Cleaning up the Garden - Part 1

Today's Harvest

In other exciting news today, we picked our first (and only) watermelon from our own garden!

And boy did it taste good! Only trouble is, I'm not sure how DD and I are going to eat it in the next couple of days! Maybe I'll have to freeze some, for when the taste of our own fresh watermelon is just a memory.

Garden Paths

The garden is starting to look a bit overgrown. With all the watermelon and rockmelon vines going everywhere, I haven't wanted to mow, so it has just gone wild. After my rockmelon debacle, I figured it was time to get into it. Had a look at the rockmelons too, and it looks like they were eaten out by something, not rotted on the vines. Still not sure what that was, but there was nothing but the seeds and shell left. So into the compost they went, and out came the mower.

Much better. I can actually see the garden beds now! I also weeded around my tomato plants, and now I can plant something else in that space.

Here is the view from the other end. Note the watermelon vines everywhere?

No longer. Only the one that was bearing my delicious watermelon. I'll leave that one, and the few growing across the path to the new corn, as there are a few watermelons developing there. I doubt they will get big enough before the cold sets in, but I don't have the heart to pull them out.
And the final view from the strawberry end.

Much neater now. I just need to decide what to do about the paths to stop them getting to that state again. The ideal would be sawdust or something similar, but I don't have any, and I'm not sure when I would get around to arranging some, given how busy we are in the next few weeks. I'm considering just using newspaper and grass, as I did with the garden beds, since we certainly have plenty of that!

I spent some time yesterday going through all the seeds over at Eden Seeds. I've ordered lots of seeds for the next lot of planting. It's Autumn here, so mostly winter plants, although I've added some that will wait till next summer.

• Peas - three varieties, 2 bush and 1 climbing
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Beans - 1 climbing, and 1 red kidney
• Tomatoes - Amish Paste
• Sunflowers
• Nasturtians
• Pansies
• Cosmos
• Dahlias

There could be more, but I'm going off memory here. I went a bit overboard on the flowers, but sunflowers and nasturtians are edible, and technically, so are pansies. I figure though, that a few flowers might encourage DD to get more into the gardening too, which could only be a good thing. I can't wait till they all arrive so I can get planting!