Garden Update 3

It's that time of the week, folks! Time for the next Garden Update! The garden has been growing well and in the short week since I last posted, I have new pictures--some of which show some obvious growth! Last week's problems are history and we have new hardships this week. Let's get right into this, shall we?

First of all, let's have a quick recap. Last week my biggest problem was that my sunflowers were being eaten down by grasshoppers. Well, I meant to get some garden-safe insecticide this week to "take care" of the hungry hungry hoppers, but miraculously they stopped chomping down my veggies! I am still a bit bothered by their presence as I can hear them flying from one section of the garden to another... yet they dont seem to be actually eating anything else in my garden, and I haven't seen any new bites out of my sunflower plants. I read the insecticide directions 3 times over and I'm very nervous about actually applying it to my garden, so if it doesnt seem that I absolutely need it, I wont get it. Anyways, time for new pictures! I'll put them in the same order as last time, starting in the upper left hand corner and going down the rows.

Row 1:
Cantelope:
Cucumber (For some reason, the cucumbers are still very small. They seem to be growing very slowly if at all... I believe that some of them got zapped by the weed killer last week, and one of them got pulled up when my son tried to help me weed the row. I cant be mad at him since he was doing such a good job helping.):
Watermelon (They are finally big enough that I can tell the difference between them and the cucumber sprouts. I couldnt tell them apart until this week):
Pumpkin:
Row 2:
Potatoes:
Carrots:
Row 3:
Tomatoes (Since I only have 7 tomato plants at the moment, and the row has yet to be really weeded out (I only managed to weed around the plants themselves so far) I went ahead and put wire cages around them for them to grow up into to help support the future tomatoes that will grow on them. It's hard to see in the picture, but there are already some tiny yellow flowers on some of the plants. I wish they would focus on growing UP instead of trying to make flowers already.):
Row 4:
Onions (The leaves fall over when they get so tall, and on the bigger ones I lift up the leaves and some of them are over a foot tall already! Plus, some of them are already getting little onion heads on them... I guess they are for the seed pods or flowers or something? I think I need to do some onion research.):
Row 5:
Peppers (Like the tomatoes, some of the peppers are already putting out buds for flowers. They need to grow upwards and get bigger first.):
Banana Peppers (These are still sprouts being raised indoors. They havent made much progress in the past week, perhaps because they need more sunlight, but it will take at least a week or two to acclimate them to the outdoors):
Row 6:
Squash:
Salad Bowl Mix Lettuce:
Caesar Mix Lettuce:
Eggplant (These are still sprouts being raised indoors. They haven't made much progress in the past week, perhaps because they need more sunlight, but it will take at least a week or two to acclimate them to the outdoors):
Row 7:
Corn (If you recall, last week I planted a second row of corn directly next to the first row. This picture is of the corn in the original row, however I am proud to say that the second row has already begun sprouting and growing tall! It's been such a short amount of time and they are really taking off.):
Row 8:
Sunflowers (I think in the next month I will need to stake them down. They are starting to get tall, and although it's amusing to watch them tilt to the left in the morning and aim themselves over to the right by evening, I dont want them to weigh themselves down and break their stalks before they even have the weight of a flower on their heads!):
The problems I've come to face this week are a bit harder to handle then last week. I have had two major issues. The first one is my son David. When I'm working in the garden, he doesnt like to be away from me for long and finds himself wandering into the garden to see what I'm up to. Usually that's when he's getting cranky and comes over to sit in my lap and cry. I can't listen to him cry in my ears for so long, so I end up getting almost nothing accomplished, and I have to wait till the hubby gets home before David will run off to follow his daddy and let me get SOMETHING done before the sun goes down. Assuming that my hubby has time to watch him for a while. The bad news for the garden is that when David comes running over to me, he tends to walk on my veggies. This week he stepped on a potato (which luckily popped back up), two or three pumpkins, and a cucumber (which sadly did NOT pop back up. Their stems are broken off at the ground, and the plants will soon die).

R.I.P. Pumpkin:
The second issue I'm facing is the weeds. Although I have weeded out around each row of veggies, the weeds are creeping back in. The aisles between the rows are half dead weeds (from the weed killer hubby put down) and half lush, green weeds. Here is a picture of a section of weeds growing at the end of my tomato row:
It will take quite a bit of time to pull out all of those weeds, even though some of them will come right out of the ground. The most time consuming is pulling out the grass... grass roots are SO hard to get up! But what I hate the most are these:
It's a weed that grows on a thick stem, with a long root, and it grows very quickly. In this picture, this one already has flowers coming out. What makes it so horrible? What makes me hate it so much? Look at the leaves. They have thorns on them! And not just on the tops of the leaves. There are thorns on the bottom of the leaves, and thorns on the stem as well! I have to dig a small hole around the base of them and pull them up by the stems that are just into the ground in order to pull them up without stabbing myself on their thorns. Often times, the roots break off in the ground and I either have to dig them up or wait a few days for them to grow back so I can try again. I hate them so much!

I was standing back yesterday, looking over my garden, when I thought to myself, "I wish my garden wasn't more weeds than veggies". So I decided to just leisurely weed out each row and aisle. I'm not going to rush, or worry about how much I can get done in a day. Here's what I've done so far:
Looks nice, right? The row on the left is Row 1, you can see the cantelope and cucumbers. The row on the right is Row 2, you can see the potatoes (2 rows of them). No weeds looks really good and clean, and I can see my veggies! Alright. Well, let's move on over to the Vineyard now.

Lemon Tree (My lemon tree sapling is already twice as high as it was last week!):
Blueberry Bushes:
Blueberries (They're starting to get their color, and they have gotten more round):
Grapes:
And now if we go indoors, my tiny Strawberries in their baskets. Although they are still very small and hard to see, some of them have gotten their first set of true leaves! They're growing!
Well, that's it for this week. As long as I dont go into labor anytime soon, I will continue spending my free time leisurely weeding completely through each row and aisle. Hoping I can get through the entire garden without too much growing back behind me. Until next week!