Mid April Update

April's a roller-coaster month in terms of weather.  Last week it was in the 50s and 60s for highs, and now its warmed up pretty good again.  The past few days, its been in the mid 80s and pretty muggy.
So at this point, my garden is in a transition state from cool weather plants to warm weather plants.  I still have many cabbages growing at various stages, and we've eaten lots of them so far.  Here is a picture of some of the remaining ones, with the snow peas in the background.

The snow peas are huge. They are just about as tall as I am now.  We picked a few yesterday and ate them with a salad... all from my garden, including lettuce, spinach, radishes, and even a carrot.  I have a few carrots growing, but the funny thing was that when I pulled it, it was very fat but short.  I think maybe since I transplanted it, it didn't grow well afterwards, and grew fat instead of long.  

My older spinach is starting to bolt unfortunately.  Hopefully some of the younger batches I planted of the spinach will still have a few more weeks before they bolt too.   I also have a few bolted collards and cabbage plants that I might keep until I can get some seeds from them to save.

The squash is loving the warmer weather.  The Hubbard squash are really starting to take off now.

The vines are starting to run now, and there are tiny flowers starting to form.  I was really suprised to even see a couple of tiny female flowers forming already! I marked them in the picture below.  

Their vines are really thick too, and the leaves are starting to shade the small lettuce plants underneath them pretty good.  I have been mulching them really well.  I have also begun looking for squash vine borer (SVB) eggs, since I am expecting them to arrive any time now.  I am still trying to decide if I will cover these soon, wait, or just spray the neem on them and see what happens first.  So far I have not seen any eggs or moths.  

The Table Queen Acorn  squash next to them is also starting to vine now.  They look small next to the Hubbards. I also see tiny male flowers on the vine forming.  I will need to start encouraging them to grow the other direction, so they don't grow the same direction as the Hubbards

Besides my main bed, I have couple other areas in the yard with things growing.  I have some ball zucchini seedlings growing in 2 hills.  Here is one of the mounds.

And along the back of the yard, here are some sunflowers that seeded themselves from last year.  Next to them are the Sugar Pie pumpkins that I mentioned last post.  This are growing pretty well too.
I expect a battle with the squirrels with the sunflowers. Last year, a squirrel chopped all my sunflower plants down when they were beginning to flower. I found that spraying hot pepper on the plants repels them, so I will probably have to do that to these plants as soon as I see the flower heads forming.