I have Zucchini!

I was out of town for almost 3 weeks and my wonderful husband took care of the garden for me. He put in automatic waterers which is super awesome! I returned to HUGE squash plants. They were so big they were taking over everything else in the garden. Yes, it is a small garden, but I was hoping to get some of my other plants growing, too.

I found out that you have to have two squash plants to actually get any fruit. Only one of my zucchini plants actually survived, and I also purchased a small patty pan (white squash) plant. I checked on the garden yesterday and didn't see any fruits, but tons of flowers. Today I decided to go out and pull up the squash plants, to allow the other plants some room. I pulled up the patty pan and had my hands on the zucchini plant ready to yank, when I spotted, lo and behold, a zucchini!! A big one, too! And there is a second one which is pretty small, and several more flowers which look like will produce fruit! Yay! Now my regret in this situation is two-fold. One, I hope the two squashes weren't actually pollinating eachother, and now I've in essence killed them both. And two, on closer inspection, it turns out the patty pan WAS producing fruit. Too bad it's withered up on the walkway now.

above you can see the biggest zucchini fruit. I think I'll either use it today or tomorrow. Mmm.

Here you can see the patty pan after demolition :(
At least I have room to plant some lettuce now.

Above is almost the whole garden. In the foreground (but behind the flowers) I have a Japanese eggplant. Behind and to the left is the zucchini, and behind and to the right is one of my cauliflower plants. I have 4 of those but none seem to be doing too hot. The leaves are pretty holey from the hail we had a while back (below).

My Anaheim chili pepper. It already produced one pepper a while back which I let turn red before picking it and trying it. It had some heat! This time I'm going to pick it while it's still green because that's how I think of Anaheim chilies.

Next year I think I'll do jalapenos instead of the Anaheim, though. I also want to try tomatoes next year, probably the little cherry ones. And I will try beets again. I have them planted way in the back, but I think they didn't get enough sun. They also got a lot of hail damage.