GARDEN JOURNAL: Garden Life in Full Swing - Harvesting, Weeding, and Planting

Hello, my dear hive gardeners here at @gardenhive! I hope you’re doing well and enjoying your time in your gardens.

June is a really promising month for us to start planting vegetables again after some of them died and withered in the previous months when the weather was really hot.

I paid a visit to some of our plants in the garden for harvest and checking whether they need weeding, watering, or fertilizing. Gladly, I found some sponge gourds hanging in the trellises and ready for harvesting. They really look enticing, so I took a selfie with them hanging.

Next to it are our string beans, also bearing fruit. My father, who was busy weeding, helped me to gather string beans and pick the fully grown sponge gourd for our lunch. These two creeping vegetables were the ones that stood the test of hot May and survived until the June rain came.

On this side grew a big sponge gourd mature enough to be cooked, so we decided to let it ripen to get the seeds for planting.

My father is weeding using his ever-trusted hoe.

*New leaves are starting to sprout from our newly planted sweet potatoes *

These trellises were used for our cucumbers, which died because of the hot weather. My father did the weeding and planted sweet potatoes here. He didn’t remove the trellises since they don't seem to affect the sweet potatoes. The rain really helped these sweet potatoes to form buds and show signs of life and survival. My father was glad to see these promising shoots. We really like to have sweet potatoes since we can also use their tops for salad.

I almost forgot about the Lima beans surviving on this side of the garden! They are just beside the pathway to our neighbors. I planted them last year, and they are still here bearing fruit. We have harvested here countless times.

I also visited the east side of the garden and found that our Chili peppers are bearing bigger and much fruit. I actually planted this from fruit and not from seeds bought in the agriculture store. I’m just saddened that some of them are wilting even if they are watered regularly. Do you think there is a bacterial wilt attacking them in the roots? Maybe I need to give them a dose of diluted hydrogen peroxide to help them survive.

Just beside the Chili plants are our growing fast and healthy Bitter gourds. They are bearing more flowers and beginning to form into fruits. This is so promising. We actually trimmed some of their vines to help them bear more flowers. We added the cut vines and leaves to the sautéed munggo beans and it’s really delicious.

Near the Bitter gourd is where we transplanted our cucumber seedlings. They look healthy and promising. The banana leaf seedling pots were really useful to help them grow well and achieve a 100% germination rate. In total, there are 46 seedlings, but my mother got confused and put 3 and 2 seeds in some pots, so we didn’t separate them when we transplanted to avoid stressing their roots.

And it’s time to go home. To get home from this side of our garden, we need to pass through this thick trees. These trees serve as our natural cooler during hot days. I just love their presence here.

Thanks for taking the time to read my garden story. I hope you enjoy the visit and come back for my next update. I am also excited to visit your gardens and stop by for a quick tour. Happy gardening! 💚🍃

(I hereby attest that this article is made by me without any aid of AI or grammar editing apps and the photos attached are mine; that I fully understand and adhere to Hive policies and guidelines in posting; and that I won’t be violating any of these rules for my future posts.) Photos are mine, the banner photo was edited in Canva