When I ordered the seeds for the garden I had dreams of fresh corn, green beans, tomatoes and other veggies being ready to eat by Juny 4th. However, the weather and other circumstances did not cooperate, so they were planted at least a month too late to make this coming week’s holiday feast.
The zucchini is not over producing like most zucchini plants tend to do. It does not seem to have many male flowers needed for pollination and those few it does have tend to open when there are no female flowers open. Bees seem to be scarce as well, so I am trying to collect pollen for use a day or so later as well as experimenting with use of pollen from another type of squash.
Meannwhile, the baby bok choi are starting to flower before I realized they could be harvested. I had never grown bok choi before and did not realize that the outer leaves which flared out giving the plants a flat appearance were actually hiding the pale stem structure I had knew from the grocery store produce shelves.
I can’t tell what the potatoes are doing underground, but they are certainly pushing out a lot of green leaves above ground. Likewise the green beans and peas are taking their time getting to the flowering stage. The lettuce, spinach and carrots did not germinate well. It is time to plant additional seeds to create later crops. The garden is not growing quite the way it was designed on paper. However, for a starter garden it looks like it is going well. I am happy to see that at least some of the plants appear to be doing what the catalog pictured — just off to a bit of a late start.
I had tried making bread several times with results that were better suited for construction or door stops than for eating. Typically this effort was the result of frustration after visiting the grocery store. My preferred bread not being restocked and I could not find another kind that I liked. 
Well, it was unlikely that the gopher incursion into the garden area would be a one time incident. Sure enough, the next morning there was a new mound by the pots along the fence. And like the first one, the tunnels had been backfilled adequately so that there was no hope of finding the runway and setting traps.
Again, on the third day, yet another mound appeared at the end of one of the raised beds, not too distant from where the other two had been. This gopher was very good about blocking the exits after he had excavated under the garden.
And so things stayed for a couple days. Then, this morning as I was walking around checking on how things were growing, the ground collapsed opening up clean access to the gopher runway. I put out the trap and hoped I guessed correctly from which direction the gopher would be returning. Later in the day, I found the trap sprung and one less gopher to be undermining things.
At four weeks old the red rump chick finally has the red feathers for which the species was given common name. There is still a lot of the gray down on his back mixed in and hiding the red.
A few days later, at four weeks old, the chick was well covered with feathers and looked like a three quarters scale version of the adults. He is spending his days in a larger enclosure so he can work on learning to climb, perch and use those wings while he also starts learning how to shell seeds and feed himself. 
