Weeded Entire Garden and More Lettuce Picked

Just wanted to update you on what has been going on with my garden over the past week.  So far I have only been picking my black seeded Simpson lettuce at the moment which is a great iceberg type lettuce.  It The lettuce has been growing quite well and the leaves have grown to large sizes.

I am very happy about this because last season I didn’t grow any and I definitely missed out on their great flavor.  I still have not picked any of the ruby glow hybrid leaves yet, but they are not growing as fast as my iceberg lettuce.  Granted these are romaine type leaves and I will have to pick them differently than my iceberg type leaves.

I would say by the end of the month or sooner I will begin picking my ruby glow hybrid lettuce.

I could start picking leaves right now, but I think another week should just be enough to harvest the leaves.

You can see here that my iceberg lettuce is prime for harvesting and that is what I have been doing now that my spinach season is over.

I picked about five to eight leaves per plant depending on the situation of each plant.  This was about the average number of leaves that I was able to get from my plants this week.

You can see that I was able to pick quite a bunch of them from this one plant.  Most of them look very similar and are continuing to grow more leaves which I am looking forward to picking in a week or so.  I picked 52 leaves and weighed four pounds this week.  I got to fill up to containers with these leaves.

Check out the size of some of these lettuce leaves.  They are almost a foot long.

Although picking lettuce was the highlight of the week I also have been nonstop weeding especially after the rain we received this past Monday.  It was good that the garden got some rain because it definitely needed it.  The bad thing about rain is that weeds pop up real fast and become a big nuisance.

Before it rained I wanted to make certain that most of my plants were already weeded in order to soak up most of the rain as possible.  I had weeded all my lettuce, beans, corn, melons, squash, and most of my cucumbers.  All these plants benefited the most from the rain.  The others I had to weed after the rain stormed passed.

Beans

Tomatoes

Pumpkin plant.

Corn Plants

So far I have thinned out two sections of my corn plants and I only have one more left to do.  I have weeded both sections and probably this weekend I will thin out the last row and weed it.

Small cucumber plant.

This was a later cucumber plant that was grown directly in the soil.  My transplants are much larger and are starting to get flowers right now.  Soon I should be seeing female flowers and hopefully they will get pollinated with the help of native bees.

Here is the first Roma tomato that has been growing for at least a week now.  I would be happy if I start picking tomatoes by the month of July.  The first transplants that were added to the garden are all starting to produce fruit and many others are at least growing flowers which can easily lead to more tomatoes.