How does your garden grow?

The old nursery rhyme comes to mind:

Mary, Mary - quite contrary - How does your garden grow?

While I am not a Mary, the rest of it fits.  My mom mentioned my lack of posting when she was down here a couple weeks ago for my son's graduation (along with picking and eating my first cherry tomato off the clearance cart "mystery variety" tomato plant!).  I've also noticed a few nudges from the old chat regs in comments and emails. So after some fighting with the digicam and Gimp, here's a little update:

Acorn squash blossoms

first sunflower blooming

Sweet mint!  And it's still alive!

The two (?) acorn squash plants in the garden box are freakishly huge, and look like some artist's rendition of the dinosaur-era flora ... they've done a LOT of blossoms but I have only one little squash forming.  When I did a google image search I noticed one pic where someone had a Q-tip fussing with the blossoms, so I may need to help them pollinate (?).  The ones I didn't succeed in giving away will get planted on the compost pile, I think.

My sunflower plants are only about waist-high, with the first flower being about the size of my open hand.  Small, but pretty.  My other sunflower plant will have two blooms ... the result of the top of the plant getting eaten and dividing into two tops.

Finally, it appears the Mint Curse has been broken!  This is my third attempt to keep mint alive, as my neighbor brought me this planter and stand (he made the stand at work from scrap metal) with a native mint of unspecific variety in it, which promptly died even though I followed his instructions.  On a whim, I bought one peat-pot of sweet mint at the garden department last month just for Ss & Gs.  It's now over double the size and still bushing out.

No pics of what's already been eaten: the first three ripe cherry tomatoes (Mom only got one), the sweet peas (an early variety that withered and died with the first week of over-90F weather at the end of May), the green onions I planted from the bottoms of what I bought at the grocery (knocked down by a thunderstorm last week), and the green beans (one round of bush-Blue Lake, and the first round of the pole-Kentucky Wonders).  Those are the successes.

On the not-success front ... I now have a good idea of what the word "bolting" means in the gardening sense, as my spinach and lettuce are determined to flower without getting big enough to snip enough leaves off them.  Most of my potato plants are gone as well ... in the first garden box they got eaten up, and in the front box they turned yellow and died without a single hole in a single leaf.  My basil has stalled at an inch-and-half tall, neither dying nor growing more.  Surprisingly, the cilantro (coriander) was eaten down to the ground, with the prime suspect being some stray cats.

More later ... I guess I really do have a lot of catching up to do.