Last weekend I returned from a 3 week trip to Central-Eastern Europe (lots to say about that trip), and was thrilled to see how well the garden was doing.

My tomatoes and I.

The automatic watering system filled in for me quite nicely; I plan to keep it running until early fall.

My dona tomato plant, being open-pollinated, has seemingly mixed with the costoluto tomato I planted right next to it, and both are producing the latter type of tomato. I couldn’t be happier though, because the former is about 6 feet tall right now- by far the largest of any tomato vine I’ve ever grown- and it contains dozens and dozens of these heirloom wonders. Costoluto is the variety I’ve grown every year thus far. I expect to be able to eat the tomatoes in a few weeks… they need that time to turn red.

Carrots

Red bell peppers

Black beauty eggplants

Beets

Closest are the cowpeas. Just after them, green beans. Below, middle basil; and beside that, tomatoes. Dried leaves are the tops of the beets.

Next to this 6 foot tall vine, I have two 4 foot tall tomato plants, and on the other side I have carrots, red bell peppers and black beauty eggplants growing.

In the other box I have some enormous, ready-to-harvest beets, a small tomato plant, some basil, cowpeas and green beans. All are coming along quite well.

The trees seem to be in good shape. I ate all the apricots from apricot tree just prior to vacation. The pomegranate tree has a handful of slightly-smaller-than-a-tennis-ball sized fruit, and most of the other trees just have rich, dark, green leaves with healthy looking stems.

Right before vacation, the clementine tree’s watering seemed to have some issues. So we had to dig down, test the piping, and eventually we noticed the connector had cracked. So we replaced it and tested the watering systems for all the trees before heading out.

I’m really excited for the start of my 3rd season of gardening. Besides the existing 8 trees (persimmon, apricot, mandarin, lemon, pomegranate, clementine, avocado and asian pear) that are coming along alright, I finally got a good, early start on my vegetables.

I went to a tomato growing class recently, and had started indoor seeding back in mid-March. Eggplants, peppers and tomatoes, all started in my garage on March 16th, will finally begin growing outdoors permanently. Along with them will be carrots, beets, lettuce, green beans, basil and cowpeas for the upcoming summer.

Initially the plan is to hand-water everything. But eventually I will let the auto-watering system take over for me.

I’m not really big on non-edible gardening, but I grew tulips this past winter, which motivated me to try growing the amaryllis belladonna (my favorite flower; I most commonly see it at the NorCal coast around late summer).

Here is the state of things as my 3rd season of gardening begins: