Strawberries and Tomatoes and Squash, Oh My!

Our garden is growing great! We have had our first two ripe strawberries, with many more ripening. For some reason, the very first one had part of it go bad (we could not see any little bites out of it), but the rest have been ripening ok so far. We have since covered the strawberries with bird netting and haven't had any stolen.

 The tomatoes have also been looking great! There were a few that died on us, but we had extras and transplanted them in. We have 10 tomato plants and 6 of them already have tomatoes. Some of the plants are not growing as big as expected, but the tomatoes are all we really care about anyway.  I had a sad accident trying to adhere one of the roma tomatoes to the trellis-it was not as bendy as I hoped and the top snapped off and we lost some tomatoes with it! Oops...now I know. The tomato pictured below is a "small fry" variety and produces cherry tomatoes.You can also see our house in the background.

 The squash and zucchini are also growing at their own pace. There are buds forming, so hopefully we'll have many little squash soon! To the right of the large zucchini, there is a container of slicer cucumbers just starting out. We had hoped to have it started sooner, but there was a little typo about planting the cucumber seeds 3" deep, so the first time we tried they didn't survive.

 The snow peas are also looking great and have a lot of little pods on them that will be ready to eat within the week. I haven't been able to help myself and I've eaten 1 or 2 each day even though they weren't full size yet.

We never gave up on the carrots (front corner), but we probably won't plant them again. Now that sun is hitting the full garden they have a lot more leaves, hopefully translating into more roots. The potatoes (large plants in back) look awesome, hope something comes from it (since we aren't really looking to eat the stems). You can also see a few peppers we have planted. They are not growing very quickly, and something has eaten some of the leaves so we don't know how great they will do.

I have seen several of these little assassin bugs on the potatoes and snow peas. I think they're cute! Though  they are supposed to pack a bite if you touch them. I'm happy to see them, they kill some of the insects that try to eat the produce!

While most of what is planted is revving up with the weather, we had to cut lots of the spinach and lettuce because it was beginning to bolt. There is no way we will be able to keep them throughout the summer, we are just hoping to get a little more to tide us over until some of the other plants produce more. My summer replacement for spinach is going to be chard, and the replacement for lettuce is going to be lots of cucumber salads (hopefully!).

Random cat picture. Cookie, the grey ghost. I wish that the cats actually kept birds away from the garden, but they tend to stalk birds more than chase them away.

Garden total for last 3 weeks:
30 cups mesclum salad mix
4 heads romaine
30 cups spinach
5 cups swiss chard
1/2 cup herbs (oregano, basil, parsley)
1/2 cup green onions
2 strawberries
5 snow peas

I am hoping by the next update we might have a few tomatoes and carrots ready, and I expect we will have lots of snow peas!
Failures: turnips, too many little bugs eating them they can't get large enough to keep growing.Something is also eating the green beans, but we have put black plastic containers around them to try and keep bugs out.