How does my garden grow?

I have not taken you on a garden tour since early June, so let's do that again now. Things have changed quite a bit in just under a month! It is warm out, the plants didn't croak during last week's cold spell (down to 41°F at night), and things have been growing seemingly overnight. 

I find it pretty amazing that I can live in a house with its own garden. Of course, we all know the green thumb in this family is not mine. I may document the garden, harvest, and freeze its produce, but I'm not allowed to touch the plants for any other reason, lest blight should fall upon them. 

In the plot near the patio, we have carrots, snow peas, orange zucchini, and green beans. Lesson learned this year: Snow peas need trellises. We had no idea they grew to be so tall. Oops! 

It is also hard to see the peas, so harvesting can be very time-consuming. They are mmmmm good! I see a lot of stir-fry in our future. Here are the green beans, and at left, the orange zucchini plant that Benjamin transplanted a while back. No produce to be seen yet here. The carrots are growing, but due to our ignorance about snow peas, they are very overshadowed now, sandwiched between the snow peas and the brick wall. Note to gardener: don't plant carrots behind snow peas next year. In the plot up on the hill, we have tomatoes (I kind of liked them by the patio - made for easy harvesting just before lunch time), eggplants, zucchini, lettuce, and shallots. We had our very first garden salad for lunch today with a head of lettuce much like this one. Nary a slug to be found, to my great relief. (And here I must confess that our garden, while home-grown, is not organic. I just can't have a garden without slug pellets.) We may be overrun with zucchini this year. We JUST finished last year's crop, much of which we had frozen... and all of which came from only ONE zucchini plant. Frédéric planted three or four of these this year. Friends and neighbors, consider that your fair warning! No eggplants yet, but a flower. And plenty of bees around to help out. The tomatoes are coming along nicely. And I have done practically nothing on the retaining wall lately, as you can see. I'm dreaming of days with both boys in school all day, when I just might be able to keep up a little better with work, housework, AND the yard. What I love most about the garden is that Frédéric does all the hard work - preparing the ground, planting, weeding, watering... and I get to do the fun part: harvesting! The boys are much less interested in the garden, and much more interested in this. Now that it's finally warm enough again, they dedicate their afternoons to shivering and squealing in the ice-cold well water of the swimming pool.