I have been waiting for my basil to sprout, and a bunch of stuff sprouted but i couldn't tell if it was basil or weeds. Finally, today you can tell.
these are basil
these are weeds
this is a basil seedling surrounded by weeds.The variety of basil is 'Sweet Genovese' so i imagine different varieties will look different.
Zucchini leaf. I am not sure if the white coloring is just the variety or if it is some kind of disease. Because, you know, i always think positively like that.
Pumpkin plant, and some baby leek volunteers. The pumpkin plant that we started inside met a bad end (somebody broke it clean off, stepped on it i suspect) so i threw in some seeds. They have grown relatively quickly but i am still not sure we will have time to actually get pumpkins from this variety. 120 days to maturity, blah.
I staked my tomatoes. I am attempting to prune them this year, i am hoping to keep some order in the garden with this pruning thing. Some of them have a blight already, like the one on the right in the picture. That is a marigold in the front.
Here is the flower of the marigold. This is an heirloom variety named 'Harlequin'. The flowers are very beautiful but you sometimes learn why things have fallen into 'heirloom' status. The plant is huge & bushy with just a few small flowers....like this one for example.
That's fine for the vegetable garden but i wouldn't want it in my flower border. Maybe they will bloom more later in the summer? 
Dill is very pretty.
I didn't actually plant it, these are all volunteers from last year's dill.
This is a lousy picture because i took it out of the back bathroom window as C got ready for bed, but i put it here as proof that at one point in the summer the garden was actually *weeded*. In fact i weeded two Sundays in a row. This is big.
I have not posted here this summer. I have been working in the veggie garden but i have not been happy about it. The raised beds were nearly gone after last year, so they not only needed to be weeded, but also redug, reshaped, and have compost added. Which doesn't sound so bad but somehow it took me, like, weeks. I swear. I don't know *why* it took so long -- i actually stayed home from work for a few days to do it and it *still* didn't get completed.
Somehow it seems like this vegetable garden is a full-time job. Well, i already have one of those, or two if you count the kids. I am doing my best to keep it up this year but i am considering just plowing the whole damn thing under next year. I hate it when it gets away from me and is a total mess. My husband hates it. I hate my husband. (no, not really, just sometimes).
On the other hand, for the kids, i do think it is really good to grow vegetables. Especially when they are growing up in the city -- they have so little connection to the land. The twins, at a year old, have never even seen a cow. That's pretty crazy, huh? We don't get out much. Next week we are going to visit family in PA and they will surely see some cows there. My mother will think i am insane -- "let's go look at some cows!"
So i am torn about it, really. We will see how it goes this year. Weeding two weekends in a row is promising...i hope i can keep it up.
