block in the tomato and pepper plots. So far I have not done any spraying for bugs, but I will be dusting the zuchs, squash, and cucumber plants this week. Even though we have had quite a dry spring, I've been able to keep the plants happy by running soaker hoses through all the plots. 20 minutes of water a day has been all they have needed and it's kept the water off the tomato fruits and leaves.

Update: I have added some photos of the gardens to Flickr.