My garden is progressing nicely. I planted in the last week of May and everything looks good right now. I have tomatoes and peppers on the vines, the basil is doing great and the parsley is doing well.

RiversideLen,your peppers and tomatoes look beautiful!Nice!

Len, your vegetables look beautiful.

Will is still bringing home lots of vegetables. Sadly, most of the tomatoes have had to come home to finish ripening, but at least we have them. We are down to one plant out of 27 that Will is leaving just so some can ripen there - the bacterial blight and powdery mildew have hit most of the gardens at the community - even our neighbor whose tomatoes lasted a little longer than ours.

The cucumbers are still prolific - Bush Slicer from Rene's Garden if anyone is interested - you can grown them in a container and they are delicious. He's been making lots of refrigerator B&B pickles. I'm going to make my Mom's cucumber mousse, probably tomorrow.The eggplant is still doing well, we got some more beans and still getting some squash. Because of the rain, Will has stopped his proactive maintenance.

We gave up the one empty plot a couple of weeks ago and the new couple has already started. When our production is finished on the current one, we will give that up as well. The other members of our group are having success at home with some tomato plants which is encouraging. I'm glad we tried at the community garden, but also glad we knew when to quit. It's a real incubator for all those diseases that circulate via the wind.

BakerAunt, a word of caution about bird netting for the blueberries. For about 25 years, we used tobacco netting; until it wasn't big enough to cover the row (10 plants, 50 ft row) and we couldn't find more to buy. So we tried bird netting (and also used it on our cherry trees). The holes in the netting are big enough to allow the netting to slip down over the berries - so the berries and some leaves get tangled/caught in the netting, with the berries on the outside, easy to be reached by the birds! We ended up getting greenhouse shade cloth through a local nursery. It was cut to our specifications (it comes 18 feet wide, and we bought 70ft), the edges were bound with heavy tape, and grommets put in every 10 feet so we could stake it to the ground. Then my husband built a simple structure, using metal fence posts topped with slats to drape the netting over. The bushes are now 6 ft tall, so is the supporting structure, and I can stand up under it to pick. The shade cloth we chose lets 70% of the sunlight through it, and is what nurseries commonly use over their greenhouses in summer to limit the sunshine. We put the shadecloth up just before the berries ripen (will do it this week) and take it down to store in the garden shed as soon as we have finished picking. It was expensive, but has been an excellent investment. If you don't have so many bushes, maybe you could look at a craft or fabric shop for some kind of netting, or tulle, or ?? If your only option is bird netting, I highly recommend some kind of structure to keep the netting off the bushes. I'll try to post a picture of ours this week.

Thanks for suggesting that, Mike; it's interesting to see all the choices available now. Back in the early 2000's, the use of greenhouse shade cloth by home gardeners was a new concept.

Sometimes we buy the "Living lettuce" that is hydroponically grown and comes with the root still attached. We found out that if you cut the root off and replant it, it will grow another complete head of lettuce. Cut that one off leaving the root in the ground and it will grow some more leaves but not a complete head.