Although the weather has been a bit rough for warm- blooded creatures of late, the green growing stuff has been extremely happy – if you judge by my garden.

I just put the veggies in about three weeks ago, and everything is sprouting up like mad. This photo is of the bean patch; green beans on the left and yellow wax beans on the right. My plan is for the greenies to twine up the chain link fence, but I’ll have to stake the yellow wax beans as they’re supposed to be a bush variety.

June is bustin’ out all over in the rest of the veggie garden, too. Here are the cucumber plants, already starting to send tendrils up the cuke trellis:

You can’t really see them because the sunlight is so bright, but there are lots of blossoms on the plants already as well as a couple of wee little cucumbers. I always like seeing the first cucumber vine tendrils – they look so tentative and fragile (nothing like the monster tentacles that will take over the garden in deep summer).

All three varieties of potato have begun vigorous growth as well. I’ve had to hill them up once already, but you can see that they need more still. I use rebar and pickets to build up their boxes as they get taller, but I need more rebar and either some hay or more dirt to be able to hill them up as fast as they grow. A trip to Home Depot is definitely in order. In three years of trying, I haven’t gotten this potato thing right yet, but this year I feel like I may finally have a handle on it.

If this hot, wet weather keeps up, I should have a bumper crop this year. Next to the actual harvest, this is my favorite time in the vegetable garden: early summer, when the little seedlings have made their first big growth spurts, the weeds are still under control and everything’s neat and tidy. In a month this garden will probably look a lot different, and I’ll give you updates as my babies grow.