Rain, rain makes a great week....

Have you ever seen a baby Cauliflower?

Yesterday, when I was out in the gardening checking out how everything was growing, deciding what work I needed to get done, I noticed this little cauliflower growing. This is the first year in all my 27 years of growing gardens that I every planted cauliflower, so it's like seeing robin eggs in a nest for the first time! So cute growing in the protective shelter of the outside leaves... take a peek.

Anyone have good tips on keeping the bunnies away while the plants grow? I discovered that there are a couple of bunnies who have finally figured out that we have a garden, so I'll have to figure out how to keep them at bay for the rest of the growing season. Suggestions accepted.

On the zucchini plants, I spotted several teeny, tiny little zucchinis starting to develop. Here's a snap for you to zero in on...

The potato towers are growing gung ho. Three towers and I think they each need to have more soil added to be able to keep developing more tubers as they grow up the tower. How much fun is this experiment?!

The sweet potato sprouts are doing well. I need to let them grow to about 6 inches and then I can take slips and plant them in the ground outside to have a sweet potato tower too. I hadn't grown sweet potatoes either until this year, so there lots of learning going on all over...

Here's what they look like from the side, in case you were wondering... (as someone asked in passing). Fortunately, with hoop house gardening available, you can extend the growing season by months regardless of where you live. Even if you got a late start on some items like I'm doing with these sweet potatoes, there's no reason not to plant them outdoors when they're tall enough because there'll still be plenty of time to grow the sweet potatoes and enjoy their harvest.

I have all sorts of different tomatoes this year... some from heirloom seed that I started indoors six weeks ahead of time, that almost were cooked in the portable greenhouse with the plastic cover on, but survived. Planted outdoors to give them a chance, but the prairie winds almost did them in right away, and these little guys still managed to survive. Thinking that might not be the case, I went out and purchased some ready to plunk in the ground heirloom plants, some hybrid that looked good, and direct seeding from the heirloom seeds I had left over. I have some of each of them, in varying sizes and stages of growth. With any luck at all I'll have a long season of harvesting fresh tomatoes.

Group shot!

Then to the victory of the day... the harvest. The green leaf lettuce is very abundant right now; and the beet greens are terrific. I couldn't believe how much they had grown in one week's time due to the two days of wonderful rain that we had last week. The peas are coming along and we're even 'thinning' the onions by bringing every other one in and enjoying their harvest. Also of note is the first picking of the red leaf lettuce. 

Side angle to see how tall the harvest is. 

Additionally, the broccoli sprouts are growing and developing as are the golden melon plants, the pole beans, the burpless cucumbers, and the English cucumbers.

Bon appetit and tell me how your garden grows...