Garden Realities: June

June has not been kind to my gardening goals this year.

As you may recall I have just a few main threads to my garden this year: To grow as much herbal tea as possible, to grow as enough tomato sauce for the year, and to start on two breeding projects.

The mint and the chamomile are not doing very well so far. As you may recall, I ended up planting everything a little too late, and the chamomile has started flowering without getting any larger. I'm collecting ten flowers a week from these minuscule plants and have no hope of collecting enough for a pot of tea, let alone a season of warm coziness. The mint is also not doing very well. Of course, everything else is going so poorly I might go out and buy twenty mint plants to fill in the blank spaces.

There might be enough tea in the house after that.

One of my potential breeding projects involved crossbreeding two melons. I planted dozen of seeds of each type in about ten different mounds. I had just thinned the plantings to two seedling per mound when something mowed all but one of them down. Most of my garden is empty now and I have no hope of continuing this project this year. Next year I'll take measures to protect them.

My sunflowers are doing well though, which is a bright ray of sunshine for me every time I visit. They are still short, from the late planting, but i'm excited to see where they will go. Sunflowers are also another potential filler for the rest of the garden.

My tomatoes are also doing well, and I expect to try out pruning them this weekend. I'm planning on pruning them down to one or two main branches each, to see how they do compared to last year. Last year it got messy fast with the tomato plants, and I didn't even get much fruit from them.

It is what it is though,

So that's my garden this month. How was yours?