Since my last article, our tomato, pepper, eggplant, watermelon, zucchini and herbs have been growing nicely! Tom’s sweet corn bed has not had a lot of germination, but what is growing looks great.

We spent the evenings of June 18 and 24 weeding, watering and admiring just how great our garden looks. We have small tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. The watermelon plants are starting to run. The zucchini doesn’t yet have flowers, but the plants are sturdy and spreading.

In one of the available beds, we planted winter squash seeds, which have sprouted and are getting their second set of leaves. We also tied up our tomato plants June 18 and 24. The high winds June 24 brought only a gentle breeze to the pantry garden; however, something has been eating many of the leaves on our sunflowers and has begun to nibble some of the leaves on a few of our pepper plants.

Fortunately for us, Hannah White, greenhouse manager from The Seed Farm, was expected to visit June 27 to check out our progress. The hope was she could offer advice on how to stop the attack on the leaves and give us other advice on how to keep our garden growing its best.

Thank you to our pantry garden neighbor - Walter - for dropping off two large, beautiful tomato plants at the garden. Thank you also to the anonymous donor who dropped cherry tomato and bee balm plants at Shari Noctor’s office.

We planted the bee balm at the pantry garden. Due to limited space, we repotted the cherry tomato plants and gave them out at the June 13 food distribution.

Thank you also to the local farmer who donated several flats of tomato plants and some cabbage plants. These were also given out at the distribution June 13. All the plants, especially the tomatoes, were extremely popular!

Our pantry guests were very happy to take home a plant or two for their own indoor or outdoor gardens.

At the June 20 food distribution, we were able to share more than 10 pounds of herbs, which were grown in our pantry garden. We had a very large amount of mint that we shared, along with smaller amounts of cilantro, dill, basil, chives and oregano.

In the coming months, we expect to continue to offer cut herbs from our garden. We are also expecting that The Seed Farm will provide us with individual basil plants for our pantry guests to take home and grow on their windowsill or in their garden.

A new challenge for us this season is that our water tank is now empty. Each week, we spot water, meaning we water each plant individually using watering cans from our water barrels that have been filled from the water tank. Due to lack of rain, our tank has not sufficiently filled to allow us to water beyond July 2.

If we don’t get rain in the next week, we will be forced to request Hokendauqua Fire Department provide us with some water to make it through this dry spell.

Don’t forget, volunteers are welcome to join us 6-7 p.m. Tuesday nights to work at the pantry garden. Each Tuesday throughout the summer and fall, we weed, water and harvest. No experience is needed, and no clearances are required. We have plenty of extra gardening gloves and gardening hand tools ready for you.

Use this address, 3540 S. Ruch St., Whitehall, in your GPS.

Questions? Give me a call at 610-379-6823.

Happy Fourth of July!

Editor’s note: This column was written by Gwen Herzog, Whitehall-Coplay Hunger Initiative pantry garden chair.