The weekend before I headed off to Yosemite for the meetings, we had some pretty heavy rain. This meant that we didn’t have to go out and manually water the garden for an entire week. So by the time we finally made it out there this past Monday, we were a bit astonished at the transformation.

The cherry tomatoes have all exploded. The sprawling ones are advancing with grim determination toward the nearby tree and the tomato fencing we put in place is definitely going to need some serious reinforcements, while the fourth has become a bush so dense that harvesting from it is likely to be an interesting sort of challenge. The cucumber plants has more than quadrupled in length, and at some point apparently one part broke off and took hold and is now veering off toward the tomatoes, despite the fact that I keep trying to train it another direction.

The potatoes are now more than waist high and vibrant green. There are flowers on the blueberry bush (although I hesitate to call it a bush quite yet because it’s still little more than a leafy stalk with a few random twigs), and even though the regular tomatoes are growing more slowly (due to the unfortunate fact that we located them in an area that gets more shade than we’d realized) they’ve all more than doubled in height and are starting to produce flowers. And the pepper plants have so far managed to survive being sat on by the (very friendly) neighborhood cat, and being nearly flattened by the sage plant (which I am now forced to hack back almost weekly in order to protect the rest of the veggies), and have not only been producing dozens of flowers, some of them are even turning into itty bitty baby peppers! Glee!

Oh, and best of all, this week marks our first, and second, harvest of the season – cucumbers!

I only ever remember seeing one or two flowers, but apparently all it took was a good rain soaking, and poof, spontaneous cucumbers. There’s a handful of additional little cucumberlets lurking about under the leaves, so it looks like we’ve got lots more to look forward to. I just hope it keeps up with the production long enough to overlap with the tomatoes, because fresh cucumber and tomato sandwiches are a treat.

I suspect at some point this summer we’ll try transplanting the overly enthusiastic sage bush to somewhere else in the yard (once we figure out where that ‘somewhere else’ should be). And the issue of the shaded tomatoes is just confirming my thought that investing in a collection of very large pots would be a good idea in the long run, so that things can be moved around if necessary. But so far, the decision to put the garden in a month earlier than last year seems to be paying off quite nicely.